Options Analysis as Context-Responsiveness in Practice: Integrating Diagnosis, Expertise, and Negotiation (Refining Communicative Planning and Critical Pragmatism)

Abstract

In settings of uncertainty and ambiguity, inequality and conflict, planners must be context-responsive and improvise. As yesterday’s routines fail to satisfy tomorrow’s demands, few prescriptive rules – no musical scores – dictate practitioners’ actions. Four cases from diverse settings show how planners can improvise “options analysis” by integrating moves of diagnosing value, leveraging expertise, and negotiating outcomes. Practitioners perform options analysis with stakeholders by deliberatively asking and answering distinct but related questions of what matters, what’s known, what they can do together. Options analysis specifies, deepens, and extends communicative and critical pragmatic planning theories, raising new research questions.

Keywords:

• Planning practice
• context-responsiveness
• options analysis
• diagnosis
• negotiation
• improvisation

Acknowledgements

This essay grew through invited lectures at State University of New York, Buffalo, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, University of Massachusetts, Boston and the University College of London, along with diverse sabbatical talks in Italy. I am indebted for comments to my hosts, and to Will Butler, Daniela De Leo, Harley Etienne, Charles Hoch, Jennifer Kaminsky, Anne Kilgore, Courtney Knapp, the late Norman Krumholz, Giovanni Laino, David Laws, Karel Martens, Patience Milrod, Antonio Moya-Latorre, Camilla Perrone, Ken Reardon, Ric Richardson, Sallyann Roth, Jen Rowe, Yvonne Rydin, Robert Shibley, Carl Steinitz, Marta Struminska-Kutra, Lawrence Susskind, Michael Teitz, Merlijn van Hulst, Hendrix Wagenaar, and Wei-Ning Xiang. Responsibility for errors is mine.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Specifying a fresh framework for practice, this analysis contributes “to” – but is not “about” – existing planning theory by exploring context-responsiveness, improvisation, diagnosis, joint fact-finding, negotiation, recognition, generative questions, and more. Not restricting improvisation to jazz, we suggest, with Ryle, and Garfinkel’s early work on “indexicality,” that improvising abilities are ubiquitous: witness everyday conversation (Ansell, 2011, p. 218; Garfinkel, 1984; Ryle, 1976). Length limits preclude discussion here of the ‘ethno-methods’ revealed by ethnomethodology.

2 “Context-responsiveness” provides an intuitive synonym for “improvisation,” both closely related to “adaptation” and “use of discretion” – performances existing well beyond the “street level,” as (Hupe & Evans, 2020) magisterially details. Research must explore how these performances enable reflective or deliberative practices, respect or recognition, biases or malpractices (Forester, 2020). Note Freire (1970, p. 73) on deliberative/communicative ethics: “Any situation in which some men [sic] prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence.”

3 Context-responsiveness requires and enables careful improvisation. Once hearing Timothy Leary’s, “Let’s improvise!” bassist Charles Mingus replied famously, “You can't improvise on nothing, man; you gotta improvise on something!” (Fesmire, 2003, p. 96). “Context” provides materials as improvisers build upon, revising or transforming, what’s at hand (Latour, 1992).

4 This first person “practice story” has been shortened substantially but without paraphrase (as in Forester, 2021). The author interviewed Jen Rowe on 3/15/2022 via Zoom and used Otter.ai for initial transcription; Rowe approved the corrected, edited text on 7/18/22.

5 Laws and Forester (2016) omitted an accomplished Dutch urban designer's tale of professional presumption: Redesigning a downtown development, the designer asked his architects to study four alternatives – taking 12 of 18 allotted months. Asked, “So then you asked what stakeholders made of those alternatives?”, he replied that by then, there was no time for that. His expert autonomy had pre-empted possibilities of his accountability, possibilities of learning, and it enacted less an “intelligence system” (see (Sclavi, 2017) in Italy) than a presumptuous, arguably shortsighted planning process.

6 Asking what planners can do differs radically from asking what planners typically do. The reconstructive analysis of exemplary cases (Mishler, 1990; Sacks, 2015) involves plausible evidence of success in complex, conflictual, politicized situations. Such reconstructive analysis must be empirically grounded (“I can see asking diagnostic questions”), experientially plausible (“I might ask such questions”) and ethically critical (“I must beware of bias, exclusion, etc.”) ( Forester, 1989). Our cases present not heroic work but skillful practices that might be instructive, even encouraging.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by small grants from Cornell’s Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, Cornell’s Institute for Social Sciences, and the Dutch Platform 31.

Notes on contributors

John Forester

John Forester is a Professor of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University. Best known for his Planning in the Face of Power (1989) and Deliberative Practitioner (1999), his best teaching materials (practice-focused oral histories) appear in Planning in the Face of Conflict (2013) and How Spaces Become Places (2021). He continues to study the micro-politics and ethics of planning.