Following Portugal’s return of Macau to the People’s Republic of China in 1999, the local government liberalized the city’s casino gaming monopoly and opened the industry to foreign investment. As a result, Macau has become the world’s most lucrative site of casino gaming revenue, and a model for other regional states which are pursuing casino gaming-driven development. This article entails a post-structural analysis of neoliberal governance in Macau and a genealogy of the resulting post-socialist consumer subject. Framed by a critical engagement with Aihwa Ong’s theory of "neoliberalism as exception," analysis reveals that Macau’s economic growth was enhanced, not by optimizing technocratic rationalities, but by reactive measures taken up by different actors, at several different scales, to address three governance crises of public order, public finance, and public health. What appear to be neoliberal interventions in the Macau economy are often exposed as contemporary iterations of latent governmental forms. These various factors form a dispositif, or apparatus, of subjectification.
Public planners are increasingly recruited to manage collaborative innovation processes, but there is hardly any research on how they deal with the tensions they encounter in managing collaborative innovation in the institutional context of a public bureaucracy. Drawing on emerging theories of collaborative planning, network management and public innovation, the article develops a taxonomy of tasks related to managing collaborative innovation, identifies potential tensions between these tasks and the institutional logic of public bureaucracies and investigates how these tensions are experienced by frontline planners who remain involved in face-to-face interaction with citizens while managing collaborative innovation processes within urban regeneration projects in Copenhagen.
Research about plans and resulting guidance for practice tend to focus on making one plan and implementing it. Plans are made and used, however, by many autonomous agents, a variety of organizations pursuing their interests while recognizing interdependence with the activities of other agents. Expanding the focus beyond one plan by one organization to many plans by many organizations raises three questions. With what agents should I make plans? How should I use plans to communicate strategically among agents? How should I express the content of such plans? We consider these questions by interpreting plans as signals, information shared among organizations. We contrast this perspective on plans with other interpretations of planning and elaborate responses to the three questions using examples from practice. By considering these questions explicitly, planners can take advantage of the signaling effects to increase the potential effectiveness of making and using plans.
Current social and economic theory has yet to explain why, despite the many advantages of the market mechanism, planning is employed at all levels of market economy. Like other studies, this research proposes an explanation based on the form of property rights; however, it uses specific definitions of market, private planning and collective planning that establish unambiguous links between them and the structure of ownership. Thus, the article supports the position that the employment of planning or market mechanisms in economic and social activities depends solely on the structure of property rights. The contribution of this article is the formulation of two criteria for the allocation of property rights derived from Coase’s seminal works, termed in this text as Coase’s criterion of institutional optimisation and Coase’s market cost criterion. An important aspect of this proposal is the suggestion that Coase’s theory can be a powerful tool with which to study shared/common entitlements. It illuminates the nature and the mechanisms of private and collective planning and their relationship to the market. The article concludes that private planning may exist only if it is good enough to improve the efficiency of the market. Collective planning is indispensable when markets employ shared/collectively owned resources.
The critical literature on participation warns that a focus on ‘consensus’ evades the political in planning, preventing citizens from confronting and challenging discourse and prevailing orthodoxy about the way the urban ought to be constituted. These critiques raise important questions about the efficacy of participatory planning and its political formation. Moreover, the extent to which citizen’s participation can ever challenge dominant trajectories has reached a point of conceptual ‘crisis’. In this article, I explore the different ways in which participation manifests from the politicising participatory moments in planning. Examining a single case study in Melbourne, Australia, I draw upon 15 key informant interviews with community campaigners who mounted a successful campaign to defeat the controversial East West Link road project. By examining the formal and informal political manifestations of participation over a period of 2 years, this article challenges the sentiment that there is a crisis of participatory planning. It shows how decisions to engage the citizenry in prescribed ways induce other manifestations and formations of citizen’s participation through politics and how these manifestations garner a pervasive and influential trajectory to reshape participatory planning.
The recent history of the public interest is one of misappropriation. Practitioners have been found to value the concept but have struggled to articulate how it guides day-to-day planning practice. It has been used to portray a homogeneous public, furthering the interests of the powerful at the expense of recognising social diversity, and leading to calls for the concept’s abandonment. Yet this article starts from the argument that the public interest remains the justification that fundamentally underpins planning activities, in light of a continuing need to address collective concerns. To this end, the article adopts the typology put forward by Campbell and Marshall, outlining different ways in which the public interest may practically be addressed. Alongside this, Dewey’s work is used to understand how the extent of the public may vary, leading to the use of scale as a way of recognising when different conceptualisations of the public interest might be practically drawn upon. Following this approach, the typology is brought together with scale, as a lens for understanding the extent of a public with a common interest, to form a framework for analysing practice. This framework is used to analyse how the interests of different publics are addressed in a case study of the Peak District, a national park in England. From the case, conclusions are drawn around the need to pay greater attention to the extent of different publics with a common interest and, in turn, how the interests of different publics can be reconciled.
This article is focused on the rules that we create using drawings (designs, pictures, paintings, etc.) which will be termed ‘graphic rules’. Its attention is therefore not simply on the use of images in normative documents but also ‘as law’. We will delve into one of these types of graphic rules: that is, graphic rules used in urban planning. The fact that graphic rules are widespread in planning practices, and indeed typical of them, makes rules of this kind a particularly significant field of interest for planning theory. An important point to stress is that while analysis of images used descriptively has been under way for some time (although in many respects it is anything but conclusive, despite what is generally thought), analysis of images used as rules is still in its infancy. To gain deeper understanding of these particular and widespread forms of (graphic) rules is therefore both theoretically and practically important.
The thesis of the ontological primacy of antagonism, thus the political, is central to Chantal Mouffe’s call for taming antagonism into agonism, or agonistic pluralism. Within planning theory, Mouffe’s conflictual ontology that underpins this call has raised questions over the ontological assumption of the presently prominent and consensus-oriented communicative and deliberative planning approaches. This is because these approaches consider consensus formation as a normative ideal and always at least a potential outcome from open and inclusive deliberation, that is, ontological. Yet, the notion that antagonism is also an ever-present possibility for all social relations and therefore an ineradicable risk for consensus-building effort in planning practices appears to be increasingly accepted even by communicative planning theorists. In this article, I trace the origin of Mouffe’s thesis of the ontological primacy of antagonism back to both her original collaborative work with Earnest Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, and Carl Schmitt. With Derrida and Laclau, I then argue that this Mouffean thesis does not hold: antagonism operates at the ontic level in the social and it is only but one way of discursively inscribing the experience of exclusion and the use of power. This insight supports a new, post-antagonism approach to politics and the political based on the ontology of radical negativity. Finally, I discuss how this approach can be linked with planning theory by adopting a de-ontologised notion of the political. I conclude by arguing that since agonism is not the only option for dealing with antagonism for the socially established actors, for example, planners, its implementation in planning practice can appear merely as a top-down imposition of a democratic ethos. Sometimes, depoliticisation of agonistic planning might therefore be necessary.
Actors in complex urban environments cope with uncertainties and interdependencies by using each other’s plans, subscribing to pre-existing decision-making frameworks, and building relationships with other actors over long periods of time. Improvisational comedians employ similar strategies to create coherent and meaningful multi-actor stories without a script or director; in short, they use "gifts," "games," and "group mind" to cope with uncertainty on stage. We use the metaphor of improvisational theater to illustrate how many plans over many years work to shape the urban built environment. This is accomplished by reformatting over 30 years of plans created by public and private organizations in Charlotte, North Carolina, into an improvised dialog of plans. This improvised "set" reveals how plans are used as signals among diverse actors over long periods of time, offering a counter-narrative to a dominant "plans-as-consensus, then implement" narrative.
Ethical issues are at the heart of planning. Thus, planning theory has long displayed an interest in debating both the ethical justification for planning and how the activity of planning can be rendered more ethically sensitive. However, comparatively little attention has been shown to how the very constitution of the planner as a ‘moral subject’ may be ethically problematic for planning practice. This article addresses this lacuna through an engagement with the philosophy of Michel Foucault. In contrast to how his work is normally applied, this article accords with Foucault’s own direction that his later examination of ethics be used as a lens through which to read his earlier analysis of power and knowledge. Accordingly, the article first outlines Foucault’s innovative reinterpretation of how power and knowledge operate in society before setting this within his novel reconception of ethics. This theoretical exposition is then employed to interpret the material drawn from in-depth qualitative interviews with 20 planning officers working in a range of different contexts. The article subsequently employs Foucault’s ethically informed reading of power and knowledge to identify ethical issues arising from the approaches used by practitioners to justify their planning activities. The article concludes by suggesting how such issues can be resolved.
The smart city has become a hegemonic notion of urban governance, transforming and supplanting planning. The first part of this article reviews current critiques of this notion. Scholars present three main arguments against the smart city: that it is incompatible with an informal character of the city, that it subjects the city to corporate power and that it reproduces social and urban inequalities. It is argued that these critiques either misunderstand how power functions in the smart city or fail to address it as a specific modality of entrepreneurial urban governance. The second part advances an alternative critique, contending that the smart city should be understood as an urban embodiment of the society of control (Deleuze). The smart city is embedded in the intellectual framework of second order cybernetics and articulates urban subjectivity in terms of data flows. Planning as a political practice is superseded by an environmental-behavioural control, in which subjectivity is articulated supra-individually (permeating the city with sensing nodes) and infra-individually (making citizens into sensing nodes).
In this article, I juxtapose David Harvey’s idea of the ‘right to the city’ and Martha Nussbaum’s central human capability of ‘control over one’s environment’, and I approach them from the perspective of their mutual convergence on Marx’s conception of human significance. In particular, I compare how Marx’s conception reverberates in Harvey’s right to the city as human right and in Nussbaum’s control over the environment as central human capability. I discuss how the language of capabilities through which the latter scholar articulates her political liberalism offers ‘important supplementations’ to the language of human rights through which the former scholar articulates his critical discourse. I conclude that the evaluative character of Nussbaum’s capability approach could advance a novel stream in planning theory centred on human development. To elaborate on such potential, I propose the notion of people’s ‘urban functionings’, and I discuss how this notion could provide new interpretative lenses through which to renew the idea of ‘right to the city’.
This article approaches the concept of public interest in planning from the point of view of Patsy Healey’s collaborative planning theory on one hand and, on the other, from the perspective of Habermasian philosophy, one of the sources of inspiration for collaborative planning. In its original form, the theory of collaborative planning prioritized the ways in which local communities can communicatively define the interests they share and have an influence on the places they share under the current conditions of pluralism of ways of life. This article asks whether collaborative planning theory can also look beyond locally focused notions of the public interest and whether the theory is useful also for trans-scalar problem solving, for instance, in the multicultural metropolises where the different locally defined "public interests" often contradict with each other. This article compares Healey’s answers to this problem with ones that could be derived from Habermas’ philosophy. It argues that in order to look beyond the locally focused notions of the public interest, the theory of collaborative planning could benefit from revisiting Habermas’ concept of "generalizable interest" and especially Habermas’ positioning of this concept in his works published after The Theory of Communicative Action.
This article discusses planning in the global South-East while focusing on the specific context of social divides, political turmoil and conflict situations. The article proposes a five-way framework based on political science and planning theory to analyse such contexts. The article explores the case of Beirut, Lebanon that has undergone several episodes of internal and external conflicts resulting in a society splintered along sectarianism. Two case studies of open urban spaces and their public activities are analysed using the five-way framework The discussion indicates how economic liberalism that is prevalent in countries of the South-East, along with place-based identities, interest-based identities, consensus orientated processes and institutionalism might facilitate a cultivation of deep values away from a narrowly constructed identity. The article argues that planners should understand the options for positive action that aim to bridge deep divisions and suggests that the five-way framework provides a reference for contextualising in different ways to suit particular contexts. Therefore, the framework is not necessarily restricted to the South-East but could be applicable to any context which manifests deep divisions.
The metropolis can be understood as a complex adaptive system made up of complex adaptive subsystems that agglomerated to help create the city’s strength, resilience and dynamism. In particular, the accumulated strength and dynamism of the individual neighbourhoods that form and evolve its districts and the districts that form its regions have major impacts on the organisation and evolution of the metropolis. This article discusses the subsystems of the city, in particular its regional, district and neighbourhood transaction places or activity centres. While all metropolitan areas are complex adaptive systems, many urban subsystems constructed in the post–World War II period are not. They are instead chaotic or controlled by mechanical order. It will be argued that only the traditional ‘commons’ has the principles required of complex adaptive systems and that being such confers many benefits to the communities they serve.
With the launch of over 40 official investigations between 2010 and 2014 alone, planning is clearly an area of renewed political interest in Sweden. Drawing on Jodi Dean’s interpretation of politicisation, which entails raising the particular to the level of the universal, in this article I argue that we are currently witnessing ongoing politicisation of planning, but of a form which aims at making planners loyal to the current neoliberal politics. I situate this argument within a wider debate which contends that democracy today is characterised by trivialisation and conformity. In response to this situation and drawing on Michel Foucault’s work on the concept of parrhesia, which means fearless speech, I identify a need for planners to develop a critical ethos and shoulder the necessary role of resistance to politics.
This article draws attention to urban planning’s apparent reluctance to engage with the ethical and political dimensions of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. It puts forward the hypothesis that planning, as a discipline, is fundamentally inhospitable to the idea of autonomy, and it raises the question of whether planning can survive a radical engagement with an immanent ethics. In other words, if planning questions its close ties with the state and its assumptions about people’s capacity to live together, if it opens itself up to lines of flight, is deterritorialized, becomes imperceptible, is it still urban planning? Six proposals for an urban planning that embraces Deleuzoguattarian ethics are presented.
The purpose of this article is to contribute to the development of new theoretical and methodological resources for analysing power dynamics in planning studies. Our overarching aim is to demystify the concept of ‘power’ and what it purports to be describing, making those practices grouped under this label more tangible and, hence, also more readily contestable. Investigating how the effects we label as power are produced, instead of using ‘power’ as an all-covering explanation of societal events, demands a conceptualization of power as the outcome of social processes rather than as a causal variable behind them. An empirical study of a referendum regarding a major urban development in a Swedish suburban municipality illustrates how strong assumptions regarding the dominance of, for example, pre-existing powerful actor-constellations or purely economic relations are not always very helpful, highlighting the need for more acute attentiveness to the micro-physics of power.
The ‘public interest’ has long been used as a concept to justify planning activity. However, attempts to specify how to determine the public interest have been so plagued with problems that the concept has been effectively abandoned by academia in recent years. This article stresses the ongoing relevance of the public interest concept in planning but does so in a way that reconceives what it entails. This article argues that central to the concept of the public interest is how ‘the subject’ is conceived. It is contended that the currently prevalent collaborative and agonistic approaches to planning present a deficient understanding of the subject as one detached from the intersubjectively formed moral frameworks that provide understanding of context and supply bearing for action. This article seeks to address this deficit by introducing the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre to a planning audience. MacIntyre’s communitarian perspective offers an alternative view of the subject by stressing how an evaluation of what constitutes the public interest is unavoidably undertaken from within a shared tradition of moral reasoning. Thus, from a MacIntyrean position, the public interest should not be assumed to simply constitute the end product of correct procedures. This article highlights the importance of acknowledging how identifying the public interest demands situated ethical judgement. The concluding section of this article details the dangers for planning theory and practice of failing to acknowledge this phenomenon.
This article argues that planning should develop a robust conception of "publics without the State." We should do so because the State is a necessarily oligarchical arrangement that prevents us from achieving real democracy. We should explore publics without the State in both theory and practice.
It is widely acknowledged that stakeholders’ relations are critical in collaborative planning. Hence, literature in this field has elaborated on the communicative and relational conditions that facilitate collaborative planning processes. Less attention has been paid to the dynamics of stakeholders’ relations and to how these influence planning processes. Analytical tools to systematically study stakeholders’ relating dynamics in collaborative planning processes are underdeveloped. Drawing on Baxter and Montgomery’s relational dialectics approach, we introduce an analytical framework to study stakeholders’ relating dynamics in collaborative planning and the way these interact with framing dynamics. We exemplify the core concepts of our framework with illustrations based on running case study research.
In this article, we aim to understand how planning theory and practice should approach new urban entities and their transforming meanings. We argue that planning practice has difficulties in identifying and recognising developmental processes where the human attachment to the local environment gradually changes the identity and use of an area. Instead, these processes are interpreted as disruptions in the planned course of action. We illustrate our viewpoint with an empirical example from Finland. The case is about a significant spot of biodiversity in a completely man-made environment. The study serves as an example of how artefacts actively co-shape the events and environment around them and thus create a relationship between humans and their surroundings. Drawing on a science and technology studies-inspired perspective on the relationships between human and non-human actors, we stress the importance of artefacts, local setting and processual development in urban planning.
This purpose of this article is to look at the potential benefit to planning practice of engaging with spatial capital – a concept derived from the social theory of Bourdieu. Doubt is expressed about the theoretical basis for spatial capital; nevertheless, it is argued that it may have merit as a trope for planning practitioners. Spatial capital has a strong empirical basis, making it accessible to planning practice and offering a new means for interpreting and communicating the combined effects of a range of individual urban events such as the gating of communities, differing mobilities and schooling tactics. By focussing on the interplay of social positioning within place, it emphasises the joined-up nature of disadvantage and highlights the limits of environmental determinism. However, its use is not without possible drawbacks. Here, the experience of social capital is informative, as this has been appropriated by groups with quite different readings of its implications for policy.
Without power and political authority, planning theorists’ advice for planners to be politically astute is of little help. The politically astute planners could do little in the face of political pressure. In this context, the logical advice for planners would be to join politics and acquire the political authority that they need to materialize their plans. This article, through case studies from the United States, Brazil, and Nepal, shows that the planners who joined politics were able to accomplish some of the most difficult planning tasks in their towns and suggests that planners should take up elected position as and when possible.
This article addresses a new mode of planning that involves a collaboration between State, private and community actors in the context of growing urban gardening movements. It questions the view of urban gardening as a manifestation of citizens’ dissensus towards administration’s institutional planning, and the expression of urban ‘counterplanning’ whose aim is to resist the consequences of a neoliberal governmentality. Although this interpretation of urban gardening is to a certain extent true, it does not completely explain some current developments in socio-spatial planning practices. In order to fill this gap, the article advances a theoretical analysis of the emerging governmentality generated by an intensified relationship between institutional, private and community actors. The theoretical analysis is complemented by the example of representative urban gardening projects in Ghent, a dynamic and inspiring mid-size city in Belgium, providing an ideal context for exploring the transformation of planning practices and their socio-political underpinnings. The article concludes that urban gardening practices exemplify an emerging informal mode of planning supported by a new transactive governmentality, which may lead to a co-creative transformation of public urban space.
This article charts predicaments and conundrums associated with the ambition to plan for social justice. Drawing from classical theory on the roles of intellectuals, we identify what we call the "power of representation dilemma." This dilemma arises because the credentials, knowledge, and skills of intellectuals (like urban planners) make them into powerful agents of social justice but at the same time can put them in a position of power in relation to the very communities they represent and serve. We develop a typology of various strategies for contending with this dilemma and conclude there are no clean ways to resolve the dilemma as each strategy has significant tradeoffs. We encourage a "realpolitik of social justice," whereby planners become cognizant that there are only imperfect strategies to engage in the politics of social justice. Recognition of their fallibility in the pursuit of noble ideals will make them more reflexive and capable of responding to the inevitability of new injustices and silencings that arise when planning for social justice.
Too often, planning theory misidentifies how planning and governance practice actually works in troublesome zones understood as unplanned or ungoverned. To counter this tendency, I use ethnographic research in one of the most active border economies in the hemisphere, where noncompliance with trade and use-of-space laws is widespread. In contrast to the commonly held assessment that Ciudad del Este, Paraguay is lawless and unplanned, I show how planners promote elite-led and exclusionary urban transformation via the strategic deployment of narratives of the unplanned city, what I call "city-stories." However, city-stories are also a terrain of contestation. I analyze the city-stories of precarious street vendors as a diagnostic of power, as embodied perspectives on everyday practices of regulation that can clarify how local state actors actively foster spatial disorder and legal uncertainty as part of planning practice.
This article advances the proposition that the creation of property rights, whether by contract-upon-negotiation or edict, is far more significant than what has been described as "Coasian bargaining" in effecting sustainable development. By "creation" we intend the neo-institutional economist’s sense of establishing a degree of exclusive property rights for common property or devising new contractual arrangements in which private property rights are entrenched. This is sometimes mistakenly confused with the assignment of property rights. "Sustainable development" is understood as the transformation of negative into positive externalities or a state of the tragedy of the commons into a vibrant resource nourishing industry. Two real-world cases involving government planning are used to illustrate this proposition.
This article provides a theoretical interpretation on the limits and potentials of the internationally highly acclaimed Brazilian urban reform as implemented since the 1990s. We argue that representations grounded in collaborative planning and neo-institutional property theory are of little help in providing insights to the somewhat disappointing progress of ‘really existing’ Brazilian urban reform. We provide a different theoretical framework based on adapted regulation theory and critical Brazilian urban scholarship. While it underlines that better plans, planning processes and redistributive land-market instruments frequently fail to produce better cities in light of a contradictory developmental state mode of production itself, it also recognizes potential progressive praxis of social movements and local governance.
The major problem with theories of the right to the city is that they inherently assume that states are the sole provider of rights and that, in liberal–democratic countries, legal rights are conceptually universal and apply to all individuals equally. I challenge these assumptions and maintain that in some situations, when the state and its governing apparatus violate or deny the very basic rights of a social or ethnic collective, the group itself becomes an alternative source of informal rights. I conceive this violation of basic needs as a necessity state of affairs, which constitutes a true and proper source of law and it makes the right to space production and the right to necessity. Thus, the state of necessity is the source of these informal rights and law, and necessity gives them the legitimation they needs. The disadvantaged groups, the community, not the State, give it the legitimation they need. As Agamben suggests in his State of Exception, that necessity has no law and necessity creates it own law. From this perspective, the right to the production of space is a plane of contradictions and struggle over the distribution of resources and rights among people in general, and between the state and its local government and planning and development institutions in particular. Seen in this light, it is clear that the right to the production of space entails not only formal legal rights but also the informal rights, the right to necessity, generated and invoked by disadvantaged groups.
The production of space, then, is born and reborn at the heart of the contradictions between formal and informal rights, and between the state’s planning apparatus and spatial agenda on the one hand and the status of disadvantaged groups on the other. The conceptual framework offered here seeks to resolve and overcome these contradictions through its contingent relations between legal rights, which are produced and distributed by the state, and the rights of necessity generated and invoked by the collective. From this perspective, the right to the production of space offers a normative framework for illuminating the relationship between the production of space, structure, and power relations at the state and city level and their relations with collective groups, as well as a means of struggle for basic rights of recognition and of the reorganization of urban society.
Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of becoming, as well as by Spinoza’s ethics, this article advocates that planning be apprehended as a transitory construct to deal with social processes, which are inherently unpredictable, and to enact a justice that is ontologically spatial and amoral. This idea stems from conceiving of reality as the relentless encounters of bodies (assemblages) whose fight for space determines unique temporary agreements (spatial justice) as a result of power exchanges (affects) among these bodies – and of their stabilisation and escape movements, of course. This approach aims to overcome conceptualisations of justice that focus primarily on superstructural causes of injustice or on ready-made normative solutions. Although widely accepted by scholars in fields such as geography or planning research, these conceptualisations are still unable to account for the increasing incidence of social inequality our cities face. A case study, drawing on the fight for space among women in prostitution in a historic Genoa, Italy, neighbourhood, will serve as a translation from theory into practice.
This article examines the extent to which leadership factors contribute to the success of collaborative planning processes. By examining the best practice in urban management in decentralizing Indonesia, we found that leadership encouraged a trustworthy and effective consensus building between the local government and the communities. The local leaders grasped socio-cultural contexts of the city to formulate communication strategies in a way that encourages an open and informal atmosphere flourished. More importantly, this leadership framework effectively restructured the institutional arrangement and created divisible tasks for subordinates and communities who were involved in the collaborative process.
This paper examines the methods of planning of complex systems. More precisely, it applies property rights analysis to the methodology of nomocracy, a leading branch of the theory of complexity in planning. To study the methodology of planning, the paper focuses on its objectives and methods, as well as the characteristics of nomocratic rules. It briefly examines the literature on the methods of planning of complex systems, the methods of the nomocratic approach, and the methods of regulation theory. It then develops a theoretical structure of the methodology of nomocratic planning by employing property rights analysis and finds that the purpose of nomocracy is the allocation of entitlements. Finally, to emphasise the importance of property rights, it discusses some specific findings of Holcombe’s work "Planning and the Invisible Hand". Holcombe’s work is a well-developed study of the relevance of the nomocratic approach to market functions; planning practices, such as zoning; and topical issues of contemporary urban development, such as sprawl and related new urbanism/smart growth principles. This paper focuses on Holcombe’s particularly critical view of the latter. However, while the application of property rights analysis fully supports Holcombe’s understanding of the positive connection between nomocratic planning and the market, it also leads to a more favourable view of zoning and new urbanist principles. The paper concludes that the main objective and defining characteristic of nomocratic rules is that they serve to allocate property rights over commonly owned resources.
Despite a longstanding and varied body of literature on suburban difference, a simplified narrative of the suburbs persists that is represented by a city–suburb binary. This is damaging as it undermines our understanding of the social dynamics of the places in which, in the United Kingdom, the majority of the population live. This article looks at the reasons for the persistence of a city–suburb binary. It engages with suburban housing as a Bourdieuian field in order to show how simplified characterisations of the suburban serve the interest of particular groups, including within planning. Bourdieu’s field theory offers a powerful means to understand how judgements of the suburbs are naturalised and so become common-sense truths. As field theory indicates ‘within-planning’ power relations that support particular truths, it offers the possibility of challenging these by exposing the taken-for-granted norms of the city-suburb binary.
Among theorists, there are rather strong differences in opinion whether communicative planning theory helps to fight or advances neo-liberalism. This article takes some distance to the debate concerning the role of communication in planning and analyses it from the point of view of different legal cultures in different European countries. It is argued in the article that the sources of legitimacy of public planning might be fundamentally different outside the Anglo-American context, in which communicative planning theory has largely been developed. Planning works in different ways in different national contexts; this is why it is not obvious that communicative planning theory would help to fight neo-liberalism in planning. The article explores the topic from the Finnish perspective, and draws on writings about legal mentality and comparative law.
Against two extreme forms of thinking, which have influenced planning theory, this article argues, in the context of a looming amount of literature generated in a movement for private planning, that the distinction between private planning and public planning is a valid one, but one in need of tweaking. However, the plan–market dichotomy (i.e. the assumption that state and private planning is mutually exclusive) is fallacious. Informed by the neo-institutional economic assumption of rational decisions and the stance of contractual solutions, it rides on the surge in private planning by proposing a taxonomy of planning that combines two modes of planning with two types of planning agent and discusses their possible interrelationships using some neo-institutional economic reasoning informed by the ideas of Coase. Some pedagogical and theoretical implications are also discussed.
What is required of the citizen to make planning more democratic? In this article, I argue this previously overlooked question illuminates key challenges for democratising planning in theory and practice. Distinguishing between deliberative and agonistic conceptions of communicative planning, I review the qualities these theories demand of citizens. Through examples from Scotland, I then contrast this with the roles citizens are currently invited to perform within a growth-orientated planning culture, drawing attention to techniques that use constructions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizenship to manage conflict generated by development. I conclude by suggesting that while ‘ordinary’ citizens’ experiences draw attention to the strengths and weaknesses of deliberative and agonistic accounts, they also highlight hidden costs associated with participation that present significant challenges for the project of shaping a more democratic form of planning.
This article takes issue with Chantal Mouffe’s concept of "agonistic pluralism." With this concept, Mouffe brings political theory to the field of "real politics." In planning theory, the concept of agonism has recently been used as an alternative to the consensual communicative deliberative approach: The notion of agonism seems to be fit for replacing communicative theory as the theoretical framework of planning theory. My point is that Mouffe’s proposed "agonistic pluralism" has an internal and fundamental flaw and that the advocated "taming of antagonism into agonism" is neither possible nor necessary. To clarify my hypothesis, I consider in a first step the roots of Mouffe’s theory: Carl Schmitt’s notion of the political and his (in)famous friend/enemy concept. Schmitt’s model is not only a main reference of Mouffe’s work but the very reason of her calling for pluralistic agonism. In a second step, I turn to Ernesto Laclau’s political theory where another version of antagonism model appears: the conceptualization of the "constitutive outside" as irreducible reason of an endless hegemonic play of antagonistic forces. I show the difference between Schmitt’s and Laclau’s models and argue that the rationale for a conceptualization of agonism disappears with the latter. In my conclusion, I discuss whether and how antagonism theory can be linked with planning theory without importing Mouffe’s short circuit.
Planning through processes of "co-creation" has become a priority for practitioners, urban activists, and scientific researchers. However, urban development still shows a close instrumentalism on goal-specific tasks, means, and outcomes despite awareness that planning should enlarge possibilities for social change rather than constrain them. The article explores the dilemmas of planning agency in light of the contemporary need to open spaces for innovative practices. Planning is understood as a paradox; a structural tension between organization and spontaneity. The article provides a detailed profile of three specific dilemmas stemming from this condition. We distinguish and conceptually explore the dilemmas of intervention, regulation, and investment in current practices. The article provides a specific understanding of today’s planning dilemmas, exploring the key notions of "space and time" in the intervention dilemma, "material and procedural norms" in the regulation dilemma, and "risk and income" in the investment dilemma. We suggest that planning practice today needs to make sense of these dilemmas, navigating through their extremes to find new contextualized forms of synthesis.
The outcomes of urban redevelopment projects are never predictable, nor do they conform perfectly to any single ideological expression of contemporary development approaches, whether that of rational master planning for the public interest, a market-driven neoliberal approach in the name of the competitive world class city or some other vision of utopia. We argue here that a critical pragmatic analytical lens can be applied usefully to improve our understanding of the justifications, qualifications and compromises that contribute to shaping such projects in their contexts. The critical pragmatic approach, deriving from the work of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski and others, is offered here with illustrative applications to the case of a major redevelopment project in Vancouver, Canada. The approach is situated within planning theory related to governmentality, communicative action theory and American pragmatic philosophy. We establish the utility of studying disputes in the public sphere surrounding development projects, in terms of the objects and actors involved in particular contexts (as opposed to a pure discourse approach) and in terms of the nature and trajectory of compromises attempted and attained in the process (as opposed to consensus-seeking or governmentality approaches).
A central question within planning theory is how changes between the relations of ‘grand institutions’ such as state, market and education influence the formation of objects ‘on the ground’. Drawing upon Foucault’s work, this article contributes to the understanding of these relations and argues that Foucault’s work provides a powerful set of tools to understand the formation of subjects and objects in spatial planning. It presents the case of the ‘innovation campus’ in the Netherlands, a model which originated from the ‘university campus’. Through an analysis of multiple campus-building ‘events’, the innovation campus appears as a model to entice and shape a new object: the entrepreneurial researcher.
The aim is to study how ideologies come through in urban regeneration plans. Neo-liberalism, participatory democracy and environmentalism are systems of ideas competing for the minds of citizens in large parts of the world. Typical urban policies linked to each ideology are listed to provide a basis for identifying features of development plans that reflect aspirations for an entrepreneurial, green or open and inclusive society. A case study from Trondheim, Norway, maps ideological traces in waterfront development plans. The central question to be addressed is whether the internationally widespread allegations of neo-liberal hegemony over urban plans are reasonable. In light of the case data, it can be questioned whether neo-liberal ideology, although influential, is hegemonic in the plans. This doubt lingers, even if the chosen case Nedre Elvehavn is the kind of large-scale transformation of former dockyards close to the central business district that is often regarded as prototypical neo-liberal development in academic planning literature.
This article investigates how planning is influenced by five categories of questions (what, who, when/where, how and why) and the interactions between them. Planning theories differ in their answers to these questions, but all of them are primarily built around an assumed connection between the questions of ‘what’ and ‘how’. This orthodox assumption of a ‘what–how’ connection is shown to be responsible for the failure of planning theories in practice and their inability to address issues of power. The article illustrates that both ends and means (‘what’ and ‘how’) are predefined by answers to three fundamental questions (‘who’, ‘when/where’ and ‘why’) and that there is no direct connection between ‘what’ and ‘how’ in practice.
Rights are central to the theory and practice of planning, and to the practice of struggles for those who are marked by conditions of dispossession and displacement. Those rights are often articulated through planning as property ‘rights in’ and procedural ‘rights to’. Yet when struggles against the dispossessory tendencies of planning become articulated through these rights-based discourses in planning, the potential arises for their immediate limitation and co-optation. This article takes two particular modes of dispossession – Indigenous dispossession under the ongoing processes of colonialism, and displacement as a result of urban regeneration – and exposes why a persistent stance of critique to the promise of rights is so critical.
The 1996 South African Constitution is renowned for entrenching a broad range of judicially enforceable socio-economic rights, including the right of everyone to have access to adequate housing and to be protected from arbitrary evictions in section 26. Although the South African Constitutional Court has issued a number of landmark housing rights decisions in recent years, an emphasis on spatial justice remains elusive in the jurisprudence and academic literature on section 26. This is despite the fact that spatial inequality continues to hold profound implications for South Africa’s urban poor. This article analyses the section 26 jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court in the context of the eviction of poor people from their homes in heavily populated urban areas to evaluate to what extent it contributes to the transformation of South Africa’s urban housing landscape by challenging spatial inequality and promoting integrated housing development. The evaluation of the jurisprudence suggests that addressing the spatial consequences of evictions and promoting integrated urban communities remains unfinished business for the development of evictions law in post-apartheid South Africa.
The purpose of this article is to explore what kind of (land-use) regulation is more compatible with a radical acceptance of the idea of the complexity of socio-spatial systems and of the intrinsic limits of explanation and prediction. The article applies insights from complexity sciences to planning practice, critically comparing different land-use regulatory instruments (in particular, patterning-instruments and framework-instruments). The main result and conclusion is that it is necessary to embrace the challenge of complexity and self-organisation, and consequently to start profound revision of regulatory instruments.
The occupy movement of summer 2011 provides an opportunity to examine practical and theoretical implications of the notion of planning justice and human rights. Analyzing the discourse by activists in a planning team associated with the Israeli Protest Movement reveals inner conflicts and debates regarding the meanings of justice and human rights in planning. The discourse exposes an ongoing rift between spatial professionals (mainly geographers, planners, and architects) and subfields (municipal and governmental bodies, nongovernmental organizations, and academia) related to applying ideas of just planning in the Israeli context. Specifically, two opposing schemas of planning justice appear—that of socio-spatial justice and urban justice. A further investigation links each schema with a different principle of justice, as defined in Rawls’ Theory of Justice: The first schema is associated with the principle of difference and the second with the principle of fair equality of opportunity. Together, the unsettled conflicts hint at an inconsistency occurring when the theory is interpreted in practice.
After communicative planning theory emerged in the 1980s, challenging assumptions and prevailing theories of planning, debates ensued among planning theorists that led to apparently opposing groups with little space for mutual learning. The most difficult obstacle is that critiques of communicative planning theory framed several dichotomies making different perspectives appear incompatible. This article seeks to advance the dialogue of planning theory perspectives by acknowledging the key tensions embedded in this framing, but arguing that they can be viewed as reflecting contradictions to be embraced as an opportunity for a more robust planning theory. Drawing on Manuel Castells’ theory of communication power, the article explores four of these contradictions and shows how in each case embracing the contradictions as aspects of our complex world can lead to insights and a richer planning theory. The article concludes with suggestions for improved dialogue among theorists and identifies research that can advance our understanding of communication power.
In recent years, enclosed residential domains have emerged in Dutch housing developments. Commentators fear that enclosed residential domains will lead to a loss of the public realm. This article considers such claims. Based on a conceptual analysis, it is argued that the question of how enclosed residential domains imply a loss of public realm should be addressed by distinguishing between three theoretical perspectives: the social perspective, the market perspective, and the civic perspective. It is also argued that the specific morphological characteristics of Dutch enclosed residential domains should be taken into account. Because of the absence of closed gates, for instance, many of the Dutch enclosed residential domains differ from gated communities abroad.
Despite the fact that spatial planning forms one of the key constituents of territorial politics, territory and territoriality have been largely neglected in the studies of European spatial planning. This article seeks to address this shortcoming by considering spatial planning through the recent research on territories and territorial politics in political geography. The article suggests that European spatial planning ought to be conceptualized as a political technology of territory of the European Union, whose effectiveness is not dependent on the acquisition of formal policy status but stems from its capacity to fuse populations and geographical areas into manageable entities, from its reputation as apolitical management of space as well as from its resonance with current political tastes.
The concepts utopia, scenario, and plan offer important ways to envision the future of place. Utopia describes the perfect, complete place. Scenario compares good alternative stories. Plans offer useful provisional intentions. All three help us imagine how future consequences of select actions might influence current expectations and hopes. I argue that pragmatism can integrate all three along a continuum from holistic inclusive to selective incremental. Utopia dramatizes emotional attachments to the daily details of a purposeful way of life for some future imagined place. Scenario describes the confluence of narrative and explanation, story and cause as coherent testable accounts of relevant consequences for plausible futures. Plan describes how we compose and compare alternatives to inform practical intentions for choices and decisions for immediate problems we currently face. Framing the three concepts pragmatically avoids the contrast between utopian rupture and narrative continuity by treating both as complementary aspects of a practical imagination. Composing plans requires adaptive attention to specific features of people and place susceptible to purposeful change.
Among the thorniest dilemmas stemming transformative planning practice in the context of American cities is the problem of race. While "just city" and neo-pragmatist perspectives have recently theorized progressive policy and planning efforts to create viable alternatives to the dominant neoliberal urban and local economic development model, they have paid less attention to the relationship between race, urban political economy, and transformative planning. This article seeks to bridge this gap by elaborating a conception of race that incorporates W.E.B. DuBois’ notion of "double consciousness" with neo-pragmatist planning perspectives to illuminate potential synergies between the situated perspectives of socially marginalized groups and differentially situated, resourced, and abled allies in illuminating systemic problems and directing deeper modes of urban policy and planning recourse. Drawing from two empirical cases, it examines how progressive urban coalitions might use race as a diagnostic and dialogic tool in undertaking provisional and contextual inquiry and praxis in the urban economic sphere toward realization of the "just city."
The people-to-land relationship is dynamic and changes over time in response to cultural, social and economic development. Land policies, institutions and land administration systems are key tools aimed at governing this relationship. Such tools will normally include the means for allocating and controlling rights, restrictions and responsibilities in land – often termed RRRs. Each of the rights, restrictions and responsibilities encompasses a human rights dimension that should be seen and unfolded as more than just political rhetoric. This article attempts to analyse the aspect of human rights in relation to land administration systems with a special focus on less developed countries struggling to build adequate systems for governing the rights, restrictions and responsibilities in land. In doing so, the article conceives planning as a key function and means of land administration systems by which human rights should be underpinned in solving concrete land issues.
To better understand injustice in our cities, and to understand how vulnerability to impacts of climate change is constructed, scholars have noted that we need to incorporate multiple factors that shape identity and power in our analyses, including race, class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality. Less widely acknowledged is the intersectionality of these factors; that specific combinations of factors shape their own social position and thus affect experiences of power, oppression and vulnerability. To address emerging issues like climate change, it is vital to find a way to understand and approach multiple, intersecting axes of identity that shape how impacts will be distributed and experienced. This article introduces intersectionality, a concept for understanding multiple, co-constituting axes of difference and identity, and kyriarchy, a theory of power that describes the power structures intersectionality produces, and offers researchers a fresh way of approaching the interactions of power in planning research and practice.
This article questions radical planning’s insistence on an ontological distinction between lay and expert knowledge. Drawing on an in-depth analysis of citizen collectives in Santiago, Chile, I explain how citizen organisations, in their quest for political recognition and emancipation, embrace rationalistic, bureaucratic, formal and instrumental knowledge and tactics. Utilising insights from Science and Technology Studies, I call modes of technification the specific and differentiated strategies by which these collectives become technical entities. Three of these modes are described: the organisational, epistemic and generative modes. The larger claim is that radical planning, by pursuing a politics of difference, may end up enacting a world in which identities are essentialised and roles forcefully allocated.
This article introduces the concept of utopia as presented in the writings of Ernst Bloch in order to propose a definition of utopia that follows from a democratic, dynamic, and open-ended conception. It outlines how Bloch redefined utopia in its different forms and will discuss how his conception of utopia could be a useful methodological tool for evaluating utopia in urban design. It then discusses The Local Project as a case to evaluate the relevance of Bloch’s methodological framework. Through this analysis, the article suggests that The Local Project could be useful in the struggle against globalization through the power of imagination and everyday actions.
In the debate on the transnational transfer of planning ideas, many authors refer to a basic interpretive scheme of diffusion/dissemination that acknowledges an "origin" (contextualization) and a "destination" of the travel (recontextualization), with a thick "trajectory" in between (de-contextualization). This article questions such a scheme, arguing that planning ideas cannot be viewed as facts or truth statements, least of all fixed things that can be moved about. Rather, they are myths. Drawing upon Roland Barthes’ and Michel Foucault’s visions of modern mythology, the article envisages the origin narrative of a planning idea as a mythological narrative that planners may use to refresh their own knowledge and traditions each and every time an idea is put into play. An example taken from a planning event in the Middle East illustrates the practical implications of such an approach.
With a new planning system taking shape, and a new Bill of Rights embodied in a transformative Constitution having been introduced in South Africa in 1994, this article grapples with the dual questions as to whether the new spatial planning system fits within the spirit of the Bill of Rights, and the Bill of Rights assists the new spatial planning system in the realisation of its objectives. As a prequel to the engagement with these questions, a brief overview of the events leading to institution of the Bill of Rights and its contents is provided. This is followed by a brief historical overview of the creation of the South African spatial planning system and a summary of its key features. These features can be reduced to the following basic components: (1) meaningful participation in all aspects of spatial planning; (2) an open, inclusive and just decision-making process where information is readily available; (3) recognition of religion and culture and equal treatment in application and decision-making; (4) an awareness of environmental issues; and (5) the significance of property and housing. The way in which these components are addressed in the Bill of Rights and other parts of the Constitution provides the starting point to determine the extent to which there is a meaningful and mutually beneficial fit between the planning system and the Bill of Rights.
This article elucidates a novel and powerful Fourth Coase Theorem using Coase’s own reasoning and extending the First Coase Theorem. It holds that state rules, which include, but are not limited to, property rights, can enlarge a market. This theorem lends support to state planning insofar as it establishes rules that enable and promote market transactions and illuminates the operation of the market’s spontaneity, subject to constraints. Seven conditions that demarcate the state’s role under this theorem from interventionist planning by edict are specified and illustrated by three well-researched real-life examples, one revealed by Coase and two others involving rights conferred by the state by licensing and zoning for maritime resources and by franchising for ordering land-use transport.
This article analyses Bent Flyvbjerg’s ‘dark side of planning’ theory and proposes to increase its critical strength by including, together with ideas of rationality and power, two further theoretical tools: the Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and biopolitics. The potentiality of this inclusion is exemplified by the analysis provided about the influence of 18th-century colonial governmentality on the real rationality of public garden planning in the modern liberal cities of most western European colonising countries. It aims to show that Flyvbjerg’s concept of ‘real rationality’ can be usefully regarded as the product of a broad interpretation of biopolitical technologies, including the disciplining of non-human further than human life, which makes it possible to control the ‘uncivilised’ instincts of society through public garden planning. This article aims to suggest, that by digging deep into the hidden rationality of planning, even in those cases in which only the progressive face of power is apparently involved, a dark side of planning is unavoidably present in the form of a disciplinary power.
Do people have a right to work on the street? If so, what are the constraints and conditions attached to this right? Historically, municipal authorities have tried several ways to regulate or even prohibit commerce on the streets, by implementing administrative regulation and criminal laws, but neither has proven successful thus far. In fact, in some cases, these attempts have backfired. Constitutional challenges to municipal regulations have paved the way for the incorporation of municipal regulations based on a right to work on the streets. This article seeks to understand and explain how the act of placing a wooden or metal stall over a public space contributes to the development of a regulatory regime that administrates the right to work in an urban space. It further shows how these solutions have been jeopardized by litigation and transformed by recent constitutional doctrines that recognize the right to work on streets. Constitutional courts in Mexico, Colombia, and India have addressed the struggles between the street vendors’ ability to work on public thoroughfare and the municipal regulations that seek to limit street trading. As such, our aim is to analyze the way in which the municipal capacity to legislate, control, and regulate public space has been challenged and constrained by street vendors’ invocation of their right to work in these countries. This will help explain how constitutional courts do actually represent urban governance.
To organize new governance arrangements and to restore trust in spatial planning, contracts are often seen as vital policy instruments. The relations between contracts and trust are regularly studied from various perspectives. In this article, we add to the existing knowledge by exploring a dynamic perspective on the use of contracts over time and the influence thereof on trust dynamics. We conclude that, longitudinally, the use of contracts can play a pivotal role in trust dynamics by influencing the construction of, and actors’ perspective on, the common history of the parties involved and their future expectations in close relation to the changing context. This perspective might help planners to deal with the inevitable dynamics of planning processes and trust.
Inspired by state theory and in particular Nicos Poulantzas, this article claims that spatial planning should be seen neither as autonomous (subject) nor merely an expression of something else (thing), but rather grasped as a place for condensation of social relations. The notion of dialectics is used in order to grasp relations between planning and other aspects and social relations. From this, we can outline five theses, claiming that planning (1) is constituted by conflicts which are grounded in social relations, (2) is never a neutral place, (3) contains neither a ‘dark’ nor a ‘bright’ side, (4) and is changing and being changed by the world and also that (5) political alliances should be made between planners and non-planners who want the world to change in similar directions.
Strategic spatial planning practices have recently taken a neoliberal turn in many northwestern European countries. This neoliberalisation of strategic spatial planning has materialised partly in governance reforms aiming to reduce or abolish strategic spatial planning at national and regional scales, and partly through the normalisation of neoliberal discourses in strategic spatial planning processes. This article analyses the complex relationship, partly of unease and partly of coevolution, between neoliberalism and strategic spatial planning. Furthermore, this article discusses the key challenges for strategic spatial planning in the face of neoliberalism and argues for a need to strengthen strategic spatial planning’s critical dimension.
Governance theory and planning theory share a tendency to either overlook the role of conflicts in coordination processes or view them as a disruptive force that must be modified or neutralized. In effect, there is little research into the productive role of conflicts in constructing and reconstructing the institutional conditions that make coordination possible. The productive role of conflicts is particularly visible in times of radical change that calls for a recasting of the sedimented world views and practices of the involved actors, as well as the relationship between them. A case study of the formation of new pluricentric regional governance arenas in Denmark provides important insights into how conflicts contribute to a gradual recasting of the institutional conditions that make coordination possible.
Under the impetus of globalization, the city of emerging economies is experiencing profound changes that are affecting its social and spatial structure. However, this new scenario seems to have had little impact on critical thinking and related urban policies. This text looks at a number of issues urban research needs to address as a result of the trends many such cities are experiencing and the consequent shift from the social and spatial polarization of the past to a more composite pattern. The article aims to help bridge the gap that still exists between urban studies on the emerging city and planning theory.
In urban spatial economic analysis, two largely disjunctive pro-market approaches influenced by Ronald Coase and Joseph Schumpeter have emerged in the discussion of spontaneous cities. They are transaction cost–based Coasian analysis and innovation-based Schumpeterian analysis. As an original attempt to contribute to planning theory using Coasian and Schumpeterian economic concepts, this article reviews the relevant literature, elucidates the conceptual differences between the two approaches and argues that they are not only theoretically compatible but also practically inseparable. An attempt has been made to pin the two approaches down using standard economic concepts with reference to the writings of Schumpeter. Three groups of actual examples from land law and property development are used to demonstrate and elaborate on this argument.
The general theory of regulation and then 10 theories related to safety regulation are summarized, explaining why regulation is or is not beneficial, or why negative externalities like building fires might increase. As an example, evidence from regulation and planning to enhance fire safety in Turin, Italy, is included, which shows apparent regulatory failure due to public choice and knowledge problems. Regulators there apparently failed to meet their public interest objective: the "control of safety conditions to prevent fires" and to "minimize the causes of fire." Data perusal suggests that (a) the income effect, (b) public choice theories of bureaucracy and perverse incentives, (c) the "knowledge problem" theory, and (d) population density to a lesser degree best explain and predict the regulatory outcome. The results tend to favor government failure models, rather than theories that say (e) government provision works even if inefficiently or as a placebo, (f) that regulation is irrelevant, or (g) explanations that surmise that racial composition, (h) immigration of poor and ignorant people, (i) technical problems with electricity (wiring and materials), or (j) moral hazard cause more fires. Thus, planning theory should endeavor to better incorporate government failure theories into its models. These theories at times provide better explanatory and predictive power than traditional market failure models.
JEL codes: R5, H4, O21
The concepts of space and time have dramatically changed with the development of modern sciences, such as geometry, physics, and astronomy. This radical shift also changes every aspect of our perspectives, including those on urban space and urban planning. With a brief introduction to the evolution of geometry, this article discusses the development of the way we think about and evaluate urban space. Such development is divided into two phases: homogeneous urban space and generalized non-Euclidean urban space, each with corresponding patterns of urban planning. Some key issues in the non-Euclidean pattern of planning are then explored intensively, such as varied measurements of urban land, geodesics in the city, and urban planning in spacetime. While emphasizing the way of thinking in urban planning process, this article provides some proposals that differ from those related to absolute space.
The processes of decentralization, marketization, and globalization of socioeconomic reform in the last few decades have promoted the transformation of local governance in China. City marketing has become one of the most typical local governance activities. This article examines the mechanism of city marketing and urban scaling-up in Xuyi County, which is marketed as "Lobster Capital" for its lobster production and festival, from urban awareness, economy, and governance. It argues that the effective combination of city marketing and local resource endowment is a very important tactic for the development of small- and medium-sized cities. The key point in this combination is the branding of local production. Moving from city marketing to city branding means not only a long-term development strategy but also an endogenous development model. Rather than simply focusing on attracting capital, continuous city marketing based on endogenous sources of power, such as political, economic, and cultural power, can effectively integrate local resource endowment to overcome the shortcomings of externality and the short-term nature of single city marketing and maximize the social benefit of city marketing, which will in the end promote the urban reputation and economic growth. Hence, the continuous city marketing mode can express the urban ability and actual strength in a clearer and better way. Local government and its effective governance system is the core of city marketing, in which the main governor’s impact plays a particularly important role. This is a typical pro-growth model of urban governance in China. This article uses Xuyi as the case of continuous city market to analyze the success of a reasonable local endogenous governance system promoted by the main governor through taking full advantage of local resources.
Existing studies that question the role of planning as a state institution, whose interests it serves together with those disputing the merits of collaborative planning are all essentially concerned with the broader issue of power in society. Although there have been various attempts to highlight the distorting effects of power, the research emphasis to date has been focused on the operation of power within the formal structures that constitute the planning system. As a result, relatively little attention has been attributed to the informal strategies or tactics that can be utilised by powerful actors to further their own interests. This article seeks to address this gap by identifying the informal strategies used by the holders of power to bypass the formal structures of the planning system and highlight how these procedures are to a large extent systematic and (almost) institutionalised in a shadow planning system. The methodology consists of a series of semi-structured qualitative interviews with 20 urban planners working across four planning authorities within the Greater Dublin Area, Ireland. Empirical findings are offered that highlight the importance of economic power in the emergence of what essentially constitutes a shadow planning system. More broadly, the findings suggest that much more cognisance of the structural relations that govern how power is distributed in society is required and that ‘light touch’ approaches that focus exclusively on participation and deliberation need to be replaced with more radical solutions that look towards the redistribution of economic power between stakeholders.
This article engages with recent debates surrounding non-representational theory and the affective turn in the social sciences, arguing that such thinking offers a particularly useful set of concepts for the discipline of planning. This includes a widened notion of agency to the inclusion of more-than-human bodies (i.e. material agency) and a focus on daily practice and the embodied experience of place. Calling upon the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the author puts forward affective atmospheres as a post-humanist way of studying socio-spatial processes associated with place identity and the spatial imaginaries that animate planning activity. Recognising the co-constitutive nature of research and social worlds, the article offers a performative methodology that situates researchers directly within the material and discursive environments they seek to investigate.
Deliberative democracy often presumes that the deliberators are members of a political community who often share common understanding about their values, even when they disagree about them. Participatory planning processes building upon these ideas argue that planning itself has to be communicative among a variety of interest groups and should, usually, result in a common consensus. However, the boundaries of these groups rarely get attention. These boundaries shape not only the discursive practices within groups but also among them, and therefore need to be examined more thoroughly. Furthermore, the relationship of membership to substantive issues of planning is important yet underexplored. Political membership in a diverse, mobile, transient and multicultural world is a contested subject and should be given deserving attention for its implications for planning practice.
We offer a novel conceptualisation of power relations in planning by bringing together Steven Lukes’ and Gregory Bateson’s frames. By studying ‘double-binds’, we can explain both the mechanisms of implicit ‘power over’ and the sources of reflective learning to transcend them and regain ‘power to’. We use the conflict over the Stuttgart railway station to illustrate how the interplay of power and learning suits the analysis of power dynamics in planning processes. In this contentious case, the opposition against the ‘Stuttgart 21’ learnt to frame and resist the large-scale traffic infrastructure and urban renewal project, initiated by the German railway company Deutsche Bahn. The power of the opposition seems to have coincided with the shifts between the three dimensions of power (Lukes), and these shifts become well understood as three cross-cutting levels of learning (Bateson).
There is a long and active tradition of land use planning in the United States, and planners have tried to subordinate regulation, primarily zoning, to prior planning. However, this project has met with only limited success. Americans prefer to make small-scale, ad hoc land use decisions. The reasons include the tradition of plans as blueprints for unlimited growth, the legal ability of local governments to ignore the regional impacts of their decisions, America’s preference for sprawling suburbia, the marginal status of plans in zoning law, and the chilling impact of the Supreme Court’s takings jurisprudence.
This article argues that contemporary planning theory is underpinned by an anti-realist ontology that has eroded its capacity to engage meaningfully with the materiality of space. The article draws on the experience of the author as a planner in a large city in the global South to illustrate the limits of planning theory. It argues that the ‘southwards turn’ in planning theory has expanded the reach of planning theory but that more is needed. The article then considers the possibility that a new body of philosophical thought known as ‘speculative realism’ may provide an antidote to this anti-realism and support sustained engagement with the objects of planning’s concern.
Nowadays, China’s rapid urbanization is accompanied by emerging problems of nonsustainability, as a challenge to global sustainable development. Our research addresses the complicated relationship between urbanization and sustainability in China. First, we establish the Kuznets-curve hypothesis of urbanization and test its reliability based on evidence from China’s urbanization, and the result shows that a win–win situation between urbanization and sustainability can possibly be achieved in China. Second, faced with an unbalanced urbanization trend in China that can be accommodated but not overturned, in order to realize the win–win situation effectively, the government needs to adopt a flexible urbanization strategy to combine an inclusive regional policy framework with a sustainable urban planning system in different regions of China.
Progressive theorists and reflective practitioners have exhorted agents to renounce exploitative planning discourses. This repudiation can, however, only be successful if the agent’s own investment in biased discourses is accounted for. Reflecting on the work of Jon Elster, John Thompson, and Raymond Geuss, it is argued that the progressive planner should direct agents toward an acknowledgement of the motives compelling them to become invested in biased discourse, and how these discourses satisfy these motives by capitalizing on the trappings of habitual modes of reasoning and thriving on the ambiguity of referents. The value of this perspective is illustrated in an analysis of neoliberalism as a contemporary hegemonic discourse. It is discussed how popular anxieties about social mobility and community power motivate the investment in discourses characterized by a thesis of the inevitability of neoliberal restructuring and associations with narratives on entrepreneurialism, multiculturalism, and self-help.
The rejection of siting controversial facilities in urban areas periodically resurrects the discussion regarding site-specific technologies that pose risks characterised by severe impacts and extremely low probabilities. This article discusses this topic from an ethics perspective, focusing on the problematic evaluation of minimum safe distances that should be established between potential accidents and exposed residents. Two different approaches to the assessment of such ‘spatial safety’ measures – namely, the probabilistic and deterministic approaches – are compared. The scope of this article is to unveil these approaches’ implicit ethical assumptions and – more generally – facilitate a considered choice between different approaches towards planning ‘risky’ land uses.
The post-positivist corpus of planning theory is replete with myriad theoretical interpretations of planning practice. Yet the theory–practice gap remains. This article seeks to explain this theory–practice gap as a systemically inscribed outcome of the very desire to theorise planning in the first place. It is argued that this theoretical disposition to the subject combined with a related preference for a methodological approach that rests on epistemic phenomenology is the reason we have collectively struggled to provide convincing accounts of practice. In an attempt to think again about how we understand planning practice, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein is introduced to suggest an analytically investigative approach.
The role of the imagined user in planning and design narratives is explored. It is argued that the imagined user is critical to the plausibility of design and planning narratives by bringing resonance and meaningfulness to them. As such, the imagined user is an important rhetorical tool. This article draws on the author’s experience of the regeneration of Hulme, Manchester, in the United Kingdom, in the late 1990s and shows how tenants were constructed as imagined users by planners and designers in ways that made sense of, and supported, specific planning and design choices.
This article examines selected methodological insights that complexity theory might provide for planning. In particular, it focuses on the concept of fractals and, through this concept, how ways of organising policy domains across scales might have particular causal impacts. The aim of this article is therefore twofold: (a) to position complexity theory within social science through a ‘generalised discourse’, thereby orienting it to particular ontological and epistemological biases and (b) to reintroduce a comparatively new concept – fractals – from complexity theory in a way that is consistent with the ontological and epistemological biases argued for, and expand on the contribution that this might make to planning. Complexity theory is theoretically positioned as a neo-systems theory with reasons elaborated. Fractal systems from complexity theory are systems that exhibit self-similarity across scales. This concept (as previously introduced by the author in ‘Fractal spaces in planning and governance’) is further developed in this article to (a) illustrate the ontological and epistemological claims for complexity theory, and to (b) draw attention to ways of organising policy systems across scales to emphasise certain characteristics of the systems – certain distinctions. These distinctions when repeated across scales reinforce associated processes/values/end goals resulting in particular policy outcomes. Finally, empirical insights from two case studies in two different policy domains are presented and compared to illustrate the workings of fractals in planning practice.