Abstract
In The Democratic Plan: Analysis and Diagnosis, Alan March sets out to resolve what he considers to be fundamental voids in urban and regional planning’s ability to self-understand, critically analyse and ultimately to affect positive change through action. He attempts to address this by developing a practical form of communicative planning that works at the system level, and acts as a critical tool that can be used to assess planning systems across contexts. The ultimate aim of this is to move towards a democratic practice that achieves many of the widely held ideals of planning.
March first affirms that we need to consider planning’s centrality to democratic societal as well as self-governance. After conveying dilemmas of democratic governance, he provides a Habermasian consideration of how the development of rational knowledge in society is prevented at the planning system level. This is presented as a route to understanding why, despite significant progress in the planning communities’ technical understanding of what can make sustainable and fair communities, planning systems still often act as a barrier to the achievement of these aims. A critical analysis of the planning system of Victoria, Australia, is carried out and a series of recommendations are made that attempt to go towards enabling a practical communicative planning system. What emerges is a theoretically grounded, practice focused and normative framework which practitioners, students and academics can use to both critically analyse and identify changes that may be required within their own planning systems.
Chapter 1 provides a brief setting-out of the rationale for planning and its problems and challenges particularly in liberal-democratic contexts. Chapter 2 draws the reader into a deeper understanding of planning as democratic governance and the role that planners play in this. Expanding upon Dahl’s Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy (Dahl, 1982), March redevelops these as: 1. Inclusiveness vs Decisiveness; 2. Rights vs Utility vs the Public Good; 3. Equality vs Liberty; 4. Centralisation vs Localisation; 5. Votes vs Money. These democratic dilemmas are used as a thread of critical inquiry guiding the remainder of the book’s analysis and diagnosis of planning systems.
Chapter 3 considers these dilemmas and tensions as it develops system-wide goals and the critical tools for understanding planning as democracy. This draws upon Habermas’s position regarding the functioning of democracy, particularly the importance of and impediments to a given society’s ability to both ‘know itself’ and ‘steer itself’ (Habermas, 1984). To ‘know itself’ Habermas posited that a society must be able to understand the challenges it faces and the options to plan rationally, inclusively and through empowering argument. To ‘steer itself’ society must have the capacity to overcome the challenges that it faces in knowing itself. March places planning systems at the heart of achieving collectively developed knowledge and action, and conveys the importance of Habermas’ most important barrier to democratic knowing and steering: the ‘mediatisation’ of the public sphere. Mediatisation is taken to restrict rationality via instrumental logics at the expense of actual ‘rational’ discourse that could be produced via open processes of deliberation. Through this, March develops a structural communicative planning that can be considered at the system level. This moves beyond the Habermasian ‘ideal speech acts’ in ‘moments’ of planning practice that has so far been prevalent in the communicative planning literature.
Chapters 4–7 form the central part of the book, and the reader is provided with a clear understanding of the theme of knowing and steering, through a New Institutional critical analysis of the planning system in Victoria, Australia. The research period of 1996–2011 allows the author to draw upon a significant period of time spent working and publishing within the case study context.
Chapter 4 considers the way knowledge is produced in planning processes and implementation and identifies the negative effects of this. In revealing the effects of ‘chronically repeated’ planning processes and barriers to reflexive practice, the chapter forms a theme taken up in Chapter 5 where the actions and rationalities of practitioners are scrutinised. Here the author reveals the way actors achieve instrumental logics of apparent ‘success’. However, March contends that these are not consistent with the generation of Habermasian ‘collective rationality’ of knowledge generation and ultimately the core values of planning. This builds towards a sense of how ‘professionalism’s empty shell’ (p. 72) exists within planning practice, which might provoke introspection from practitioners reading the book.
Chapter 6 deals with ‘inclusiveness and decisiveness’ in planning processes and calls for a ‘front loading’ of citizen input into plan-making processes and a curtailing of involvement in plan implementation. Chapter 7 addresses questions regarding the level at which power should rest with various government functions. The chapter then engages with the issue of rights versus utility and liberty versus equality in the planning system. In these considerations, March demonstrates that he is not averse to tackling ‘larger than planning’ issues and to identifying where planning fits into democratic governance; most specifically where it should operate in order to achieve sustainable and just planning outcomes.
Following this analysis, in the book’s final chapter, Chapter 8, the theoretical basis and critical examination of the case study converge towards three interrelated principles to establish a practical communicative planning that could provide for rational knowledge generation and steering. March provides a series of specific recommendations that he considers would make this achievable in the Victorian context. However, readers coming from contexts in which many of the changes that are recommended have already been attempted via systematic reform might be more sceptical than the author in terms of the likely impacts of some of these recommendations and their wider effects.
Although a relatively brave undertaking by the author, the arguments presented will be unlikely to convince the critics of communicative planning theory. For many it will still not provide a resolution to the theoretical and practical problems that a communicative planning system faces. On the other hand, adherents of communicative planning might be equally put off by an analysis of the limitations of existing communicative theory and practice which can be cutting at times, by the book's prescriptive nature, and by the trade-offs that the author deems necessary to achieve a practical structural form of communicative planning. This is a book that comes at a time when communicative planning theory is fragmenting and evolving. However, with its attempt at providing a system-level version of communicative planning utilising lesser-known Habermasian theory on overall democratic functions, it provides an important and practical contribution to a wider and long running theoretical debate in the planning academy.
The book will appeal to readers in countries and contexts pressing for or currently designing planning system reform. It will also appeal to readers in more ‘progressive’ planning contexts who wish to take stock of their planning systems, and possibly consider why, despite operating in systems often ostensibly influenced by communicative planning theory, outcomes still often fail to live up to core planning ideals. It will also serve as an important text that re-grounds the purpose and practice of planning within that of democratic governance in general and provides a new route to the discovery of the existing literature in this wider field. This is a perspective from which students and others will benefit enormously when considering for the first time or perhaps even through revisiting.
In terms of style and approach, the book is aimed at practitioners, students and academics. Overall it is a commendable attempt at bridging the practice–theory gap. It covers some complex themes that get to the heart of democratic governance and planning and on the whole these are dealt with clearly and effectively for all readers. Possibly as a result of aiming at a wide audience, a repetition particularly of the theoretical fundamentals of the author’s argument becomes apparent as the book progresses. This issue aside, a series of figures graphically convey key themes, such as the continuums of democratic dilemmas. These help the reader visualise the dilemmas, questions and arguments that are developed. A final case summary and ‘knowing and steering’ checklist add to a relatively accessible and practical treatment of a complex theoretical subject matter. This supports one of the book’s aims in allowing readers to carry out examinations and comparisons, within their own contexts, but focused on core theoretical questions. Readers will gain from an important and still timely contribution to the debate on the place and purpose of planning and how it might be able to contribute to achieving more just and sustainable societies.