draft 12/04/09
Crossing Borders: Do Planning Ideas Travel?
John Friedmann
One of the main themes of this volume is the transfer of planning ideas from one country to another, what happens to the ideas in the course of this transfer and with what results. Interesting as these stories are in themselves, each a unique tale from the past, what I miss from their telling is what anthropologists call a thick description of the process of the transfer itself.[1] I would like to fill this gap with a story from my own practice when, in the latter part of the 1960s, I worked for the Ford Foundation in Chile, in charge of a large-scale, multi-year technical assistance program to the national government concerned with regional development planning and a variety of other issues regarding housing, urban policy, and social programming. Although also unable to adopt the anthropologist’s method of “thick description,” I hope at least to evoke some of the things that happened when an overseas technical mission worked in close collaboration with a reform-minded, democratic government on a range of planning issues.
I will follow this with a second story that calls attention to some of the difficulties of inserting what appear to be desirable planning practices from one country into the political and cultural context of another. The general tenor of the essays in this volume is, one could argue, fairly optimistic about transferring planning practices around the globe, especially from presumptively more developed countries to those still undergoing a process of “development.”[2] On the whole, western planners tend to be an optimistic bunch, yearning for improvements in the lives of humankind. I am one of them, and have staked a large part of my life on the hope that modernization, as I used to understand this concept, is a global aspiration, desired by most. Naturally, I thought that as an unquestionably modern man and as a planner to boot, I had an obligation to help others to become modern in turn. My long experience has taught me, however, that to be modern doesn’t come in a single version, as it were prêt-à-porter, and that the modernity I wanted to help others to attain might for various reasons be resisted or, as in Sanjeef Vidyarthi’s chapter, re-imagined by indigenous modernizing elites.
This second story begins in 2007, when I was appointed (honorary) adviser to the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design (CAUPD), an autonomous agency within the Ministry of Construction (today the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development). It concerns my admittedly limited efforts to persuade the Academy to follow up on what to me seemed two attractive ideas: first, to undertake a series of experiments with development planning at the neighborhood level and second, to promote the idea neighborhood planning in a revision of the planning curricula in leading universities, such as Tsinghua and Tongji, respectively in Beijing and Shanghai. To date, my efforts have failed to win support. I will therefore try to identify what I perceive to be some of the reasons why the idea of neighborhood (community) planning, involving a high degree of civic participation, which so appeals to us in North America, meets with profound skepticism in the Chinese planning bureaucracy. My analysis of these reasons is meant as a cautionary tale for those who advocate the universalism of planning ideas and for whom, as in Tom Friedman’s words, the world is flat (Friedman 2007).
I
In the deep winter of the Cold War during the 1960s and 70s, Chile, a long, thin strip of a country along the western edge of South America, became one of a number of battle fronts of this ideological confrontation. The American aid program (USAID) was spending millions in direct economic assistance to Chile for the construction of social housing but was getting worried about the lack of community facilities which, they hoped, would help calm the rising swell of popular discontent. Accordingly, the Ford Foundation was approached to fund a program that would design and put in place a few pilot projects of so-called equipamiento comunitario and instruct Chilean architects and planners in how to link these facilities with large-scale social housing programs. In 1963, Ford liked the idea and invented what turned out to be a Byzantine arrangement for what should have been a relatively simple task, involving five institutions—a firm of architectural and planning consultants and Rice University in Houston, an ad hoc group of academics from Harvard and MIT, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and the International Institute of Education—to undertake this mission. The Chilean government under President Arturo Alessandri, an arch-conservative and scion of a large land- owning family who was notorious for refusing to shake hands with his peons, signed the agreement but soon afterwards lost the elections. The winning Christian Democrats were led by Eduardo Frei, a moderate liberal who stood for social reforms ranging from housing to land redistribution. Chile was about to reach the half-way point on its urban transition and was ready to trounce the feudal oligarchy that had traditionally ruled the country, but was determined to do so within a democratic framework.
Aware of the in-country criticisms of its community facilities program and in light of the new political situation, the Foundation approached me to assess the program and make appropriate recommendations. After a flying visit to Chile, my report suggested a complete restructuring of the existing program involving a broadening of its objectives and the re-centering of advisory services in Santiago. The Foundation liked what I had written, and asked me to head up the newly named Urban and Regional Development Advisory Program in Chile (URDAPIC). I left MIT where I had been teaching for four years, arriving in Santiago in June 1965.[3]
The new mission included four activity areas: community facilities planning in the context of urban development; the social integration of “marginalized” households by acknowledging their claims to housing and other citizen rights; regional development planning as a way for guiding the location of public investments; and a program for graduate education and applied research in planning. The counterpart agencies for this effort, and the agencies to which advisors would be attached, were to be the Ministry of Housing (which was then being formed), the Office of Popular Promotion, a new agency directly accountable to the President of the Republic, the newly established National Planning Office (ODEPLAN), and the Pontifical Catholic University of Santiago where the Ford Foundation would help establish a new Interdisciplinary Center for Urban Development (CIDU) to provide the training and research aspects of the program. My own role as coordinator of the Foundation’s efforts stood outside this institutional framework, and my name hadn’t even been submitted to the government for clearance. Quite simply, I represented the Foundation’s interest in the program as a whole.
The situation in which we found ourselves was very edgy. The young lions who spearheaded the reforms of the new regime were suspicious of the Foundation’s motives, and themselves uncertain about how to proceed with the new initiatives. Moreover, there were tensions concerning power relations, particularly with regard to ODEPLAN, where we had hoped to provide assistance in regional development planning. The Ministry of Finance was loath to relinquish its power over the budget, regarding ODEPLAN as an interloper whose job, they thought, should be focused more on drawing up a national plan that could serve as bait for foreign financial assistance than to actually have the executive power to steer development through budgetary allocations. In the end, the Ministry of Finance retained the de facto planning powers via a program budget, while ODEPLAN divided into three sections: one concerned with the preparation of a long-range national development plan; another with managing foreign assistance; and a third to draw up plans for the regional decentralization of national administrative offices that would include technical planning as a staff function of regional governors to be appointed. The latter, which was of direct interest to URDAPIC, was fortunate in having the support of the President and his closest advisors. Decentralizing government was seen as a way of putting a halt to the further expansion of Santiago by identifying development projects at strategic locations throughout the country.[4] The Foundation had deep pockets, and we could emplace up to ten technical advisors in these new institutions. But how legitimate our presence, given the negative history of the earlier Foundation program in equipamiento comunitario and the unproven abilities of the advisory staff being recruited? None of us had experience in advising a national government on the specifics of housing, urban development, regionalization, and so forth, and our assistance had not actually been requested by the present government, but was inherited from the defeated Alessandri administration. It would only take a letter from President Frei to send us packing.
The very fluidity of the situation, however, allowed us to make our case. Over time, trust was established through interpersonal dialogue, advisors were recruited, and we were able to move ahead, working closely with Chilean colleagues. The account of what we jointly accomplished would take too long to relate here. What I would like to do instead is to lay out some of the things we learned over the course of the next four years. As I think back on this period of my life, I am astonished how little we, as government advisers, actually knew that was directly relevant to Chile and could somehow be “transferred.” We had no “bundles” of planning knowledge into which we could dip that would fit the Chilean situation. The very idea of a national policy for regional development, for example, was no more than some thoughts I had put together in three years of study in Venezuela, but none of them had actually been tested in practice.[5] Together with our counterparts, we had to learn by doing, by putting into practice this most pragmatic of planning epistemologies. Below, I will briefly comment on four things that I personally took away with me from this experience.
1. As advisors, we were engaged in what I came to call innovative planning. This was a term I coined to distinguish the process in which we were engaged from traditional forms of allocative planning. Budgets and land use plans allocate scarce resources. By contrast, what we were doing in Chile was to help devise new institutions and try to make them work in real time. As planners, we were not bound to planning documents but improvised solutions in accord with the accelerated time line of the reform government.[6]
2. The URDAPIC team practiced a form of mutual learning, which I subsequently proposed as a new planning approach I called transactive.[7] Formally defined, mutual learning is a process by which, in given situations, the abstract theoretical knowledge of planning experts is conjoined with the practical knowledge of ordinary people. It is a process through which theory and practice are brought together, each complementing and strengthening the other, thus generating new knowledge. In our situations, the “ordinary people” were our counterparts and professionals themselves. Still, we came together, working side by side as we jointly considered the problems at hand, exchanging ideas through dialogue. The idea was that neither expert nor local bureaucrat had sufficient knowledge of their own, but that together, they might be able to come up with a workable approach.
There were certain preconditions before mutual learning could occur. We were an advisory group that was composed principally of experts from abroad. Only a few of us initially spoke Spanish, yet this was the country’s language of everyday communication, and we had to master it quickly or become irrelevant. In addition, each one of us had to acquire knowledge about the country itself, its history, geography, economics, culture, and politics, so that what technical knowledge we possessed could be transformed into strategic advice. The expert also had to learn something about the dynamic institutional and interpersonal fields in which he had to work.[8] He would be obliged to become familiar with the bureaucratic subculture within which he worked, to whom to talk (and whom to avoid), and how to get things done. All this proved to be a challenging assignment. It also made it clear to me that one of the most important if elusive qualities of a good planning advisor is to be a quick learner. To be effective in a situation such as ours, he would need to learn all these things during the first few months of what was typically a two or three-year employment contract.
3. In innovative planning (and probably in every sort of planning), politics is inevitably in command. As advisers, we had to “go with the flow,” as laid-back Californians like to say. The political direction and the priorities of our Chilean colleagues had to be respected if we wanted to be heard. In the case of the Office of Popular Promotion, for example, where URDAPIC had initially placed a senior adviser, we actually had to withdraw our participation, once it became evident that the Office was being used chiefly for partisan politics. This was an extreme case, but there were many instances, where advisers were unable to prevail because of the government’s priorities, or where the solution that was “obvious” to the adviser would take a prolonged process of persuasion testing his patience. It was difficult to remind ourselves that while our counterparts would presumably remain in Chile forever and would have to live with the consequences of their actions, the foreign adviser would depart within a few years for another life elsewhere.
4. Political dynamics can wipe out most if not all achievements of innovative planning. In Chile’s case, this happened, first, when the United Front government of Salvador Allende was elected to office in 1970, and definitively in 1973, when the military coup, sanctioned by the American government and supported by the CIA, invested General Augusto Pinochet with dictatorial powers.[9] The coup annulled Chilean democracy for seventeen years, a victim of Cold War paranoia. We had been allies of the Christian Democratic regime, and most of what we had achieved was almost instantly dismantled. The Interdisciplinary Center for Urban Development at the Catholic University was shut down and restarted under new leadership in the Faculty of Architecture where it remains to this day, principally focused on urban design and physical planning. The National Planning Office remains as well, as does the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, but only as bureaucratic entities, with new priorities. In short, the two regime changes (of which the second was imposed at the point of a gun) had created a series of discontinuities, and instead of permitting normal democratic processes to do the slow work of social reconstruction, the highly ideologized temper of the times (and foreign subversion) sought to incorporate Chile into the expanding American empire. Under the neo-liberal order decreed by General Pinochet, unemployment soared, reaching 40 percent at one point, while enriching a small minority at the top. Democracy did not return to Chile until 1990, 21 years after I had returned to the United States to head up a new Urban Planning Program at UCLA. But my Chilean experience had left me with a treasure of ideas about planning that I could transfer back into my teaching. I made social learning central to my writing, seeing planning as a form of praxis, that is, as the constant alternation of knowledge and action, theory and practice as a way of planning in the dynamic, rapidly changing situations of our time. For innovative planners, the past is not a reliable guide to the future, and what we think we know because we have read it somewhere or have had an experience that taught us a lesson, needs constant revisiting and critical re-examination.[10]
II
My second story is why an idea such as neighborhood or community planning, which has been popular in North America since at least the 1960s if not earlier (see Vidyarthi this volume) fails to find a responsive audience in contemporary China. A neighborhood planning that directly involves the local community can be traced back, at least in the United States, to Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty” which, among other things, led to the invention of community development corporations and other community-based organizations, and changed American planning practice forever by introducing the concept of “advocacy planning.” The turbulent sixties also gave rise to the idea of democratizing planning through the direct participation of people likely to be affected by proposed interventions.
Now more often referred to as community planning, neighborhood planning was reinforced by the rise of neo-liberal policies during the 1970s, when the federal government devolved responsibility for welfare and pro-poor development to local areas. These changes in national policy spurred the active participation of what we now refer to as civil society, that is, the self-organization of social groups for public causes.[11] This tradition of democratizing planning all the way down to the grassroots continued in the new millennium, as political philosophers turned their attention increasingly to what they called a deliberative politics. Although most of these discussions turned on the politics of the nation state, a few, such as Archon Fung, saw the future for a deliberative politics chiefly at the local level.[12]