Patsy Healey: More Than an Intellectual

1 I am borrowing a phrase used by Jill Grant during an Editorial Team discussion.

¹

I find myself writing this Editorial with a heavy heart. Patsy Healey, the first Senior Editor of Planning Theory & Practice, died on 7 March 2024, in Wooler, Northumberland, a place which had very much become home. I followed Patsy as the Senior Editor, having been one of the founding editors along with Robert Upton and Eugenie Birch in 2000.

In the days since the announcement of Patsy’s death I have been struck by the breadth and profundity of her influence within the planning field. Her writings shaped our understanding of planning, normatively and empirically, by providing insight into governance practices from the very local to the strategic. There seem few corners of the globe that do not feel her loss, with the constant refrain not just of an intellectual giant, but of an institution builder, who embodied integrity and humanity. She truly was the best of us.

I have had the great good fortune that my journey in planning interfaced with Patsy’s, starting for me in 1985 as a masters’ student reading her then recently published book, Local Plans in British Land Use Planning (Healey, 1985), and more directly for the last 25 years through my editorial roles with Planning Theory & Practice. Patsy made a purposeful decision to become the first Senior Editor for Planning Theory & Practice. She was the journal’s guiding inspiration, framing what it was to become. (‘Framing’ was a concept Patsy frequently invoked as key to a well-crafted paper (after Rein & Schön, 1993)).

Patsy’s contribution to our field has few rivals. To celebrate her scholarly life, and more especially the priorities and values she embodied, the Editorial Team has decided to curate a future Special Issue. Our purpose for that issue is not only to explore Patsy’s formidable contributions, but to reflect on how her work, including her approach to that work, speak to the challenges, lessons and opportunities for planning, now and into the future. This Editorial starts that process by reflecting on her planning life and its context.

Patsy’s direct engagement with planning started in 1965. I will let Patsy describe that experience (taken from the foreword to her 1985 book):

In 1965 I joined the planning department of one of the newly-created London Boroughs to work in the Development Plan team. I had then no formal training in planning, and until this time, had thought in a vague unformulated way that planning was something to do with public intervention to distribute resources more fairly than the market could achieve. It was difficult to discern any connection between this general political idea and the tasks of the Development Plan team of which I became a member. …Meanwhile, as we worked away at collecting a variety of facts, the economic and social life of this part of inner London was affected by substantial factory closures and major comprehensive redevelopment schemes. Ugly multistorey system-built blocks of flats emerged on the skyline while dereliction spread at ground level. Our work…was in no way able to account for the processes of technological change which were producing factory closures.

My experience was not untypical of many of those who came into planning in the 1960s. …Many of us were social science graduates, often, as I was, untrained in planning. …At this time, both practitioners and planning schools were under attack for the longstanding habit of treating the physical structures of cities as if they were somehow separable from social and economic processes. Young geographers like myself did little to redress the balance, since we were similarly deficient in skills relating social processes to spatial structure, and none in grasping the role within social processes of the activities of the government agencies of which we were a part. We had, in effect, joined the enterprise of British town and country planning at a time of paradigm shift, when people had lost confidence in traditional approaches but were in the main unaware of the emergence of new ones. (Healey, 1985, pp. xi–xii).

This passage is telling in two ways. Firstly, it provides a window into the stimulus for preoccupations which went on to animate Patsy’s academic life, and secondly, it reminds us of how a sense of history might encourage greater humbleness in the claims we presently make about the past and the circumstances encountered by those who have gone before. We see description of structural forces, and their implications for lived experience, meeting with the micro-politics of planning processes. This is accompanied by a search for ideas able to grapple holistically with the challenges of the day in the context of the apparatus of democratic governance. Importantly too, this sensibility is located in a specific place and time, in this case a London Borough in the 1960s.

Like most planners of her generation, Patsy undertook her planning studies part-time, in the evening, completing a Diploma in Town Planning at what was then known as Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster). However, as Patsy states: “…I still felt I knew little about the planning activity I was involved in… so I thought that by doing a PhD I might get a better idea of the nature of the planning endeavour” (Healey, 2015, p. 5). In 1969, Patsy was accepted for a doctoral degree at the London School of Economics on a new part-time course in Regional and Urban Planning. The theme of her PhD was ‘planning and change,’ stimulated by what she describes as “a vague idea that I wanted to investigate how far planning – as an idea and activity – could contribute to transforming societal conditions” (Healey, 2015, p. 5). The initial intent of focusing on Britain’s new and expanded towns programme was “quietly dropped” (Healey, 2015, p. 5) as an opportunity opened to explore planning’s potential (and limitations) in the rapidly urbanising contexts of Columbia and Venezuela.

While completing her PhD studies Patsy became a lecturer at Kingston Polytechnic, then moving to something of a crucible of planning thought at Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) in the mid-1970s, and in 1988 became the third Chair of Town Planning at the University of Newcastle, where she remained for the rest of her career. She led that department through a period of transformation, invigorating the trajectory and direction of research activity, perhaps most notably, through the formation of the Global Urban Research Unit (GURU).

Research activities within planning schools in the UK to that point had been something of a mixed bag, with debate raging as to priorities for a practice-based discipline. For some, capabilities in academic research came a lowly second to professional planning experience, as they assumed the latter made for better teachers. There was also a tendency for boundaries to be blurred between ‘consultancy’ and ‘academic’ research, not to mention one-upmanship² between the various advocates of each. Patsy was, however, clear that planning research had a distinctive contribution to make, practically as well as academically. Yet to have credibility, the rigour and robustness of empirical data collection methods and the accompanying argumentation had to equate with the highest standards in the social sciences. The expectation that planning academics would have a PhD did not become a norm (in Britain) until the 1990s. I wonder whether, in part, this context suggests why Patsy always took a particular interest in the work of PhD students.

I first met Patsy in person in the late 1980s, while completing my PhD. I had been appointed as a research fellow in Sheffield, and Patsy was the external examiner for the masters’ programme, which involved an annual visit. I was by far the most junior person in the room for the final ‘examiner’s’ meeting (and the only other female academic). I still recall being somewhat surprised that Patsy made a point of coming over to talk to me, during the obligatory sandwich lunch. As with so many others, before and after, there was no fuss, just a genuine interest to learn about my work.

With contemporary eyes, it can be difficult to conceive that ‘planning’ hardly existed as an academic endeavour (far less discipline) in the 1960s and 1970s. Its existence and relevance had to be fought for and justified within and beyond the planning community. Patsy played a pivotal role in establishing the credibility of the discipline through her scholarship but also recognised that institutional infrastructure was needed to support and sustain its future. Such infrastructure does not just fall into place without strategic leadership, much effort, and of course, impassioned debate. Patsy played a hugely significant role. Her institution building activities extended beyond the places in which she was employed, including for example, co-founding the formation of the Association of European Planning Schools (AESOP) in 1987, and this journal in 2000. Beyond academic arenas she was invited to advise government departments³ and most recently sought to grow capacity in her community in Wooler, as a trustee and for a time the Chair of the Glendale Community Trust. In all cases, Patsy was aware of the importance of paying attention to the soft infrastructure which builds a vibrant and resilient ‘community of practice’ and was willing to roll up her sleeves to make things happen. Never just an observer or commentator on the planning discipline, she was an active agent of change, conscious that change is not a singular endeavour but requires communities of practice to be nurtured to sustain the trajectory.

Many of Patsy’s priorities for the planning discipline came together in her founding role as Senior Editor of Planning Theory & Practice. A phrase Patsy often uses in her writings is ‘knowledge resources’ (alongside ‘communities of practice’). She was strongly motivated by a belief that ideas (which are our ‘knowledge resources’) make a difference. This was not in the sense that knowledge resources are determinative or their influence linear, but rather that ideas matter, as they offer the prospect of new possibilities and hence of improving the lives of the most vulnerable. It therefore follows that the planning community (practitioners and academics collectively) would be less able to meet current and future challenges if we fail to pay attention to the process of refreshing our knowledge resources. A natural extension of this ethos was to become a journal editor, more especially of a new journal where Patsy’s personal ethos and the emergent mission of the journal aligned.⁴

Crucial to the mission behind Planning Theory & Practice was the word ‘and’.⁵ The vision was to encourage engagement between theory and practice, neither ‘theory’ nor ‘practice’ being adequate intellectually or practically, without mutual reflection on the other. Patsy articulated this vision in her final Editorial as Senior Editor:

So our ambition in creating the journal has not been to create just another “platform” for academic production. Instead, we have aimed to enhance the scholarly dimension of the field, to enlarge the range of experience and knowledge to which practitioners, including academics, have access to and to improve the quality of academic contributions, so that they have greater potential to command respect. (Healey, 2008, pp. 433–434)

The statement underlies the importance Patsy attached to high quality scholarship as a means of supporting the knowledge resources of practice. This is a recurrent thread in several of her other Editorials, in which she speaks directly to practitioners, illustrating the pertinence of academic research to their work, through examples drawn from articles published in the journal.

The role of knowledge resources in planning links to a second theme Patsy identifies in the mission of the journal, as follows:

…we seek to challenge the introversion which often comes over professional fields dominated by the routines and institutional arrangements of particular practices. This involves a complex balancing act. On the one hand, it is important to recognise the situated particulars of planning practices. On the other, it is all too easy to get “locked in” to these particulars, as if they were the whole world. (Healey, 2008, p. 432)

The richness of particular places mattered deeply to Patsy, but planners’ abilities to envisage and create better places depended on combining the perspectives of both the insider and outsider. Insights from unfamiliar contexts should not therefore be treated as alien, but rather prompts for reflection and reassessment of the established order and taken-for-granted. This sensibility is reflected in the journal’s international outlook.

A third theme in Patsy’s vision for the journal concerned the craft of academic writing. As she states, “we make no apologies for insisting on good scholarship” (Healey, 2008, p. 434). However, Patsy accompanied the importance of encouraging “authors to write well and make clear arguments” (Healey, 2008, p. 433) with a distinctive developmental ethos, especially in relation to early career scholars. Patsy was also sensitive to the challenges for non-native speakers writing in English, not just because of the basics of language, but because of differences in the patterns of argumentation. Patsy established the journal’s developmental commitment to academic writing, which includes working supportively with authors, as well as offering guidance through the journal’s website and being ready to speak at workshops.

This third aspect of the journal’s mission has so powerfully been reflected, since 7 March, in stories shared about personal interactions with Patsy. These stories speak of what is unseen, and the values Patsy embodied. The mentoring and support freely offered to so many, near and far, whatever the stage of their career. I cannot imagine how many references Patsy has written over the years, nor paper presentations attended. She would take time and trouble to attend presentations, clearly listening, and ready to offer support and suggestions.

In the last few days, as I have read through most of Patsy’s near thirty contributions to the journal, and some of her other writings, as well as hearing and reading appreciations from the Planning Theory & Practice community, I am struck by her love of ideas, and her faith in the power of ideas to effect positive change. This conviction in the mobilising potential of ideas was not, however, accompanied by the tribalism that so bedevils the academic community. Patsy was not interested in the furtherance of ideas as a means of self-aggrandisement or finding the sanctuary of your tribe within the academy. For a significant time, Patsy and I were constructed (by others) as being proponents within opposing (theoretical) tribes. While I acknowledge that some of the themes I wrote about bemused, and even at times perplexed Patsy, our differences of perspective were a source of stimulus and lively conversation rather than division or disrespect. There was the time on the top deck of a red London bus a fellow passenger entreated that we “shut the **** up.” In that moment, it seems not everyone was interested in the arguments of Jurgen Habermas or Michel Foucault! But there is a serious point to this anecdote: more than ever in a world of disinformation and fake news we should heed Patsy’s example. No-one, nor any empirical study or conceptual framing, has all the answers to the challenges of inequality or the climate crisis. We need ideas, but we also need conversations about ideas even if they challenge our own thinking. We need too, to be alive to the pressures than can drive “a wedge” between practice and academic inquiry, which, as Patsy states in the journal’s first Editorial, only “weakens both” (Healey et al. 2000, p. 7). Tribes and echo chambers can feel comforting, but they offer the comfort of the ostrich with its head in the sand.

I have purposefully not focused directly in this Editorial on Patsy’s scholarship. Her contribution to conceptual and empirical understanding of planning, as place governance, has few peers. My purpose has been to trace a broader narrative, as it is this which I sense lies behind the current feelings of loss within the global planning community. The values that underpinned the unseen work of mentoring and the commitment to building institutional capacity, alongside her curiosity about and faith in ideas, set Patsy apart. Our Special Issue will return to these themes, while exploring how her scholarly work speaks to emerging concerns and challenges in a range of contexts.

On behalf of the Planning Theory & Practice, community I offer our profound condolences to Patsy’s family and friends. We feel the loss too, but we celebrate the good fortune the planning field has had to learn from a teacher such as Patsy and draw inspiration for our future endeavours from her example. Patsy really cared about planning and the need to keep it nourished through ideas. She tells us that ideas are precious, but they are precious because of the work they can do in the world.

In This Issue

Patsy cared about the next generation of planning scholars emerging around the world, and given this I am sure she would have relished seeing the papers published in this issue. The first paper by Nidhi Subramanyam focuses on the most vital of human needs, the provision of clean water. Her case study based in Tiruppur, India, seeks to probe beyond structural constraints, to explore the discretion exercised by street-level bureaucrats in controlling the equitable supply of water. Importantly, the existence of discretion, offers the opportunity for outcomes to change.

The next two papers are concerned with the nature of neighbourhoods. The practical application of the idea of the ‘15-minute city’ is the central focus of Fujie Rao, Yijun Kong, Ka Heng Ng, Qiyang Xie and Youyu Zhu’s paper. While recent controversies surrounding the implementation of ‘15-minute city’ ideals provide a back-drop to their analysis, Rao et al. have undertaken a morphological analysis of the application of the concept in the cities of Shanghai, Melbourne and Portland. Given the idea of compact neighbourhood form is not new to planning, they seek to understand what distinguishes the ‘15-minute city.’ Amalia Engström is also concerned with the creation of compact urban forms, more especially the implications of densification for the provision of outdoor recreational space. Engström’s case study of Upplands Väsby in Sweden, points to the tensions that often exist between different policy objectives, for example densification (and hence walkability) and the provision of outdoor recreational space. Joining-up across policy domains is further complicated by institutional organisational structures framed by administrative silos.

The final paper in this issue is concerned with property rights and land values in the context urban development in China. Jun Chu, De Tong, Yu-Hung Hong, Ian MacLachan and Xiangxiang Pan investigate the outcomes of the application of a new model of shareholding land readjustment in Zhaoqing. The study highlights an approach based on cooperation between residents in circumstances of rapid urbanisation in China.

The need for planners to better understand the knowledge and practices of the property industry is an area of Patsy’s work for which she is less immediately known. In the Interface section, the guest editor Sara Özogul, along with colleagues working in a variety of international contexts, argue that planning scholars need to much better understand the processes of property development and the workings of the real estate industry. In her introduction, Özogul notes Patsy’s pioneering work with Susan Barratt, which explored the behaviour and strategies of actors in the property development industry. The contributors to the Interface are largely early career scholars, who have practical as well as research experience of the world of real estate. Their argument is that planners constrain their capacity to achieve their objectives if they lack knowledge of the methodologies and practices of real estate markets, and the reverse is also the case. It is hugely disappointing that this argument still needs to be made, and should be heeded in relation to planning scholarship and education.

The first contribution in the Debates and Reflections section picks up on the theme of neighbourhoods. Tali Hatuka and Gal Elhanan provide an extended review of Emily Talen’s book Neighborhood, published in 2019. They appreciate the focus Talen brings to the long enduring concept of the ‘neighbourhood,’ but also pose the question as to what physical neighbourhoods mean in the digital age.

The final contribution to this issue brings us full circle with Stephen Connelly’s review of Patsy’s last book in 2022, Caring for Place: Community Development in Rural England. In this book, Patsy reflects on her own recent experience, as a scholar, resident and activist of rural community development and governance. As was a feature of so much of Patsy’s work, Connelly says of the book that it “…bears a nuanced yet hopeful message, which should both inspire engagement and intellectually support civic activism by showing how to understand complexity and evaluate what is going on.”

Nuance and hope: descriptors all planners should strive to embody, as Patsy so powerfully exemplified.

Notes

1 I am borrowing a phrase used by Jill Grant during an Editorial Team discussion.

2 The gendered language is consciously used.

3 Her governmental work was recognised by the award of an OBE (Order of the British Empire) by the Queen in 1999.

4 I will leave the full back story to another place, but like many important academic initiatives Planning Theory & Practice grew out of a corridor conversation. Patsy had been appointed (once more) by Sheffield as an academic assessor, and between meetings we started talking about the range of currently available publishing opportunities for planners. After an hour or so, reflecting on the current geographical and disciplinary orientations of existing journals, we agreed we would explore opportunities to work together either on a new project or significantly to evolve an existing journal. I had no idea whether such an outcome would come to pass. Coincidently, the new Secretary General of the Royal Town Planning Institute, Robert Upton, had determined that as part of the Institute’s role as a learned society it should sponsor an academic journal. He approached Patsy, and I was fortunate in being invited to join the team.

5 Robert Upton was the first amongst the Editorial Team to coin this phrase.