Planning Cultures and Histories: Influences on the Evolution of Planning Systems and Spatial Development Patterns

Abstract

This special issue addresses the influences of planning cultures and histories on the evolution of planning systems and spatial development. As well as providing an international comparative perspective on these issues, the collection of articles also engages in a search for new conceptual frameworks and alternative points of view to better understand and explain these differences. The articles focus on three main aspects: the change in planning systems and its impact on spatial development patterns; the interrelationship between planning cultures and histories from a path-dependency perspective; and the variations in physical development patterns resulting from different planning cultures and histories. Papers from different parts of the European continent present evidence at different scales to illustrate these aspects. In all cases, the specific combinations of political, ideological, social, economic and technological factors are important in determining urban and regional planning trajectories as well as spatial development patterns.     

The Idea of a Category Mistake: From Ryle to Habermas,and Beyond

Summary

The term ‘category mistake’ began to turn up regularly in public discourse in the 1990s as a general term to describe a confusion between different fields of thought with serious practical consequences. But it began its career in philosophy, introduced by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind in 1949 to attack Cartesian dualism and assert a monistic solution to the so-called mind-body problem. This paper traces the stages by which it came into general usage, arguing that while by the later 1960s it had generally been rejected by philosophers, it was saved from disappearance by its migration into fields such as psychology and theology. From there, it moved into critical theory and then into international relations. Its entry into these latter areas first made plain its potential in political argument. Eventually, multiple meanings of the term came to coexist with one another, with the practical and rhetorical usage supplementing rather than replacing its original philosophical sense.     

Expectation,motivation, engagement and ownership: using student reflections in the conative and affective domains to enhance residential field courses

Residential field courses are important and should be designed and delivered to maximize their value to students, staff and institutions. In this context, we use a novel approach involving analysis of the daily affective and conative reflections of students immersed in the field course experience to better understand student engagement with fieldwork. We show that students base their field course choice on a range of factors (costs and benefits) and that these choices subsequently influence student expectations and motivation to engage with fieldwork. We also show that the motivation of students to engage with fieldwork-based learning varies from person to person and from day to day. Our findings suggest that having a more nuanced understanding of the decisions students make when deciding which field course to enrol upon would enhance our ability to design attractive, accessible and useful field courses; that having an awareness of the expectations of students around field courses would enable us to better prepare them to undertake them; and that students are more motivated when they are afforded an opportunity to work independently and perceive themselves to have ownership of their learning.     

A civilisation at peril: Goethe's representation of Europe during the Sattelzeit

The importance of the concept of Europe as a source of meaning and object of contested discursive battles during the fundamental transition towards modernity of the Sattelzeit (1750–1850) can hardly be overstated. The Weimar Classics (Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Wieland) made important contributions both to Enlightenment debates about Europe before the French Revolution and to the discursive battles about the continent taking place in the aftermath of the French Revolution in a context of heightened epistemic uncertainty and ideological confrontation. The paper aims to investigate Goethe's representation of Europe as an almost millenarian civilisation endangered at the end of the eighteenth century by a double process of economic and political modernisation. Particular attention is paid to how Goethe rooted his perception of Europe as a civilisation in geographic and climatic assumptions and how he compared the continent to other civilisational entities such as America, China, India or Persia. Finally, the political implications Goethe derived from his perception of Europe as an ailing civilisation shall be contrasted with democratic, romantic and conservative discourses about the continent in the aftermath of the French Revolution.