Local Community Participation in the Planning Process: A Case of Bounded Communicative Rationality

The article contributes to the discussions of the relationships between planners and the local community, with a focus on the intervention of the planner in reaching reflexivity and just decisions. In spite of the commonly acknowledged phenomenon of local communities that protest against “unwanted” risk facilities, the principal contradiction in the problem formulation between their lifeworld and the structure of modern institutions has received little attention. This is the focus of the following case study, which explores the communicative activity of the local community within a planning process of mining in a new EU member state. In the theoretical section, I discuss the theory of Habermas to re-investigate the widely criticized foundations of communicative planning. I approach the statements of Habermas with the help of Luhmann to reveal that their different viewpoints may be complementary rather than oppositional. The empirical analysis focuses on the lifeworld of the affected community members and the decision-making process by institutions. The analysis reveals preconditions embedded deeply in the planning process that prevents community members from the introduction of their vision of the issue.     

The Rhetorical Side of Transport Planning

A rhetorical approach to transport planning seemingly contradicts the traditional bias towards means-ends rationality and reliance on analytical techniques. However, this approach is useful for understanding transport planning in its present context. Two major causes are suggested for a possibly growing importance of rhetoric. One is the institutional setting of the transport planning authorities; the other is the changing conception of transport planning problems. Some archetypal rhetorical strategies are described, as well as a particular strategy aiming at the acceptance of road pricing. Acknowledging the rhetorical content of transport planning practice implies new challenges for transport planners. A normative framework based on communicative planning theory is outlined. The discussion draws upon case study material from transport planning in Trondheim, Norway.     

From Formal to Semi-formal and Informal Communication in Urban Planning. Insights from Polish Municipalities

Abstract

The communicative turn within planning theory results in a high diversity of planning forms, adapted to particular spatial and social contexts. The degree of their embedment in the official planning law is varied, therefore a precise definition of what is “formal”, “semi-formal” or “informal” may be a difficult task. Nevertheless, such attempts need to be made if we want to achieve a general conceptual and normative order in planning theory. In this study, 18 Polish municipalities experiencing a relatively fast growth in urban planning in recent years were examined. The analysis of the emerging new forms of public communication gave the following results: all the information produced within the planning process is perceived as public, though not all is publicly available; formal planning procedures are usually extended by the multiplication of statutory communication channels; the list of actors taking part in planning is dominated by landlords, developers and entrepreneurs, which affects plan formulation with an overbalance of economic factors. A general conclusion is that we may be witnessing a gradual shift from the traditional, hierarchical mentality in Polish planning towards a more communicative model.     

Planning Analysis and Political Steering with New Public Management

Interviews with members of the Norwegian national assembly's Standing Committee for Transport and Communications were conducted in 1995, 1997, 2001 and 2004. The politicians were asked about the usefulness of analytic input that planners contribute to national plans, first the Norwegian Road and Road Traffic Plan and later the National Transport Plan. Questions related to steering, coordination, delegation and the inclusiveness of the planning process were also posed. Changes in the politicians' attitudes to types of analytic planning input are outlined. Furthermore, the last round of interviews sheds light on the apparent paradox that parliamentarians accept delegation of highway investment decisions despite their profound scepticism regarding the cost–benefit analyses and impact calculations that are essential to management by objectives and results (MBOR), which was to give them continued political control despite delegation. Another conundrum is the parliamentarians' willingness to renounce the right to decide over most highway projects, even if these were seen as politically important, in order to obtain a strategic overview which they have been unable to use for changing the priorities set by the Government. The political concentration on strategic steering, the concomitant delegation, and MBOR are central components of New Public Management.     

Venturing Into Unknown Territory: The Preparation and Formulation of the Second Benelux Structural Outline

Inherent in transnational planning are obstacles which cause spatial planners to venture into unknown territory. The scale, the issues and the institutional context are significantly different from planning at the national level or below. What does this mean for the role of spatial plan-making, which is the cornerstone of the planning profession? This paper focuses on the role of plans as part of building transnational governance capacity. It does so on the basis of an in-depth case study of the preparation of the Second Benelux Structural Outline (1994–2000). The research material consists of a series of interviews with directly involved planners and administrators, primary sources such as internal reports of the Benelux Economic Union and direct observations by the researcher who attended several meetings of the planning committee. The paper starts with a short discussion of contemporary planning theory through which the formulation of the plan is analysed. Planning as a communicative process and planning as a programming process are central concepts in this analytical framework. The paper proceeds with an analysis of the making of the Second Benelux Structural Outline. A conclusion is that the plan as a communicative tool was not sufficiently developed during the planning process, in spite of the desirability of such a feature in this stage of building transnational governance capacity. The concluding remarks will focus on the ways in which the communicative dimension of future transnational plans can be improved.     

Ambitions and realities in Norwegian regional planning

The article illustrates how regional planning processes in Norway are performed under the terms of the Planning and Building Act, considering the communicative turn in planning theory. It also analyses the coordination of nature management, regulated by the Nature Conservation Act, with regional planning and development. Discourse analysis is used and the story-lines, the discourse coalitions and the emblematic issues in planning and conservation are identified. It is concluded that planning in practice is quite different from the prevailing, theoretical understanding of regional planning. Nature management and regional planning are performed through separate, uncoordinated processes.     

BOOKNOTES

Annette Baker Fox, The Politics of Attraction: Four Middle Powers and the United States Edward N. Peterson, The American Occupation of Germany: Retreat to Victory Charles R. Frank, Jr., Foreign Trade and Domestic Aid Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, American Espionage: From Secret Service to CIA Philip J. Farley, Stephen S. Kaplan, and William H. Lewis, Arras Across the Sea Carol Corder, Planned Cities: New Towns in Britain and America Charles H. Levine, ed., Managing Human Resources: A Challenge to Urban Governments Harvey H. Kaiser, The Building of Cities Development and Conflict David Rogers, Can Business Management Save the Cities? The Case of New York Eugene Lewis, American Politics in a Bureaucratic Age: Citizens. Constituents. Clients and Victims Fred A. Kramer, Dynamics of Public Bureaucracy Fred A. Kramer, ed., Perspectives on Public Bureaucracy Grover Starling, Managing the Public Sector Christopher C. Hood, the Limits of Administration B. Guy Peters, The politics of Bureaucracy: A Comparative Analysis George W. Downs, Jr., Bureaucracy, Innovation, and Public Policy Richard Steiner, Managing the Human Service Organization: From Survival to Achievement Michael J, White, Michael Radnor, and David A, Tansik, Management and Policy Science in American Government     

Empowerment Planning in Regional Development

In the planning literature, there is a tendency to contradict top-down and bottom-up policies, government and governance and instrumental and communicative planning. However, through extensive action research in regional development practice, we have learnt that there is a need for combining them in adequate planning models, and we have found strong arguments in philosophy and theory for this combination when we go to the debate on modernization and the arguments in favour of better balance between communicative and instrumental rationalities. This article is a theoretical discussion of a planning model that we have called empowerment planning. In this discussion, we regard empowerment in regional development as a combination of top-down and bottom-up processes with the variables context, mobilization, organization, implementation and learning. Planning is regarded as a combination of instrumental and communicative rationalities in an institution-building process based on Habermas' will-forming process with different discourses. We present how a planning approach with institutional, strategic, tactical and operative levels of planning can stimulate different development variables, contribute to the institution-building process and strengthen the legitimacy of the planning institution.     

The disciplinary effects of communicative planning in Soufriere, St Lucia: governmentality, hegemony and space-time-politics

Communicative planning initiatives are being increasingly implemented across both the North and South of the globe. Influenced by Habermas' theory of communicative rationality, this form of planning concentrates upon consensus building between different signified interest groups. The paper explores how communicative planning in the eastern Caribbean country of St Lucia disciplines people's conduct from the perspectives of Foucault's concept of governmentality and Laclau and Mouffe's theorization of hegemony. Linking the latter to an analysis of Massey's non-bounded conceptualization of the local, it is argued that, as geographers, we may do better to concentrate less upon the deterministic effects of common styles of government and more upon the moments which bring their themes temporarily and spatially into being. In doing so, some initial steps are made toward proposing the concept of space-time-politics, drawing upon Wittgenstein's work on 'aspect-seeing'. In concluding, I argue that we should not see terms such as 'consensus', 'empowerment' and 'the local' as pre-existing moral justifications for political action, but instead as the product of relations of space-time-politics.     

旅游规划公众参与的核心内容初步研究

本文从旅游规划的公众参与角度入手,系统地梳理了国内外旅游规划公众参与研究进展;围绕谁参与、为什么参与、参与方式、参与行为及参与时间等问题,初步探讨了旅游规划公众参与核心内容,即包括识别利益主体、分析参与决策行为、明确公众参与模式、确定主体参与阶段、选择合意参与方式等。通过这些问题的研究,以加强和推动公众参与旅游规划的深入研究。     

Class,Community and Communicative Planning: Urban Redevelopment at King's Cross,London

Abstract: This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class‐ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process that contain clear class effects are looked at: the amount of office space, the flexibility of plans, and the appropriation of the urban environment as exchange or use value. These aspects structure the urban redevelopment but are external to the communicative planning process. The opposition to the redevelopment has in the planning discourse been articulated as “community”‐based rather than in class‐sensitive terms. We finally present three strategies for reinserting issues of class into planning theory and practice.     

Confronting institutional boundaries to public participation: a case of the Danish energy sector

Although public participation has become an integrated part of planning practice, experience and documents literature still document difficulties in implementing participatory planning processes that provide arenas where citizens can truly influence planning. Based on a combination of institutional theory and action research methodology, this paper focuses on the institutional boundaries to introducing participatory practices by exploring openings and closures to the adoption of participatory planning processes by the Danish energy transmission system operator (TSO). Public participation in the Danish energy sector is characterized by complex institutional arrangements. The study shows how institutional boundaries are perceived by planners and how openings and closures can be identified and developed in an action research approach. The study reveals that citizen involvement has the potential to influence existing power structures but is highly challenged by an instrumentialised and sector-divided planning.     

On Spatial Planning and Marxism: Looking Back,Going Forward

The renewed interest in Marxism that occurred in social sciences and humanities after the 2008 economic crisis has not yet found its counterpart in spatial planning. This paper examines what Marxist planning theory and practices could mean in the current conjuncture. It does so through scrutinising (1) the vibrant Marxist discourse in planning that existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, (2) the recent history (since the 1980s) of planning theory and its relation to the political economy, and (3) the current political economic context (not least defined by the diabolic crisis). Where previous Marxist approaches to planning were very strong on analysing the political economy, I argue there is currently a need—with old hegemonies losing ground, communicative approaches losing support, and neoliberalism in the political economy losing legitimacy—to also discuss establishing alternatives.     

Auditing culture

This article explores the effects of the spread of the principles and practices of the New Public Management (NPM) on the subsidised cultural sector and on cultural policy making in Britain. In particular, changes in the style of public administration that can be ascribed to the NPM will be shown to provide a useful framework to make sense of what has been felt as an “instrumental turn” in British policies for culture between the early 1980s and the present day. The current New Labour Government, as well as the arm's length bodies that distribute public funds for the cultural sector in Britain, are showing an increasing tendency to justify public spending on the arts on the basis of instrumental notions of the arts and culture. In the context of what have been defined as “instrumental cultural policies”, the arts are subsidised in so far as they represent a means to an end rather than an end in itself. In this perspective, the emphasis placed on the potential of the arts to help tackle social exclusion and the role of the cultural sector in place‐marketing and local economic development are typical examples of current trends in British cultural policy making. The central argument purported by this article is that this instrumental emphasis in British cultural policy is closely linked to the changes in the style of public administration that have given rise to the NPM. These new developments have indeed put the publicly funded cultural sector under increasing pressure. In particular, it will be shown how the new stress on the measurement of the arts' impacts in clear and quantifiable ways – which characterises today's “audit society” – has proved a tough challenge for the sector and one that has not been successfully met. The article will conclude by critically considering how the spread of the NPM has affected processes of policy making for the cultural sector, and the damaging effects that such developments may ultimately have on the arts themselves.     

Tracing resident antagonisms in urban development: agonistic pluralism and participatory planning

This article draws on research with resident action groups and other alliances in Sydney. It investigates the ways in which citizens work beyond the formal planning system to approach and achieve their urban development goals. The post‐political treatment of community voices in planning relies on the centrality of consensus politics in current participatory planning regimes. By providing a democratic outlet that is far removed from the actual development outcome, powerful urban actors can silence through inclusion. Planning theorists have posited that one pathway beyond this post‐political moment in urban planning is provided by Chantal Mouffe's critique of Habermasian communicative theory and consensus politics, which she bases on her theory of agonistic pluralism. Following Mouffe, to achieve a productive agonistic politics, any rigid antagonisms between “enemies” need to be moderated to more mutable “adversarial” positions. However, we have little knowledge of the conditions that might precipitate such a change in praxis. To address this gap between theory and praxis, we use focus group data to show how local resident action groups and urban alliances work through three modalities of antagonism to achieve their urban development goals. We add empirical weight to the idea that citizens can shift from rigid and fundamental antagonisms to the potentially more productive adversarial politics of agonistic pluralism but therein expose some limitations with how Mouffe's ideas are being applied to urban planning.     

Why are cultural policy decisions communicated in cool cash?

In this article, we analyze the role of the economic rationale in modern cultural policy decision communication and ask why it remains such an important factor, even though research has argued against it. Based on Luhmann’s system theory, we show how the economic rationale manifests itself in the cultural political communication as parasitic and complementary couplings, and how different communication forms are in play: the indirect, direct, and the both-and form. The point is to construct communicative positions in cultural policy. The positions involve the economic rationale in their own particular way and each of them offers themselves as a communicative platform which the culture politician can optionally step into and out of. The arts system stands out from other systems by not distinguishing itself in one single distinction and coding. In exactly this issue lies the communicative complexity which the communicating cultural politician faces and must handle. As our analysis shows, this complexity is handled by communicating within the economic rationale and coding, with the result that complexity is reduced.     

The Future of Collective Farms' Built Social Infrastructure: Choosing Between Central Place and Network Theories

The aim of this paper is to discuss local and regional planning and development practices in a post‐socialist country such as Estonia. Two approaches — central places and network theories — are used as a conceptual basis. According to the first hypothesis, planning and development of social infrastructure (e.g. schools, sports halls) has remained based on the central place theory — as an outdated planning approach — in Estonia. The second hypothesis argues that while, on the one hand, the application of the network paradigm and increased cooperation between local communities would considerably save public resources, on the other hand, because of the path dependency of Soviet centralized planning and development practices, the networking and lobbying takes place vertically rather than horizontally. This restricts both administrative cooperation and networking on the local and regional levels. The paper consists of three parts. The first part describes the turn in Western planning theory: the shift from normative top‐down planning to a bottom‐up approach and networking. The second part analyses critically the Soviet and post‐Soviet planning theory and practices: the planning and development culture created during the Soviet era. Finally we present a case study of a community planning procedure in the Suure‐Jaani locality — a good example of the influence of historical changes in the settlement system and planning culture of the past on current development.     

Reconciling beauty and utility in early city planning: the contribution of John Nolen

In the history of city planning, the dichotomy between the aesthetic aspirations of the City Beautiful and City Practical movements is overstated. The aesthetic impulse did not disappear but persisted as an important thread through the development of comprehensive planning approaches into the 1920s. The nexus between beauty and utility was negotiated and expressed across four main discourses: broad social improvement, aesthetic functionality, economic rationality, and holistic design. Ultimately, beauty became wedded to utility within the very nature of the comprehensive city plan itself. The work of the leading city planner John Nolen is central to an understanding of these historic continuities and informed the early evolution of city planning theory and practice. Nolen’s challenge to the City Beautiful paradigm, while still retaining an artistic sensibility, reaestheticizes scholars’ appreciation of the City Practical.     

Foucauldian discourse: Power and truth in Urban and regional policy making

This paper explores the implications of Michael Foucault's work on discourse, knowledge and power for our understanding of the policy process, and for planning theory. A recurrent weakness in planning theory is its failure to address issues of power. In particular, the recent turn to argument in planning theory, grounded in Habermasian Communicative Rationality, is marked by power‐blindness. The importance of a focus on power is discussed, focusing on the sociopolitical contexts of planning, theory in planning and the inter‐disciplinary nature of planning. The paper concludes that the turn to argument risks rendering the policy process vulnerable to the influence of power. Foucault's work suggests an alternative planning paradigm which unmasks and challenges power and brings the possibility of empowerment.     

Book Notes

R. Douglas Arnold, Michael J. Graetz, and Alicia H. Munnell (Eds.), Framing the Social Security Debate: Values, Politics, and Economics .
Eugene Bardach, Getting Agencies to Work Together: The Practice and Theory of Managerial Craftsmanship .
J. Patrick Dobel, Public Integrity .
Milton Fisk, Toward a Healthy Society: The Morality and Politics of American Health Care Reform .
Marie Gottschalk, The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States .
Graeme A. Hodge, Privatization: An International Review of Performance .
Donald F. Kettl, The Global Public Management Revolution: A Report on the Transformation of Governance .
Steven G. Koven, Public Budgeting in the United States: The Cultural and Ideological Setting .
George A. Krause, A Two-way Street: The Institutional Dynamics of the Modern Administrative State .
Michael T. McGuire and William H. Anderson, The U.S. Healthcare Dilemma: Mirrors and Chains .
Kenneth J. Meier and Jeff Gill, What Works: A New Approach to Program and Policy Analysis .
Karen Mossberger, The Politics of Ideas and the Spread of Enterprise Zones .
Kate O'Neill, Waste Trading among Rich Nations: Building a New Theory of Environmental Regulation.
William Simonsen and Mark D. Robbins, Citizen Participation in Resource Allocation .
John D. Wirth, Smelter Smoke in North America: The Politics of Transborder Pollution .