It often feels as if we live in a world of noise or silence. There are certainly times when it is appropriate to be quiet and times when voice is needed, but if there is only silence and noise then our humanity is diminished and planning as a shared endeavour of working towards a better future becomes very difficult, if not impossible. However, maybe we need to focus less on extremes and more on moments, spaces and happenings which do not grab attention, where conversations are or could be on-going and action moving along. A focus away from extremes may seem to be boring or ordinary, but on the basis of what currently attracts media attention, and, notably too, research grant funding, such consideration is rather out-of-the-ordinary.
I have been thinking of centring an editorial on the theme of conversations for some time. I am intuitively drawn to the word ‘conversation,’ as opposed to other words concerned with human spoken interactions, such as dialogue, debate, discourse, argument, discussion and so forth. A conversation is suggestive of something more mutual, open, spontaneous and, yes, ordinary. Not something for which a case is prepared in advance, evidence presented or re-presented; an arena about winning and losing, however achieved, and at whatever cost. This is not to suggest that conversations should be completely harmonious. The most rewarding conversations usually have some edge, in which all participants find aspects of surprise, pause for thought and re-evaluation.
So why now has the moment come to write about conversations? One stimulus will be obvious, the other not. I imagine there are few within the planning field, at least in the global North and West, that were not struck by the ferocity of the language and international attention that was unleashed at the various local authority plans to implement the concept of the ‘15 minute city’ and associated traffic management policies. That the epicentres of this metaphorical planning earthquake were in my current and former backyards of Edmonton in Canada, and Oxford in the United Kingdom, probably also accounts for my somewhat piqued interest.
The notion of neighbourhoods in which there is easy access to the basic services of daily life is probably as old as the building of human settlements. Yet in the middle of February 2023, such an outwardly sensible, if relatively rare part of our urban form, became the flash point of the latest conspiracy theory, fuelled by the instant global reach of social media. There are undoubtedly questions to be asked of the ‘15 minute city’ concept, most especially, how far market forces will allow everyone to get the opportunity to live in a community offering access to a full range of amenities, while also offering home to the people providing those services. However, these were not the issues exercising global attention, rather a dystopian world was constructed of a state-imposed urban form that would curtail individual liberties, through confining residents to prescribed areas and the issuing of travel permits. While the dialogue certainly exemplifies edge, it was not conversational in tone, and for the moment there seem few prospects of a meeting of minds.
Academics have a tendency to perceive that, in contrast to examples such as the noise engulfing the implementation of policies associated with the ‘15 minute city’ concept, our world epitomises civility, learning and active listening. However, my second stimulus comes from a reflection on how difficult it is and how rarely we converse beyond the siloes within our own context, especially across disciplinary boundaries. By disciplinary boundaries, I am not only thinking of those admittedly enduring divides between fellow social sciences or various sub-fields of engineering for example, but those resilient chasms between the arts, humanities and the social sciences, and engineering, science and medicine. Few academics would refute a statement that society’s greatest challenges of inequality and climate change require simultaneous engagement between human and technological concerns, yet how often do those conversations take place, far less in circumstances of mutual listening?
This brings me to my second stimuli, a reflection on a recent meeting involving engineers, architects and planners. Inevitably, the prompt for the meeting was a funding agency call, (why else would we come together to discuss research other than the lure of money!). The research call had been written and led by social science funding agencies, and included the (standard) commitment to inter-disciplinarity, as well as to working with communities. What was striking was the extent of the differences in the way the call was read, and not merely in terms of the detail but the very purpose of the research to be undertaken. The differences were so great a bystander might conclude that the participants were talking about different calls. Should we be surprised that there were differences of understanding and interpretation? Certainly not. The open question is how many noticed, and whether it matters sufficiently to any of the participants to explore those differences outside the fleeting impetus of a research grant. Will we give ourselves sufficient time to take stock of what lies behind the differences so that we understand each other better, in the future hope that we might be better placed to simultaneously consider both the human and the technological in the service of societal challenges. If we do not, inter-disciplinarity will remain the tokenistic, hollow-shell it so often is within university contexts. Moreover, as we struggle to converse with each other in our own habitat, the important priority of learning from and working with those beyond the privileged gates of the ivory tower has hardly started.
If the dominant sound level of my first case is noise, perhaps, my second is more a tale of quietness, if not silence. In practice, while in each case one sound level is dominant, they usually exist together – with noise for some meaning silence for others. Why do noise and silence matter? Because if we only have noise and silence, whether in our democratic politics, planning practices or a university meeting room, the capacity for creativity is hugely reduced, and stasis and inertia tend to become the norm. It can be hard to see (or hear) beyond the volume of communication in the moment, but it is what lies behind those reactions that is telling; who is speaking or not speaking; why the silence or noise; and does anyone care? As researchers, such questions lie at the heart of the routine craft of critical analysis. The insights produced are telling, but what really matters is ‘what’s next’?
This takes me back to the theme of conversations. There is a multiplicity of texts about the art of good conversation, which I am sure are helpful. However, I am less concerned with the nature of the process, than with the simple priority of having conversations. This is especially true of conversations which reach out beyond our usual circle and like minds. It has probably always been the case, but stereotypes based on surface characteristics, mean we converse with only half our mind, and likely too – half a heart. People are placed in pre-determined compartments based on association groups, life-style choices, visual identity, political allegiances, social media friends, consumption patterns, schools and universities attended, accent, employment, place of birth, residential neighbourhood, form of housing, favoured transport, family situation, clothing and much more. In the university setting, a further set of identifiers are grafted onto our pre-judgements such as discipline or sub-field, favoured research methods, citations record and academic rank. Conversations that start from these stereotypes will be limited in value, and risk becoming little more than a combination of silence and noise. It is evident that speaking only with those of a like mind is not getting societies very far in relation to the profound challenges currently faced. I have written previously that the moral superiority of those in universities vis a vis Brexit or Trump voters, can lead to a failure to take seriously the enormously difficult lives facing so many, and their sense of vulnerability and abandonment (Campbell, Citation2016). Seeing individuals only in relation to a pre-determined compartment is similarly problematic within the university world, if from a collective position of privilege.
It is not my intent to romanticise the notion of conversations, nor do I have in the back of my mind some ideal of the Parisian café. It is much more that silence and noise is not working, and that this is not merely a problem of democratic politics but equally of the academic world. We all make choices as to who we talk to and about what. We can choose to engage only with those who confirm our world view or have conversations where we may be surprised or discomforted; where we find the same word means many things and different words mean the same thing; where we only come to realise weeks, months or years later the pertinence of an interaction. I may be overly optimistic but I sense that there is more scope than daily media output would suggest for conversations that help broaden understanding, and in so doing open up the space for creativity and the new possibilities which are so urgently needed.
Optimism is often a term academics use to justify suggestions that better outcomes are possible. It comes with a slight measure of embarrassment that in the face of immense systemic and institutional structures it could be suggested that some measure of agency for planners, policy-makers, and academics too, can be conceived and delivered. As the cliché goes, that we can change the world. More especially, the work of social scientists is framed through critical analyses, and to suggest the capacity for agency is perceived, at best, as naïve. This has always posed a huge conundrum for planning academics, linked as we are to the education of future practitioners and to the generation of knowledge, which, while challenging existing practice, has a responsibility to envisage spaces of potential for better.
I am aware that for the most part the starting position of much of the research published in Planning Theory and Practice is largely framed as critical analysis. The field certainly needs those insights, but as editors concerned with challenging theory and changing practice, we always also ask authors to at least consider the implications of their studies for the theory and practice of planning within the contexts in which they are writing and beyond. However, it is striking that of the five articles making up this issue, three explicitly focus on issues of agency, and a fourth is presented as a form of conversation. These papers are concerned with how planners, policy-makers and others can find the spaces and moments in which to work towards progressive transformative change. None of these authors have in mind the planner of a technocratic age, rather they take as their starting point the complexities of the institutional contexts in which planners are embedded, and seek to find opportunities to exert influence and alter the direction of travel. I do not know whether this is a trend or blip. My conversations with students tempt me towards the view that it might be more than coincidence. Our students know that the institutions they inherit have produced a world of vast and increasing inequality and inequity, which is in turn responsible for and compounds the implications of climate change. What they want is glimmers of possibility. Change is difficult, fitful and partial, but the trajectory of the alternative is not encouraging. We all have choices. Maybe we could all start by having a ‘new’ conversation, and not just for the sake of having a conversation, but with an eye towards the future opportunities and the actions that might be suggested?
In This Issue
As I have highlighted, the content of this issue of Planning Theory and Practice is distinguished by three papers which take as their starting point a concern with the agency of planners. Raine Mäntysalo, Martin Westin and Hanna Mattila grapple with a question which has tended to be avoided in the mass of writings about participatory practice concerning the underlying substantive purpose of deliberation. In their paper, ‘Public Planner – A Deliberative Authority,’ they argue that beyond merely facilitating spaces for mediation, planners need a firmer basis on which to construct their agency in shaping the deliberative practice. This leads the authors to issues of the common good, and how such agency can be legitimated. As the authors state in framing their concern: “A key problem is the weak conceptualization of legitimate forms of power-over, regarding the deliberative planners’ agency.” This paper is important for taking on this much avoided, yet pivotal, challenge for planning theory and practice.
Eric Keys in ‘Truth, Lies or Allies? The Agency of Estimates’ draws on his practice experience to challenge current conceptions of the estimates used in planning practice as either ‘apolitical facts’ or ‘lies’. Either conception, he argues, constrains planners’ agency. Rather, by interrogating Marty Wachs’ seminal case study of “when planners lie with numbers” and a case drawn from his own experience, Keys seeks to demonstrate a more nuanced view of estimates as social constructs which can be put to work for positive ends. There are connections between the framing used in this paper and Andrea Restrepo-Mieth’s concerns with how planners translate reflective practice into action in the context of complex institutional structures. Her paper, ‘Learning from Mistakes: Reflective Planning, Simple Junctures, and Institutional Change,’ seeks to explore how planners can move from reflection to action and better solutions. Restrepo-Mieth draws on a case study based in Medellín, Columbia, to develop and illustrate her argument.
Katie Turiff and Janice Barry’s paper, ‘The Possibilities for Legally Pluralistic Planning: An Exploration of Haudenosaunee Planning Law’ is in many respects an example of a conversation; in this case a revealing conversation about the principles underlying Indigenous and non-Indigenous forms of law. The authors explore how Haudenosaunee planning law might coexist and productively challenge non-Indigenous planning systems, focusing in particular on aspects of allyship and incommensurability in relation to non-Indigenous understandings of the public interest. Turiff and Barry argue for legal pluralism, illustrating the insight to be gained from greater interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous legal conceptions, most especially within in contexts such as Canada. The final paper in this issue is also concerned with the regulatory framework of planning. Neil Harris proposes that planning would benefit from paying greater attention to the work of legal geography. His article ‘The Spatial, Material and Temporal Dimensions of Planning Regulations: A Legal Geography Perspective’ suggests legal geography offers a rich array of frameworks and conceptual tools with which to interrogate planning practices. Harris outlines a research agenda for the future development of this field of study.
The Interface section is edited by Matti Siemiatycki and Kevin Ward with Lisa Bates, and focuses on infrastructure. The underlying narrative is one of connection and divide, more especially that the massive investments associated with infrastructure development, which are usually framed as facilitating connection, so often also divide. A rich international array of examples illustrate the costs and challenges, perhaps more than the benefits, arising from infrastructure investment: Prerona Das, Tim Bunnell and James Sidaway focus on a railway development in north east India; Alesia Montgomery examines water infrastructure and the associated struggles against environmental racism in the United States; the theme of environmental racism is also central to Sawyer Phinney’s contribution; Astrid Haas asks the question: Who gets to decide what is built? – based on a case study of Kampala in Uganda; Ian Mell and Tenley Conway bring a rather different dimension to infrastructure provision by exploring local greening; and finally, Cathy Oke, draws on her experience as a local government politician in Melbourne, Australia, where she was involved with implementing policies for climate resilient transport infrastructure.
In the Debates and Reflections section, Glen Searle and Sébastien Darchen are concerned with how innovative ideas and policy responses emerge to tackle the challenges of sustainability, and argue for the value of Deleuzian conceptual tools. They look at the interconnections between local initiatives and flow of policy solutions around the globe. Finally in this section, Mick Lennon considers planning in the post-pandemic context, and is particularly concerned with the implications of the evolving relationship between home and work following the experiences of recent years.
A journal is in many respects a conversation, but with an unseen audience. Through the Interface and Debates and Reflections sections, Planning Theory and Practice has directly tried to curate conversations beyond the academy with professional colleagues, community members and politicians as well as across disciplines. We look forward to building on this experience and taking the commitment further in the coming years.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).