ARCH 1065 History and Theory of Planning

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ARCH 1065 History and Theory of Planning

• Week Eleven
• Planning Beyond the State

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Course Mechanics Individual Research Feedback

• Everything received as of last Friday has been
  marked
• Individual research marks count for only a
  portion of the collaborative project grade if
  things did not go well, you can compensate by
  thoughtful contributions during the collaborative
  period
• Major issues
• Citation! Citation! Citation! if I have
  identified any problems with your citations, you
  must correct these during the collaborative
  period
• Focus on academic and policy debates, rather than
  personal opinion or ungrounded generalisations
  (e.g., it may be true that most people think x
  but, for purposes of this assignment, you need to
  ground your assertions with reference to the
  literature)
• Structure the order of paragraphs or sentences
  should be logical
• Minor issues
• Quotations always introduce and conclude
  quotations
• Links and references to further resources are
  very helpful

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Course Mechanics Assessments

• Assessment updates have been prepared for
  everyone, and can be picked up near door
• Summarising
• Theoretical essays to date
• Wiki
• Individual assignment
• Feedback on collaborative contributions to date
  (quantitative grade is not possible for this
  item, as contributions are not complete)
• Participation
• Tutorial presentation (if given)
• Other participation feedback (quantitative grade
  not possible, as contributions not complete)
• If there are mistakes, please let me know.

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Collaboration Current Priorities

• Through 5 June
• Correct any citation issues identified in your
  marked individual assignment
• Consider the feedback you have received on your
  individual essay, when contributing to the
  collaborative process
• Create links and new pages by placing double
  square brackets around words that could be a new
  page title, e.g., Melbourne 2030
• Names of people, places, major pieces of
  legislation, etc.
• Words describing important topics
• Edit and contribute to articles, or create and
  contribute to new ones

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Lecture Overview

• Last week
• Brief introduction to social, economic and
  cultural dimensions of 1970s crisis
• This week
• Planning beyond the state
• Next week
• Contemporary issues
• Recommendation
• James Scott (1998) Seeing Like a State How
  Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition
  Have Failed, New Haven Yale University Press,
  especially ch. 4 The High-Modernist City an
  Experiment and a Critique

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Planning Beyond the State

• Critiques of the technocratic state yielded new
  conceptions of planning, each attempting to
  transcend different aspects of modernist planning
• Principle of value neutrality
• Expert-centred, top down planning
• Faith in scientific progress
• Orientation to amelioration, rather than
  fundamental transformation
• New critiques and models
• Advocacy planning
• Marxist critiques of planning
• Communicative action theory
• Libertarian critiques of planning
• Environmentalism
• Feminism
• Neo-liberalism
• Postmodernism

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Advocacy Planning

• Rejection of principle of value neutrality
• Planners always deploy values in the planning
  process the rhetoric of value neutrality
  functions as a cover for planning in the service
  of the status quo
• Planners should actively embrace values
  supporting those at the margins of society
  planning should be oriented to transformation, to
  the achievement of a more just society
• Often associated with planners who work in local
  communities, rather than for traditional
  government organisations, although some
  government planners also embraced this approach
• Ideal of bringing expert, technical knowledge to
  local communities
• Goal of assisting local communities to articulate
  their goals in terms that could be understood by
  formal political actors
• Goal of advocating on behalf of local communities
  
• Never dominant, but most common in 1960s-1970s
• Criticised for
• Naïve assumption that disempowered communities
  possessed a privileged view of social reality
  naïve rejection of the state
• Patronisation professional planners often
  decided what communities needed
• Disempowerment encouraging those communities to
  translate their political objectives into
  professional language, they inevitably watered
  down those objectives

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Marxist Critiques of Planning

• Revival of Marxism in late 1960s-1970s
• Marxist revival spanned well beyond planning, in
  part due to 1970s fascination with Mao
• Conceptualised in the planning literature as an
  attempt to address absence of spatial issues in
  Marx
• In planning Manuel Castells, David Harvey, early
  Leonie Sandercock, and others strongest in the
  1970s, although some will still identify with
  Marxism today (tends to be called political
  economy in Australia)
• Tended to criticise modernist planning for
• Amelioration, which served to deflect
  revolutionary impulses by improving standards of
  living while leaving intact inequitable social
  relations
• Individualism assumption that individual
  planners could make a significant difference,
  when Marxist theory held that structural factors
  were more important
• Criticised for
• Over-emphasis on structure left unclear how any
  person or group could ever fundamentally alter
  existing social relations
• Uncertain how one could consistently be a planner
  within this framework
• Problematic relationship with actually existing
  communism China, USSR rendered particularly
  evident by market triumphalism after the
  collapse of the USSR

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Communicative Action

• Several strains, all drawing on dimensions of
  Jürgen Habermas work (1970s-1990s)
• Habermas goals are philosophical and
  epistemological how can we understand the
  emergence of democratic ideals, which emerged
  originally in societies that had never known
  democracy
• Habermas argues that these ideals are embedded in
  human communication but, for various reasons,
  were only discovered in relatively recent history
• Planning theory (Healey, Forester) tends to
  disregard Habermas philosophical aims, and to
  use him to argue for
• the practice of collaboration as a social
  learning mechanism, and
• the value of practical, rather than technical,
  knowledge
• Attempts to
• Redefine planning as a practical art, to validate
  the professional knowledge and skills of the
  planner without relying on modernist notions of
  top-down expertise
• Reform planning practice to centre more on
  collaboration and shared learning
• Criticised for
• Retaining some aspects of planner-as-expert
• Ameliorist concept of planning not
  revolutionary enough for some critics
• Impractical or undesirable emphasis on consensus

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Libertarian Critiques

• Core concept society is too complex to be
  managed consciously by a central authority most
  human activities can be coordinated more
  efficiently by decentralised forms of
  self-regulation, particularly through markets
  (Hayek)
• Prevalence
• Not common within the planning profession,
  although a growing number of planners have
  embraced aspects of the concept over time
• Dimensions of libertarian theories have entered
  other social theories, including Habermas
• Critiques
• Social justice markets increase social
  inequality, and the poor cannot signal their
  preferences through money
• Externalities price signals cannot capture
  various externalities environmental, social,
  etc. for which charges are not applied
• Markets are blunt instruments, capable of
  responding only to price signals, while remaining
  insensitive to why people are spending money
  (i.e., if other goods were available, if people
  were wealthier, etc., perhaps they would make
  other decisions)
• People do not necessarily behave as rational
  maximisers, making the most reasonable decision,
  given the money they have available to spend
• Sufficient levels of competition cannot always be
  sustained

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Environmentalism

• Major influence on planning, both through
  cultural shifts, and through changes to
  legislation
• Shifting emphasis over time
• Fears re fossil fuel shortage, population
  crisis, and zero growth campaigns
• Concern with global management of pollution,
  global warming and other issues that span
  national borders
• Sustainability proposals
• Some parallels between concepts of
  self-regulating systems that run through
  libertarian and environmentalist critiques of the
  state nature and the environment both come to
  be conceptualised as potentially self-regulating
  system, if they are left free of human
  intervention

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Feminism

• Second Wave feminism 1970s
• First Wave feminism often focussed on special
  roles women could uniquely perform
• Second Wave feminism tended to focus on the
  potential for equality between men and women on
  womens ability to carry out the same tasks men
  carry out
• Within planning, initial exploration of the
  concept of feminist planning theory, and on
  planning for the needs of women
• Increasing uncertainty over whether there is, or
  should be, a distinctive form of feminist
  planning theory
• Incorporation and expansion of some principles of
  planning for women into notions of inclusive
  planning for persons with various specialised
  needs

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Neo-Liberalism

• Often used very loosely, even within the academic
  literature, as a catch-all term for a wide range
  of approaches critical of state intervention into
  markets
• More narrowly, refers to a combination of
  initiatives pioneered by Margaret Thatcher,
  Ronald Reagan, etc., characterised by
• Delegation of control from the state to civil
  society (markets and voluntary associations) in
  many areas
• Focus on drastic economic restructuring (market
  discipline) to correct the stagflation crisis of
  the 1970s and 1980s
• Faith in the greater efficiency of the market and
  private industry, relative to state bureaucracies
• Strategies, including the use of state power, to
  weaken the power of organised labour
• Concentration and strengthening of state power in
  those areas over which the state retained
  jurisdiction
• The current shortage in planning professionals
  derives, in part, from neo-liberal policies,
  which led to a short-term belief that planning
  (of all sorts) would not be in high demand

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Postmodernism

• Term is used very loosely, by critics and
  adherents, and can refer to
• An aesthetic movement
• An epistemological and historical critique of the
  Enlightenment and of scientific rationality
  (Lyotard and, at one remove, figures such as
  Derrida, Foucault, etc.)
• The current historical period, characterised by
  contrast with the modernist (postwar) era
• Most planning theory is too eclectic to invoke
  postmodernist epistemology consistently.
• Some theorists invoke the critical conclusions of
  postmodernism, while inconsistently rejecting the
  relativist epistemology.
• Others simply use postmodernism descriptively,
  without any critical intent.

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Next Week Preview

• Contemporary issues