The Uses of Planning Theory:

A Bibliographic Essay

John Friedmann

Preface

Studying planning at the University of Chicago in the early 50s, I was privileged to be a student of Edward C. Banfield who offered the first planning theory seminar ever to be held anywhere. Among the assigned readings which influenced me the most was Karl Mannheim’s Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1949; orig. 1940) a translation of which had just appeared, andHerbert A. Simon’s Administrative Behavior (1976, orig. 1945). Mannheim was a Hungarian sociologist who had fled to the United Kingdom just before the war and was best known for his work on the sociology of knowledge; Simon, an American student of public administration would receive the Nobel Prize for his work on artificial intelligence many years later. While Mannheim was searching for a democratic alternative to the twin evils of communism and fascism, Simon explored the possibilities of rational decision making in the context of American bureaucracy. Banfield himself was particularly fascinated by Simon and undertook his own research into the field of housing policy in Chicago (Meyerson and Banfield, 1955). His conclusion that planning for public housing in the Windy City was all about politics, and that the planners’ purported rationalism was little more than an ideological smoke screen, led him eventually to the study of urban politics and a professorship at Harvard. But I was bitten by the bug of “planning theory” (which neither then nor now can be precisely defined and encompasses a vast terrain) and have been engaged in thinking about planning ever since.

I mention this personal story because, since those early and tentative beginnings, planning theory has become a respectable subject with a journal exclusively devoted to the topic and courses on the history and theory of planning offered in most American planning schools, often as an introductory subject. In fact, coverage of planning theory is now mandated for accreditation purposes. Despite this apparent “success,” skeptical voices still dismiss its usefulness for practice. As Sanyal has argued, based on a survey of planning practitioners, not one of them had found planning theory, or indeed any theory, useful as they grappled with conflicting interests (Sanyal 2002). They learned by doing, Sanyal said, not from theories. The present essay is my attempt to argue otherwise, stressing several “uses” of planning theory as I see them. I am fairly certain that if they were pressed for an answer now, most practitioners would continue to validate Sanyal’s conclusion. But I believe that any intellectual discipline has its particular role to play in the discourse about planning and indeed in academic discourse generally, and that this discourse cannot but affect the thousands of planning students who are puzzled by the question of “what is planning.” Over the years our answers to this existential question have changed, and our writings on planning theory have helped to shape the minds of our students as they emerged into their own practices. In this way, and for the most part unbeknown to themselves, they have contributed to the generational drift in our collective understanding of planning practice. We have distanced ourselves from a practice conceived as a form of rational decision-making, the dominant model in the immediate post-war era, to our current understanding that planning is inevitably embedded in politics, reflecting and adapted to what for want of a better term we call the spirit of the times.

The writings that I will cite in this essay obviously reflect my own biases, and it would be false modesty to deny that I have contributed to this discourse for more than 50 years and am perhaps responsible for some of the shifts that have occurred (Friedmann 2002, ch. 7). Others may well disagree with what I call the three central “tasks” of planning theory, or how the writers who contributed to this discourse actually understood what they were doing. And so, because I value discussion, I invite responses to the present version of what I perceive to be the case.

An essay such as this is necessarily written in a style that is more or less impersonal. I will therefore interject more personal comments from time to time such as this Preface. The reader will recognize them by the italic script.

Introduction

Planning theory is becoming an increasingly global discourse. The eponymous journal Planning Theory was founded by Luigi Mazza of the University of Milano in the 1990s. Several volumes of Anglo-American planning theorists (Forester, Friedmann, Healey, and Sandercock among others) have been translated into Italian and published by Dedalo under the general editorship of Dino Borri of the Technical University of Bari. In the UK, Patsy Healey, with the strong support of the Royal Town Planning Institute, founded the journal Planning Theory and Practice which in 2008 is celebrating its tenth anniversary. In Germany, Klaus Selle at the University of Aachen has been a major contributor to planning theoretical discourse. Individual contributions have come from Israel, Brazil, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and Greece. And as recent issues of the China City Planning Review (published in English) demonstrate, there is now even a small number of Chinese planners who have joined the discourse.

What is less clear is how we should answer the question of “planning theory for what?” or why those of us who engage in theoretical practice choose to do so. Skeptics sometimes argue that the coterie of self-identified theorists talk chiefly among themselves, that theory is an esoteric game of little or no practical import. A contrary position such as Klaus Selle’s, sees it as having a central role in renewing planning practices (Selle 2006). Being of Selle’s persuasion, my purpose in this essay is to suggest three ways that theorizing in and about planning contributes to our professional field, with a particular emphasis on North America. There exist other ways of contributing to planning theory which I will not refer to in this essay, but I regard the three to be discussed as central to our endeavor. I refer to them as “tasks,” which is to say that they are major concerns, whether explicit or implicit, of those participating in the discourse.

The first task is to evolve a deeply considered humanist philosophy for planning and to trace its implications for practice. This is the philosophical task of planning theory. The second task is to help adapt planning practices to their real-world constraints with regard to scale, complexity, and time. What I have in mind here are the constraints (and opportunities) with which the constant flux of the world presents us, along with the growing complexity and scale of the urban, and the importance that “difference” makes. I call this the task of adaptation. The third task is to translate concepts and knowledges generated in other fields into our own domain, and to render them accessible and useful for planning and its practices. I call this the task of translation. In the remainder of this essay, I will elaborate on each of these tasks by drawing on specific examples from the literature.

I Evolving a humanist philosophy for planning and its practices

It doesn’t seem so very long ago that planning was perceived to be a value-free activity guided by professional if not scientific standards. Planners, it was argued, are guardians of the public interest. Today, it would be difficult to maintain this position—or is it? In Japan, for instance, planning is still largely perceived as a technocratic activity exercised by Tokyo-based bureaucrats (Sorensen 2002), and versions of this attitude are widely held throughout East Asia.And although North American planners no longer embrace technocratic hubris, architects and some urban designers by and large still do, and economists of the neo-classical variety regard their pronouncements as scientifically based advice to policy-makers who can then exercise their values in whatever way they choose. They believe in the maxim of speaking truth to power. In their understanding, facts and values don’t mix; they are derived from different logics.

And yet, as planners, we don’t have a well thought-out philosophical position beyond the usual platitudes of “participation.” Some planners today think of their primary role as that of facilitating public discussion or mediating disputes. While they may favor a different outcome, their professional skill is primarily to assist in “getting to yes” among stakeholders, in arriving at an actionable consensus, whatever that may turn out to be. This facilitative approach is a considerable distance from an understanding of a planning practice embedded in politics.

So the question for us is this: can planners evolve a value-based philosophy as a foundation for their own practices in the world? My personal view is that this is perhaps the major challenge before us in a world that, despite protestations to the contrary, is increasingly materialist, individualist, and largely indifferent to humans’ impacts on the natural environment. In the absence of a human-centered philosophy or some other defensible construct, we will merely drift with the mainstream, helping to build cities that are neither supportive of life nor ecologically sustainable.

*

That planning is not a value-free activity has been widely acknowledged for some time, at least in North America, where value-based planning is no longer a salient issue. The Canadian Institute of Planners, for example, has an 8-point “Statement of Values” that is meant to serve as a source of inspiration and guidance for professional planner ( Moreover, for progressive planners in the US and Canada, social justice concerns have been an important focus for decades, ever since Paul Davidoff (1965) made the case for planners’ advocacy of the poor and Chester Hartman’s Planners Network Newsletter in 1975, which has now evolved into the quarterly journal, Progressive Planning (Hartman 2002). Equally notable is Susan Fainstein’s tireless advocacy of social justice in the city (Fainstein 2000; forthcoming). More recently, some planning schools (especially in Canada), such as the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia, have declared themselves to be committed to sustainability and the democratization of planning, thus making a specific value-orientation central to their mission. And over the years, various value claims have been embraced by both the planning academy and many individual practitioners, such as advocacy of the poor and other marginalized people, citizen participation, inclusiveness, and the right to housing.

These commitments did not, however, simply “drop from the sky” but were the result of political struggles, debates, and dramatic changes in the zeitgeist of our societies. Underlying them, too, were new researches, new discourses, and new common understandings about the contemporary world. These writings, addressed to planners but occasionally to a more general readership as well, are part and parcel of what I call the central tasks of planning theory. If planning practice is now, as I would argue, both societal and political, and if we live, as we are obliged to, in an increasingly interconnected world, we have to think more and more deeply about the values that should inform our practices, including how to move from values to action. In the following paragraphs, I will give the merest hints of the extensive work that lies ahead for us.

I begin with what I believe to be our birthright to human flourishing. In an essay on the “good city”, I argued that “every human being has the right to the full development of their innate intellectual, physical, and spiritual capabilities in the context of wider communities.” I called this the right to human flourishing and proposed it as the most fundamental of human rights (Friedmann 2002, 110).[1]

Philosophical anthropology teaches us that individual human beings cannot be meaningfully described as an abstract concept such as the utility-maximizing “economic man” of neo-classical thought which, when seriously applied in policy discourse, can have vicious consequences (Clark 2002). Rather, from the moment of conception until we die, human beings can only be understood as multi-dimensional, socially-related beings, or persons who, over the entire arc of their lives, evolve biologically, psychologically and in the social relations that constitute our collective existence. More recently, we have come to understand human interdependence not only societally but also with the natural environment: both are essential to our continued sustenance and flourishing (Daly and Farley 2004; Clark 2002). This anthro-ecological model is essentially one of limits: limited, that is, by the requirements of biological and psychological life, culturally mediated social obligations, the extensive production of use values without which we would not survive and which some refer to as the moral economy, and nature’s capacity to sustain human life on earth at socially acceptable levels of living (Polanyi 1977).

Two crucial observations follow from working with a model of limits. The first is that it clashes with the belief in the possibility of unlimited cumulative growth in material consumption and thus, presumably, of human happiness as well (an ever increasing “happiness?”), a belief that has become the dominant ideology in policy planning worldwide. The second is that an implication of working with either or both models is bound to lead to contradictionsthat can only be resolved either peacefully through a political process or, failing that, by deploying the police powers of the state. An example is the off-loading of the rising economic and environmental costs of unlimited material growth onto the least powerful sectors of the population (using the full powers of the state to enforce this solution) and/or onto the weakest countries of the global community, many of them in Africa and the Middle East. In other words, increasing domestic and global inequalities are partly responsible for generating the present world disorder ranging from drugs, people smuggling, hunger, and random violence against civilian populations to desertification, global warming, and the “long emergency” of post-peak oil (Kunstler 2006). Since violent solutions may be the most probable but are also the least desirable, we are for all practical purposes left with only a range of political options.

At a theoretical level, these options confront us with the challenge to devise political systems and/or processes capable of overcoming the inherent contradictions in public policy work. This line of argument takes us directly to the question of democratic theory most of which, at least in recent decades, has had the nation state as its focus. Planners have made few contributions to democratic theory as such, possibly because our attention is overwhelmingly focused on the local.[2]

Twenty years ago, in an attempt to write the history of planning thought, I suggested that John Dewey’s experimental pragmatism, Karl Mannheim’s “third way” of democratic planning, Karl Popper’s advocacy of an “open society”, and Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom’s political economy offered planners a bridge to political theory (Friedmann 1987).[3] But turning to contemporary political theory directly, perhaps the most influential work over the past half century has been Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision (2004; orig. 1960). In a more radical vein and especially relevant for planners, are the writings of Iris Marion Young on social justice and the city (1990; 2000) and Chantal Mouffe’s edited collection, Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (1992), which brings together some of the most eloquent political philosophers of our time.[4]

During the last decade, a stir has been made (mostly in North America) by advocates of deliberative democracy. Various attempts have been made to define the meaning of this deliberative turn in political theory. Two of the leading advocates of the approach define deliberative democracy “as a form of government in which free and equal citizens (and their representatives) justify decisions in a process in which they give one another reasons that are mutually acceptable and generally accessible, with the aim of reaching conclusions that are binding in the present on all citizens but open to challenge in the future” (Gutmann and Thompson 2004).[5] Virtually all the debates that have swirled around this concept, however, have cast their arguments in terms of a national polity, and the relevance of public “deliberation” as this term is used by political scientists has found little resonance among planners.

Archon Fung’s recent work is an exception. Using a series of six case studies from Chicago, Fung has given us a detailed look at deliberative democracy at work (Fung 2004; see also Fung, Wright, and Abers 2003). He calls it Empowered Participation and sees it as a strategy of administrative reform. Among political theorists, his work is exceptional, but his focus on the local community is a familiar one to planners, especially to those working in mediation and negotiation, such as Judith Innes and David Booher (2003).

It is John Forester, however, who has taken deliberative democracy’s moral vision furthest by working it into the language and practice of community planning (Forester 1999). His early writings focused on the art of listening, but in The Deliberative Practitioner he departed from the rationalist models of political scientists and philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas to confront the deep grievances and passionate commitments people often bring to public deliberations. If the parties to a conflict seek to reach agreement, their pains, passions, and grievances, he argues, must first be publicly acknowledged. Most importantly for planning theory, perhaps, is his emphasis on what he calls transformative learning that occurs when people honestly confront their emotions and those of others in the course of talking with each other.