ARCH 1065 History and Theory of Planning

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ARCH 1065 History and Theory of Planning

• Week Five
• Theories of the Emergence of Planning

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Course Mechanics Library Sessions

• This course assumes that you have the background
  provided in the sessions booked in week 2
• If you missed these sessions, book yourself into
  the librarys classes on
• Internet searching, and
• Database demonstration
• Booking information at library website
  http//www.rmit.edu.au/browseIDbtjpyxi3pnch1
• Advanced sessions option for later in term

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Course Mechanics Wiki

• This weeks assignment was designed to provide
  additional practice with basic wiki functionality
• Logging in to read and edit the wiki
• Basic formatting commands
• Counts toward your contribution mark for the
  collaborative research project
• Everyone who logged in and edited a page, or who
  communicated with me prior to the 24 March
  deadline about problems preventing them from
  logging in, receives full credit for this
  assignment
• From now until 28 April
• Work on individual research
• Log in and contribute to wiki at least once
  weekly
• Post updates, notes and drafts on your own
  research
• Assist other students with their research,
  writing or wiki technical skills

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Course Mechanics Upcoming Wiki Deadlines

• Today tutorial workshop
• Wiki QA
• Tutorial presentations QA
• Coordinating related research projects
• creating overarching categories for
• creating sub-pages for individual research
• dividing work
• Collaboration and academic ethics exercise
• Through 28 April contribute to wiki on a weekly
  basis
• Notes and drafts relating to your research
• Assistance to other students
• Contribution grade for this period reflects
  consistency and quality of your contributions
• Friday, 28 April individual research assignment
  due

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Course Mechanics Theoretical Essay Feedback

• 17 March essays marked
• If you submitted an essay by 17 March, and I have
  not returned it, speak to me ASAP
• Some 24 March essays marked
• If yours has not been marked, check back next
  week
• Questions for final three weeks distributed next
  week
• Once these questions are available, all students
  will need to provide me with an indication of
  which questions they will answer (this is
  indicative only you can change your mind)
• Work Practice students need to inform me of the
  deadlines for their group essays
• General comments

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Course Mechanics Tutorials

• 2 Sessions
• 1100-1230 in this classroom
• 130-300 Bld. 8, lvl. 9, rm. 42
• Student Presentations
• Begin 10 April
• Students present on a topic related to their
  individual research
• Depending on topic, may cover entire topic, or
  sub-section of topic that can be introduced in a
  10-15 minute presentation
• Not purely descriptive, but designed to provoke
  class discussion/debate
• Relate topic back to contemporary planning
  practice
• Conclude with questions to guide 15-20 minutes of
  class discussion
• Tutorial Imbalance
• Seeking volunteers to move from morning to
  afternoon tutorial
• If insufficient volunteers, some students from
  the morning tutorial may serve as guest
  presenters in the afternoon tutorial

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Lecture Overview

• Last week
• look back to 18th century liberalism
• Very influential through 19th and early 20th
  century (and again today)
• In key respects, introduced conceptual categories
  essential to the emergence of the planning
  movement
• Brief overview of theoretical approaches to
  understanding capitalism
• Can specific theoretical approaches enable us to
  account for worldwide social and economic trends
  in the 19th and 20th centuries
• This week
• Explore how specific planning theorists and
  practitioners have approached the questions Why
  do we plan? and Why did the profession of
  planning come into being?

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Class Discussion

• Why do we plan now?
• How did the profession get started?
• What has changed in the profession over time?

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Social Complexity

• Argues that many earlier societies did not
  require planning
• Smaller
• Less dynamic
• Less diverse
• Views planning, therefore, as a logical,
  necessary and largely inevitable outcome of the
  increasing size, diversity and dynamism of modern
  societies
• Very common explanatory trope
• Liberal economic theory is also preoccupied with
  the consequences of increasing size, dynamism and
  diversity of modern societies
• Adam Smith (and many others) contrast the sorts
  of division of labour characteristic of other
  societies, with the intricate detail division of
  labour characteristic of our own
• Liberal economists, however, believe this
  complexity makes it impossible to plan managing
  such complexity requires decentralised,
  spontaneous, natural self-regulation
• Mid- to late-19th century sociology picks up
  this preoccupation and translates it into a form
  far more sympathetic to concepts of planning and
  state regulation
• Both approaches derive opposing implications from
  the same historical trends

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Problems with the Social Complexity Thesis

• Conflicting conclusions drawn by liberal economic
  and sociological traditions provide a clue
• Very strong temptation to assume that history
  could only have followed the path that it
  actually did follow to assume that correlation
  implies causation
• So liberalism concludes that more complex
  societies emerge alongside the emergence of more
  decentralised forms of self-regulation
  therefore complexity requires decentralised
  self-regulation
• Sociological traditions, looking at boom-and-bust
  economic cycles and the social unrest associated
  with them, conclude complexity is threatened by
  the recurrent crises caused by decentralised
  regulation therefore decentralisation threatens
  complexity
• Both over-extrapolate from a specific historical
  circumstance without considering other potential
  organisations of social life

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Problems with the Social Complexity Thesis

• Under-determination of the theory by the evidence
• Even if we accept that complexity necessitates
  some form of planning, this glosses over several
  key issues
• Why were we in the historical position to solve
  the problems presented by complexity? many
  societies generate problems they are unable to
  solve, so pointing to the emergence of a problem
  does not, by itself, explain the emergence of its
  solution (functionalism)
• Is the present form of planning the only type of
  planning that could potentially have managed the
  needs of a complex society? many theorists
  slide from a relatively uncontroversial point
  (complexity necessitates planning) into the
  assumption that, once weve established the need
  for planning, weve accounted for all of the
  qualitative characteristics of the planning
  profession, its theoretical self-understanding,
  and its practices (discovery)

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Response to Problems of Laissez-Faire Capitalism

• Three variants
• Neutral/Functionalist
• Laissez-faire capitalism had generated a degree
  of complexity and global interconnectedness that
  could no longer be entrusted to the spontaneous
  self-regulation of the market
• Planning emerged quasi-naturally as a response to
  the problems generated by the laissez-faire era
• Critical
• Laissez-faire capitalism was giving rise to
  potentially revolutionary forms of social unrest
• Planning emerged as a means of deflecting that
  unrest preserving the unjust system of property
  rights, while redistributing just enough wealth
  to coopt revolutionary movements
• Utopian
• Laissez-faire capitalism was giving rise to
  social injustices and inequalities
• Planning emerged as a means to right these wrongs
  and incrementally bring about a new, more
  emancipatory form of social life

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Problems in Explanations with Reference to
Laissez-Faire Capitalism

• Neutral/Functionalist
• Similar issues to all other types of
  functionalist explanation
• Does not sufficiently explore counterfactuals
  alternative paths history might have taken or
  might still take
• The existence of a problem is not a sufficient
  explanation for the emergence of any particular
  solution
• The social function ultimately served by a
  practice does not explain how and why that
  practice originated
• Critical
• Often causes tensions with planning
  practitioners, who feel this critique, taken to
  its logical conclusion, would mean that no
  socially-committed person could also work in
  planning
• Conspiracy theory conscious decision to thwart
  working-class revolutionary movements
• Tends to disregard evidence of planners stated
  motives and intentions
• Struggles with, e.g., Marxs critique of
  Feuerbach Who educates the educators?
  granting the ruling classes consciously attempts
  to thwart revolutionary impulses, why choose
  this method to achieve that result? Why would
  this method work?
• Structural domination unintended side-effect
  has been to diminish revolutionary movements
• In their current form, most structuralist
  explanations suffer from a tension between their
  critical impulse their sense that some
  alternative form of society must be possible
  and their form of structuralist theory, which
  tends to imply that the social forces that
  structure ultimate outcomes are all-powerful
• Not an inevitable problem
• Utopian
• Problem dealing with the evidence adduced by more
  critical theorists, that, regardless of some
  planners utopian intentions, the consequence of
  much planning activity appears to be facilitating
  existing social hierarchies

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Self-Assertion of a New Professional Class

• Inspired by Michel Foucault
• Foucault (writing 1960s-1980s) analyses the sorts
  of universal values associated with liberalism
  and the Enlightenment. In Foucaults account,
  these universal values
• Do not unambiguously represent progress, or a
  movement toward greater freedom compared to other
  societies
• Instead, the qualitative character of domination
  changes with the Enlightenment
• New technocratic professions arise that generate
  novel forms of domination, under the guise of
  universal equality
• Uses of Foucault in the planning (and other)
  literature do not necessarily reflect Foucaults
  own views
• Foucault changes his position over time many
  who appropriate Foucault read only his earliest
  (post-structuralist) works
• Contradictory tendencies
• to group Foucault with postmodernism (Lyotard)
  and deconstruction (Derrida), to arrive at a more
  generic relativist critique of overarching theory
  as such
• to translate Foucault into more of a class-based
  critique (of a post-bourgeois class), rather than
  to focus on Foucaults more structural notion of
  domination

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Problems with Perceiving Planning as the
Self-Assertion of a New Class

• Historical issues
• Inadequate explanation of why a new class would
  assert itself in this specific way why invoke
  universal ideals? (Again, Marx re Feuerbach
  Who educates the educators?)
• Why do others accept the authority of this new
  class?
• Epistemological issues
• How far do we push the relativism of this
  approach?
• Can planning dispense with ideals such as the
  general good, the public interest, etc.?
• Are contemporary (scientific and moral) standards
  equivalent to those of earlier societies?
• Performative contradiction Many critics have
  argued that this approach tacitly relies on the
  concepts it attempts to debunk that
• its real critique of the Enlightenment and
  liberalism is that these traditions promised
  universal rights, but failed to live up to that
  promise
• tacit notions of universal values are used in the
  very critique that claims to debunk those values

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Emergence of Planning Was Historically Random

• Often a tacit theoretical position not
  articulated directly, and perhaps even explicitly
  denied by the authors who use it
• Derived from a particular understanding of
  post-structuralism (Foucault), post-modernism
  (Lyotard) and deconstruction (Derrida)
• Rejection of meta-narratives large,
  overarching theories that history was moving in a
  linear direction, generating higher and higher
  levels of progress
• Historically fuelled by a series of crises and
  political disappointments
• Soviet Union realisation of its totalitarian
  character
• Welfare state recognition that forms of
  technocratic regulation were being promulgated by
  the welfare state
• Environmental crises sometimes as the direct
  consequence of large-scale modernist
  environmental interventions
• Failure of large-scale planning projects urban
  infrastructure crises, persistence of poverty,
  etc.
• Rejects notion of planning as a result of
  historical progress, and explains its rise as the
  result of a series of random, contingent
  circumstances

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Problems with Theories of (Strong) Historical
Contingency

• Empirical issues
• The social, cultural and economic transformations
  associated with the rise of planning and, in
  fact, the rise of planning itself are global
  trends, replicated in a wide variety of local
  contexts
• This suggests that the transformation that gave
  rise to the planning movement was somehow
  structured that something about this
  historical period made it particularly likely
  that people would experience these specific
  trends
• Theories of historical progress are one way of
  accounting for this kind of empirical evidence
  e.g., everyone suddenly adopted this new form of
  practice because it was superior to everything
  that had come before it
• Even if you reject the notion that planning
  represented some kind of historical advance, the
  empirical problem remains why did this form of
  practice spread widely at roughly the same
  historical moment?
• Alternative theoretical options
• You can reject notions of progress without
  rejecting overarching theories of social
  structuration e.g., you can consider whether
  historical trends are a regress, or whether
  they are ambivalent in character, etc.

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Planning as a Momentary Deviation from
Spontaneous Self-Regulation

• Neo-liberal theory, grounded in notion that
  complex societies cannot consciously govern
  themselves in a centralised manner, but must rely
  on decentralised, spontaneous forms of
  self-regulation via the free market
• Crisis of the welfare state in the west, and
  collapse of communism in the east, taken as
  historical evidence for this claim

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Challenges for the Neo-Liberal Theory

• Theoretical
• Sees decentralised mechanisms for spontaneous
  self-regulation as the most central, defining
  institutions of modern society
• Does not explore the historical relationships
  between the emergence of those institutions and
  the simultaneous emergence of contradictory
  pressures toward centralised regulation
• Without understanding this, we may not be able to
  understand
• The viability of mechanisms for spontaneous
  self-regulation (or the threats to those
  mechanisms), or
• The ways in which those mechanisms are
  restricted, limited or shaped by contervailing
  mechanisms
• Does not explore question of whether the market
  exhausts the available options for decentralised
  self-regulation
• Empirical
• Issue of socially acceptable externalities or
  unintended consequences from spontaneous
  self-regulation via the market, when the market
  can only hear social signals based on price

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Theory Critical and Non-Critical

• Theory any narrative that organises evidence to
  describe or explain how things work
• Critical theory any narrative that contrasts
  how things do work with how they ought to work
• Heightened awareness that our data, based on
  observations of the existing social world, may
  not reflect the only possible organisation of
  that social world
• Problem Where does the ought come from?
• Not a problem for theological traditions the
  ought doesnt need to be related to existing
  society (some secular theories tacitly adopt the
  same approach often criticised in the
  literature as adopting a Gods eye view)
• Materialist traditions need to provide a
  secular basis for the ought
• Theories of progress traditionally did this the
  future, or potential future, of our society the
  standpoint from which existing institutions could
  be criticised as, e.g., backwards,
  regressive, etc. Marxist and liberal forms
• Contemporary scepticism about progress has
  removed this option, but current critical
  theories often dont offer an alternative

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Self-Reflexive Theory

• Self-reflexive theory an attempt to resolve this
  problem, by accounting, in secular
  (materialist) terms, for the values the
  theorist uses when criticising contemporary
  society
• Generally, self-reflexive theory is historical
  theory
• Understands our thoughts and actions as the
  products of a particular time and place
• However, does not understand that time and place
  as uniform and non-contradictory (society is not
  a totality)
• By examining contradictory historical trends, the
  theorist can
• Begin to account for the historical plausibility
  of competing theoretical traditions each
  tradition, for example, may be focussing on one
  historical trend to the exclusion of other,
  equally or more important, trends
• By understanding the historical basis for
  competing theoretical traditions, you dont have
  to reject them outright, but can incorporate
  their valid insights, while also criticising them
  for being partial accounts
• By providing a more comprehensive account, you
  can uncover options for historical agency
  exposing choices that people may not realise they
  have
• By linking criticism of existing society to these
  choices, you can ground your critique can
  explain, in secular (materialist) terms, that
  the ought is just as much as product of
  contemporary society as the is

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Next Week Preview

• Overview of the works of a few classic figures
  who influenced the early development of the
  planning profession