Abstract
Euro-American academic planning has entered a phase of self-reflection. Both major North American journals have been publishing in this vein: The Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA) has a series of autobiographical pieces by American scholars, and the Journal of Planning Education and Research (JPER) is publishing capsule biographies of scholars who have won the Distinguished Planning Educator Award, the highest honor of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP). Both of these have focused on North Americans. Now, we have a collection of sixteen autobiographical essays, originating in Europe, or more precisely Vienna. It includes both European and North American thinkers in planning: six Americans, four British, three Germans or Austrians, one Belgian, one Italian, and one Israeli. In addition, the editor, Beatrix Haselsberger, teaches in Vienna. Surprisingly, the group includes no French or Dutch scholars, though Andreas Faludi and Barrie Needham both lived and taught in the Netherlands.
According to the editor, the book aims to provide a generational look at planning thought, through the voices of scholars now in or nearing retirement. All the contributors are aged sixty-two or older, which might account for fewer women, though one can easily think of some who might fit. This presumably also accounts for the absence of minorities. Haselsberger suggests that these scholars represent a generation that profoundly changed the character of planning thought and that their reflections should bring to younger scholars and professionals in the field both insights and lessons on how a career might be fashioned and how ideas are generated. Furthermore, for academics, the essays might provide useful perspectives on teaching and research to be applied in educating future generations of planners. These are laudable goals.
One might approach a book such as this in quite different ways. The essays themselves provide glimpses into the self-perception of people who have undoubtedly been very successful in their careers. The differences between them reveal diverse life paths even in the relatively calm world of academia and the power of chance. For readers with a more psychological interest, traces of the inner and intellectual life may be intriguing. Friedmann’s essay does this superbly. Alternatively, one might focus on the intellectual movements in the field of planning that these authors represent. In view of the editor’s claim that they reflect a powerful and fundamental shift in planning thought over the past fifty years, we might ask whether the essays collectively represent such a shift in the intellectual underpinnings of the field. I will employ both of these perspectives, looking first at the essays.
The diverse autobiographies all chronicle academic careers. Space precludes consideration of them in detail, but each has some intrinsic interest that makes it worth reading, albeit at times rather heavy going. The book opens with John Friedmann, the oldest contributor, surveying his remarkable odyssey—refugee from Vienna before World War II, to the United States and the fabled planning PhD program at the University of Chicago, to working around the world during the heyday of international development, to building a new program at UCLA with Harvey Perloff, writing several major books, and now living in Vancouver. Friedmann describes himself as “a sojourner,” living for longer or shorter periods in nine countries, yet ultimately “in none of them did I ever feel settled or at ‘at home’” (15). His essay is rich in insight that comes with age.
After Friedmann, the longest running theorist in the group, Andreas Faludi, moved from post–WW II Vienna to the UK, then came to rest in the Netherlands, which he does call home. Faludi wrote the first published text and reader in planning theory and was a major influence on the field. In contrast, Luigi Mazza began as an architect and converted himself to a planner yet founded the journal Planning Theory. His essay is a joy to read.
Peter Hall, who died shortly after the book was completed, writes with his usual graceful style—perhaps the best and surely the most prolific writer in the group. His account of his father holding him up to see the trains running below sets the stage for a career of great distinction, both as a scholar and as policy advisor, especially in transportation and urban development. He has even had a train named after him, a peculiarly British form of recognition that he might well have preferred above all the others that he received. Like many others here, both Friedmann and Hall lived as internationalists, though Hall’s stay in the United States was less than a decade. Rachelle Alterman similarly moved from Israel to Canada, then returned home to focus on planning law and international research
Patsy Healey, whose optimism and boundless energy are evident, was also an early participant in the book’s creation. Like Michael Batty and Cliff Hague, she came of age during the decades after World War II in Britain and benefitted from the reforms of that era. She writes about the formation of AESOP, in which she played a major role. Similarly, Judith Innes describes her part in the early years of ACSP, in which she played a significant role, and goes on to show the difficulty that women faced in academic life in the 1960s as she struggled to be heard as a theorist in an almost all male environment.
Among their diverse paths to academia, some of the authors had substantial professional careers, such as that of Klaus Kunzman, a Hungarian/Austrian whose education in the Austrian institutional context pushed him back and forth into practice. His picture of life in the all-powerful professor German model of academic organization is sobering. Gerhard Schimak, in the same context, considers the emergence of planning from beneath the yoke of architecture. Peter Marcuse came to academic planning by a different route after years as a lawyer. Marcuse, together with Cliff Hague, presents a more explicitly Marxist or radical view of the world. Hague’s interesting essay documents the struggles to break the grip of the hide-bound professional organization, the RTPI, on British planning education. Charles Hoch came to planning after turning away from theology and engaging in community action and evolving into a pragmatic theorist. Louis Albrechts, working in Belgium, combined teaching and practice in a very rich way
Three figures in the group seem to stand somewhat apart. Barrie Needham presents himself as an economist, born in the UK, and studying land use planning in the Netherlands. He is grounded in market ideas yet wedded to planning. Michael Batty, a remarkable scientist of the city, connects primarily to another tradition, the quantitative revolution in geography and planning. John Forester’s thought has been central to this group, yet his intense, brilliant essay seems intellectually apart.
In a larger sense, the essays also provide an opportunity to consider the changes that have occurred in planning thought over the past fifty years. In particular, we may ask whether the group collectively constitutes a school of thought. One indicator of their intellectual interrelationships rests in the autobiographies themselves. To what extent do the contributors see others in the group as influential, as reflected in the authors whom they choose to cite? A simple tabulation of citations to and by each author is quite revealing. The most cited among the group is Healey, followed by Friedmann, Innes, and Forester. All of these cite each other, except Forester, who cites only Friedmann and Hoch. All are associated with the rise of a view of planning theory that employs Jürgen Habermas’s idea of communicative action, developed in various ways by Forester, Innes, and Healey and known as communicative or collaborative rationality. The distinctive feature of this view is its focus on process, as contrasted to a conception of plans as products. This is indeed a school and a very influential theoretical advance, which raises the question of why it occurred when it did.
In the 1950s, the term planning theory was rarely heard. Jack Dyckman, who compiled the first mimeographed reader, taught some theory classes, but with an eclectic mix of content. Planning theorists mostly were public intellectuals like Lewis Mumford or else critics seeking a new and more rigorous basis for planning and debating rationality. In the schools, Mumford or Patrick Geddes provided the instrumental rationale for conventional practice. However, the growing number of US planning schools from the late 1950s onward generated a flow of new faculty, many with doctoral degrees. Their desire to publish provided the impulse and the revitalization of ACSP together with its conference, the means for development of a thriving academic community. That is attested in the essays. The changing larger world ensured that debate would occur over radical politics, advancing analytical methods, community engagement, and the meaning of theory. Out of all this, the school of thought represented in this collection has succeeded in capturing much of the theoretical high ground in planning education. These authors should be proud of that. In practice, however, things are more complicated. Community engagement rarely nears the level of communication envisaged by theory. Many plans, especially in transportation, are technically driven, and GIS is everywhere. Politics dominates most major planning decisions, as always, and ideology prevails over rationality, of whatever type. In short, we still have a long way to go.