Silent places,silent plans: Silent signification and the study of place transformation

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the importance of silence in planning, an endeavor we deem relevant in an era where communication and planning are seen as nearly equivalent. We investigate the meanings and functions of silence in the interpretation of plans, planned space and the planning process. We distinguish silence in the literal sense, as absence of sound, and metaphorical silence, representing other forms of absence: of other voices, of oppressed discourse, of intentionality. The paradoxical nature of silence, as potential fullness and emptiness of meaning, increases complexity and unpredictability in the interpretation of space, plans and the planning process. It is argued that a process of participatory planning, including many actors, documents and interpretations of space, necessarily multiplies the ambiguities introduced by silence. This creates steering problems for planners, but it also introduces openness and flexibility. Silence can have the positive function of stretching up the interpretations of space, plans and the process.

Keywords

silence planning communication interpretation flexibility ambiguity

Prelude

The steps

You steps, children of my silence

o so saintly, so slowly placed

towards the sweet bed of vigilance,

shall proceed silent and cold

O pure person, divine shadow,

how sweet is the beholding of your steps!

O gods! all these gifts that I invite

shall come to me through your bare feet

If, with your offered lips

you prepare, peace offering,

for the dweller of my thoughts

the nourishment of a kiss,

Don’t you rush this tender gesture,

sweetness of being and not being,

for waiting for you was my whole life

and my heart, nothing but your steps

Paul Valéry, from Charmes (Translation Felip Costaglioli)

Valéry poetically and elliptically elucidates a series of concepts and resonances that structure much of Western thought on silence. Silence is presence and absence, warm intimacy and chilling alienation. Silence enables reflection, a simultaneous exploration of self, other and space. Coming closer to the other takes time, a patient approach. Silence is thus openness and the positive and necessary condition for a simultaneous construction of self, other and place. Yet, at the same time silence embodies the impossibility of perfect approach, perfect knowledge and perfect intimacy. The other and physical space itself are exteriority, potentially threatening alterity. Silence can open and close communication and interaction. It can be warm and cold, and the experience of other and place can oscillate between intimacy and alienation. A place, another person and a community can be a home, a place of complementarity and integration, but also a site of confrontation with irreducible difference.

Both space and the other are thus invested, through silence, time and movement, with emotion. They can yield meaning to the exploring individual: knowledge, emotion and meaningful experience, of a physical and a spiritual nature. Silence has a double function, as a catalyst of shifts between layers of meaning, physical and spiritual, and as a sign of intimacy, of immediate presence with the other in space. Yet, the sign is deceitful and incomplete, since our presence with others and with space is always mediated, and an experience of intimacy in silence can give way to an experience of muteness, of a distance that cannot be bridged. Silence can make appear nature and community as a home and as a hostile unknown environment. Hence, it is a powerful sign of ambiguity, of negativity, but simultaneously ‘counts as [a gate to] what is beyond language’ (Lacan, 1975: 313).

Introduction

Since the 1990s, communication has taken central place in planning literature. Since the initial advocates for communicative planning, and later interactive and participatory planning, entered the stage, a tradition of critique has developed, centering around concepts of power, access to and design of the participatory process (Gunder and Hillier, 2009; Hillier, 2002; Van Assche, 2007; Van Assche et al., 2009). All the same, a stronger emphasis on communication, compared to modernist central planning, and compared to an entirely free market (non-planning), seems part of the current consensus (Allmendinger, 2002; Healy, 2005; Innes, 1995; Sandercock, 2004). With this, it seems worthwhile to investigate the presumable absence of communication, silence, and its roles in planning. With Bakhtin (1981) and Barthes (1983), we argue that silence is a semiotically intricate concept, that its functions and meanings should be seen as an integral part of the complexity of communication. Silence can have meaning, or not, and when it does not have a meaning, it can still have a function in the communicative situation (Farmer, 2001: 2; Glen, 2004: 3), hence our distinction between functions and meanings of silence. Silence can be eloquent (Ephratt, 2008: 1911), allowing for a rhetoric of silence (Glen, 2004: 3), and it can deepen, intensify and stretch up signification, enabling a poetics of silence (Peterkiewicz, 1970), but this distinction does not exhaust its functionalities.

In the scattered literature on silence, a number of meanings and functions of silence can be identified (Dauenhauer, 1980; Ephratt, 2008; Jaworski, 1997; Johannesen, 1974; Tannen, 1985). Silence can be treated as absent meaning, as absence of sound, of communication, as absence of signs. With Peirce (1932; Savan, 1988), and Barthes (1983, 2001), we point out that in human communication, everything is habitually symbolized, turning silence into a potential sign. Everything can be rendered meaningful, including silence, and the meaning of a specific silence, will hinge on the context of the communication situation (Nasio 1997: 10; Van Assche, 2007: 106; Vanbergen, 1986: 14).

Paradoxically, meaning does need a structure to attach itself to: something needs to be recognized as a sign, and a sign within a specific sign system, before it can be interpreted. The less structure, the more ambiguity, the more outspoken the polyvalence of the sign: abstract paintings consisting of a few brush strokes can have many meanings, while with a legal text, many interpretations are effectively excluded by the detailed coding (Luhmann, 2001: 15; Vanbergen, 1986: 64). Silence, as absence of sound, can therefore be conceived as the limit of meaning, in a double sense: complete absence of meaning, and complete polyvalence (Glen, 2004; Schmitz, 1994: 6). It can be interpreted as pregnant with every possible meaning, therefore impossible to interpret, and as completely lacking meaning, with the same effect.

In the following paragraphs, we present a first analysis of the paradoxical nature of silence, after which we illustrate the multiple roles of silence in the signification of place through film analyses. We opted for cinematic examples because the medium of film and a long line of film makers rendered film history a treasure trove for the study of silent space. Through film, space, self, other and narrative can be communicated and, with that, the often paradoxical linkages silence creates in the signification of self, other and place. The cinematic exploration of silent places naturally leads into planning, as an endeavor claiming to reshape place and community and an enterprise involving a variety of communicative media and situations. We distinguish between silent places, silence in plans and silence in a planning process and finally elucidate the enabling and disabling effects of these silences and their entwining for planning.

Silence as boundary

In a physical sense, absolute silence does not exist: no place is free of sounds and noise. A priori, it is impossible to identify which sounds will be symbolized, which ones will be treated as background noise, and filtered out. Even if something is only generically interpreted as ‘noise’, it can thoroughly shape the interpretation of what comes next, by creating a mood, setting a tone, that frames the rest (Bruneau, 1973: 18). Interpretation of emptiness is difficult for that reason, and it is all the more so because people typically feel not at ease with silence (Kuhling et al., 2003: 303; Glenn, 2004: 11). In the rare cases when no noises are heard, silence functions as a blank slate that invites our projections (Lacan, quoted in Nasio, 1997: 281). So, silence, as absence of sound, is already an interpretation of the physical surroundings, a Peircean qualisign that needs further embodiment and interpretation to function as a sign (Keane, 2003; Van Zoest, 1978: 43).

In Peircean semiotics, every sign is partly symbolic, that is, connected to its object by means of a social convention (Savan, 1988; 12). In this process, culture interferes, silence will be interpreted by means of the symbolic meanings available in a culture (Basso, 1972: 83; Tannen, 1985: 11).

While silence can function as absolute void or absolute fullness, both creating difficulties in the interpretation, silence can also have a clear meaning, a well-defined meaning. That meaning cannot be found in the silence itself, per definition lacking in structure, but rather in the overall structure of sentence, text, genre (as Peircean legisigns, categories allowing for the interpretation of many potential signs; Keane, 2003) and in the concrete communicative situation (Morsbach, 1988: 212; Vainiomaki, 2004). The concrete situation, the presence of others, the embodied presence in a physical space at a given moment, enables indexicality, a grounding in the here and now by means of signs that are perceived as caused by the object (Savan, 1988: 32). Indexical signs are constitutive of what Peirce calls ‘reality effects’, the performance of reality by signs (Keane, 2003). Silent space can not be predicted in its interpretation, without a real presence in that space, at a point in time. Silence itself can become meaningful in the unfolding series of signs, but it can also trigger new interpretations of other objects in space or aspects of space (Luhmann 2001: 16; Tarasti, 1999).

Film and the exploration of silence and place

Of all the art forms, film brings us closest to an embodied experience of place and other (Metz, 1991: 4), offering a privileged perspective on the semiotics of silence in place. Silence in film enables the gaze. The visual spectacle, say, the landscape or urban space, becomes at once more barren and stripped-down, but at the same time more fully perceptible thanks to the presence of silence. In silence, landscapes can unfold in raw presence, or in befuddling intimacy. Silent landscapes are not merely passive receptacles of emotions associated with the narrative and character; they can also become characters in themselves, shaping the interpretation of the later unfolding of narrative. We map out the terrain of silent spatial semiotics by means of a series of brief film analyses.

Silence in place can make the place represent features of the individual, the community. Depending on the story, the associations can be positive, negative or ambiguous, but the resonance between silent place and narrative implies a humanization of place. Silent places can become more ‘home’ because of silence. In Visconti’s Il gattopardo (1963) the silent Sicilian landscape, unyielding and harsh, represents the community, old, treacherous and unwilling to change. By contrast, Manon des sources (Claude Berrri, 1986), despite being a tale of revenge, has a Provençal landscape setting that is utterly humanized, a friendly and unchanging home for the characters, who all seem to have a natural place and an intimate knowledge of place.

Silences can render a place home because of the implication of shared assumptions, a shared culture, possibly a common spiritual sensibility. Silent places can open the door to spiritual experience. Victor Erice’s El espiritu de la colmena (1975), in its loving depiction of isolated life in a remote Spanish region, hovers between a spiritual and social interpretation of silence. The two young heroines live their lives amidst a silence that permeates both the landscape and the home, but they are very much at ease. Silence entices to exploration, and for one of the kids, familiarity with silence makes it easier to become familiar with the world of the invisible.

Whereas silent everyday environments can enable a spiritual reinterpretation of place and self, some spaces are purposefully indicated as entries to spiritual experience, and often they require silence. The God in Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois, 2010) is of an accessible sort. Silence, in the monastic life depicted here, is not threatening, alienating, but a precondition for the sustained focus that makes the presence of God more tangible. The simplification of sounds conjoins a simplification of space. Not the majestic desert landscapes of Algeria, but the simple and utterly familiar cloister cell is the background for the experience of the transcendent.

The God that can be approached in silent places is not necessarily benevolent, understanding and human-like. The door of silence can open up to a more unsettling experience of the spiritual world, an experience that renders the world more alien. The Return (Andrei Zvyagintsev, 2003), a family drama with strong religious overtones, is set for most part in a threatening and bleak Russian wilderness landscape, inhospitable and imbued with a defiant and aggressive silence. Just as the father figure, and by implication God, the landscape only reveals its forgiving side slowly, after much suffering and sacrifice. Silence alternates with eerie sounds, noises that induce anxiety and distort interpretation.

The utter ambiguity of silence can also lead into utter alienation. Silent places can reveal the non-existence of God, and the incomprehensibility of nature for man. In Takeshi Kindo’s The Naked Island (1964), a tale of alienation in nature, the isolation of the island stands metaphorically for the isolation of its small lot of inhabitants. They are desperately trying to cultivate the place and trying to derive meaning from a close contact with a nature that remains mute, unforgiving, destructive. Nature remains ultimate alterity. The island never becomes home to its inhabitants, as nature can never be home to humanity, nor a source of real spiritual sustenance. Here, silence is deafening.

Silence, then, can open up the spectrum of potential meanings of a place. It can make the link between identity narratives and place stronger, as it can dissolve that link. It can make a place feel home and alien, spiritual and earthy. The spirituality that can be experienced through and in silent places can reinforce the idea of being at home somewhere, as it can cast an unforgiving spell on the familiar world. Silent places can thus reinforce and unravel identity narratives, via a spiritual detour, or through direct confrontation.

But the functioning of society does not allow for a constant confrontation with these possibilities of silent signification. One cannot question oneself and the world continuously. Silent places are thus either avoided, or signified through their everyday cultural coding, a coding that nevertheless can never be entirely stable. Silence can easily break through its culturally imposed meanings, and through silence, places can be reinterpreted more easily. Attempts to impose a certain place interpretation, for example by means of planning and design, are more easily undermined in silence. The intended meanings slip off the material world more easily in silence, in the absence of extra coding in other media. Jacques Tati’s Trafic (1971) is a classic depiction of oppressive and over-planned modernist city space. The bumbling and stumbling silent hero navigates with considerable problems a collection of spaces where the considerations of planners and designers were clearly more important than the desires of the users. These spaces remain mute to the users, and simultaneously silence these people. Silence enables a gradually accruing ironic interpretation of the place and the planning behind it. Tati, in a wildly exuberant scene of a party getting out of hand, shows how people can also break the mold, undermining the oppressive discourses (and resulting spaces) they created for themselves. Silencing of people, by means of planning, is never complete since it creates its own resistance.

Before moving the analysis to the domain of planning, we need to introduce the concept of silencing, routinely associated in the humanities with a (negatively understood) silence (Glenn, 2004: 28; Schmitz, 1994: 14).

Silence as oppressed discourse

If silence is silence and/or absence of certain groups and perspectives, silence becomes equivalent with oppression or marginalization. In this sense, silence and silencing became prevalent concepts in the humanities and social sciences since Foucault (1972, 1975). Groups in society are marginalized, their construction of the world is silenced (Davies, 2001; Ferguson, 1994; Hillier, 2002; Sandercock, 2004; Van Assche, 2004).

Silence in this sense is explicitly negative, and giving a voice to ignored discourses, or allowing for the development of oppressed discourses, is seen as an emancipatory activity (Farmer, 2001: 31; Glenn, 2004: 29). Silence here is an absence that serves the interests of a dominant discourse, of the status quo in society. In Lacanian terms, we can say that Master-signifiers, as naturalizing ideologies structuring the symbolic order, automatically suppress alternative or more subtle understandings of the realities covered (Gunder and Hillier, 2009: 15–17). For Lacan, as for Foucault, the discursive creation of meaning and of social cohesion cannot escape its dual nature, at once enabling and disabling, uniting and dividing, liberating and oppressing. Silencing can thus be strategic, but it is also embedded in the structure of reality. Place/community as home and as alienating alterity, are Siamese twins, and silence can imperceptibly move the focus from one to the other. Thus silence itself can be ‘a threat of disorder, of a profound, poorly understood and confusing disorder’ (Lacan, 1978: 234).

Silence in planning

If we define spatial planning as the coordination of policies and practices affecting spatial organization (Van Assche, 2004, 2007; Van Assche et al., 2009), then the multiplicity of actors and spaces implied cannot but produce complex communication situations. If we see, as many others, planning also as a process of communication, and a process of participation of various stakeholders in decision-making on space, then there is significantly more room for strategy, domination, silencing. Simultaneously, participatory planning creates ample space for the ambiguities of interpretation to unfold, for silence to demonstrate its paradoxical nature. One can see a planning process as a series of sites of silence, and the overall impact of silence in planning as the result of silencing and silences in those different sites. If the sites are occasions of decision-making, different silences can become relevant in each site.

We distinguish between:

Silences in space: Various interpretations of space compete in a planning process. Silence in spatial interpretation, as physical silence, or as absence of meaning, can shape the response to and the vision for those spaces. With regards to the results of the planning process, the altered spaces will not only echo the ambiguities of that process, but also the inherent ambiguity of spatial interpretation.

Silences in the plan documents: Plans and policies remain silent for many non-experts. This can be manipulated in the process, but even in the absence of such strategy, this silence will have effects for the interpretation of the implemented result, and, consequently, of the process itself. The form of policy document or graphic representation can further mute intentions that were there among decision-makers, a propensity for silencing that is aggravated when the distance between decision-makers and the producers of the plans is larger. Conversely, a silencing that was deliberate in the decision-making can be partly undone by the form of the decision, the document.

Silences in the process: What is decided reflects who and what is included, which actors are around the table and which ones might be present but in discursive subjugation. It also entails an interpretation of the previous stages of the process, a reinterpretation of prior decisions and documents that enables silencing, but also opening up of silences coded into prior decisions.

In the following paragraphs, we investigate these forms of silence and their relevance for planning.

Silence in space

Space is necessarily loosely coded. Spaces can acquire meaning by themselves, when foregrounded in communication, but they need the capability to disappear in the background, to make place for objects and events that require attention and signification (Keane, 2003: 411; Van Assche et al., forthcoming). In other words, space can be an object, but it is simultaneously a medium and a frame of reference (Keane, 2003: 410; Van Assche, 2004: 25), and in those capacities it needs to be flexible enough to absorb the multiple and shifting meanings that make up our lives (hence the possibility of spirituality in the chicken coup, as in Espiritu de la colmena). Fluid re-signification of space is a requirement for the versatility of discourse (Eco, 1976: 184–6). High ambiguity, or under-determination, is an aspect of this condition of fluidity. For planning, this property of spatial interpretation has consequences.

First of all, the effects of spatial interventions under the labels ‘planning’ or ‘design’ can not easily be discerned. In a museum, the whole setting indicates that the objects hanging on the wall are ‘art’ and ought to be observed utilizing a separate set of distinctions (Vanbergen, 1986: 32). In the world at large, similar pointers are usually absent, and interpreting certain structures, patterns, places, as ‘art’ or in a broader sense as result is difficult. Intentionality in space is usually ambiguous, in other words (Karmanov, 2009: 52; Keane, 2003: 412; Van Assche et al., forthcoming). As a rule, it is difficult to see authorship, to see authors with intentions behind the organization of space, or behind the appearance of a place. That in turn makes it easy on the one hand to ignore or overlook intentionality, and on the other hand, to project unintended meanings on a place. The hero in Trafic did not recognize the intentions of the city planners that created the space around him, but he did recognize intentionality, with rather suffocating effects, and this recognition led to an ironic, and rather resisting attitude. Ambiguous intentionality creates openness in the interpretation. What comes through from any intention, even if it was a consistent and strong plan, and one that dominated the development process, is necessarily unpredictable and unstable (for Peirce, ascriptions of intentions are always tenuous; cf. Short, 1981).

Personal histories and cultural differences can tinge the interpretation of certain spaces and the attribution of intentionality, but in present-day planning, diverging spatial interpretations appertaining to professional roles and disciplines also play a prominent role. (Ferguson, 1994; Howe, 1992; Karmanov, 2009; Van Assche et al., 2010). Meanings intended by planners, architects, landscape designers will, once implemented, not be recognized by the users of a place, since the signification of space assumed by (modernist) experts is one that is virtually restricted to the profession itself (Gunder and Hillier, 2009: 1627).

A second, related, consequence of the multiple roles and malleability of space in interpretation, is that interpretations of places, and types of places, are highly marked by personal and group histories. Those histories tend to shape the visions for the future (Gunder and Hillier, 2009: 29–32; Van Assche et al., 2009: 238). In a participatory planning process, the actors around the table bring in not only differences in spatial interpretation, but also different sensitivities regarding history. Especially in heritage planning, this can generate conflicts (Duineveld, 2006). Discourses on history can not only silence alternative versions of time, but also of place, and vice versa (Davies, 2001; Sandercock, 2004). If individuals and groups narrate themselves through discourse on place and time (Van Assche, 2004: 100–10), and if silence as a dissolution of naming ability can dissolve identity (Glenn, 2004: 12) then the power of planners to silence histories-in-place is a power that can restructure social identities (Gunder and Hillier, 2009: 128–31). The Sicilians in Il gattopardo, reflected in and shaped by their landscapes, would probably over time redefine themselves if those places were massively re-planned (by others).

If one considers a space that is the product of recent planning and design, it will be very difficult to distinguish the effects of intended silences from those of unintended silences, as it will be hard to differentiate between ambiguities that result from properties of and strategies in the planning/design process, and ambiguities that should be ascribed to the process of spatial interpretation, to the openness of any space for re-signification. This difficulty is aggravated by the fact that, in case of a recognized intentionality, a recognized plan, the actual function and impact of that plan have to be uncovered in every context (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 143–5; Van Assche et al., 2010: 378). No two plans have exactly the same impact on the area they intend to reorganize, even if the rhetoric of planners and designers is identical. The rhetoric of the expert groups has to be carefully distinguished from the actual process of implementation, and secondly from the interpretation of space by user groups that are not exposed to that rhetoric.

If one considers a place that is not clearly designed or planned, those places can still engender artistic interpretations (Barthes, 1983; Van Assche et al., forthcoming). Silence seems to play an enabling role here. As in Manon des Sources, even the most familiar places can be turned into spatial poetry in silence. Its paradoxical nature can stretch, even overturn, the meanings we habitually attribute to places. As enabler/disabler of interpretation, it ‘establishes an oscillation among the several levels of discourse and between the domain of discourse and the domains of non-predicative experience’ (Dauenhauer, 1980: 82) In silence, both the unspeakable and the unspoken assert their presence/absence (cf. Moitra, 1984: 224; Olinick, 1982: 270). The Return masterfully maintains the ambiguity, slowly and silently developing the idea that the unspeakable inhabits the unspoken.

Silence and plans

Plans, as textual or graphic documents, as synthetic visions for the future of an area, are open to various interpretations. In the case of plans as written documents, every individual rule (e.g. regarding a type of zoning) might be easily grasped, relatively unambiguous, but the overall intention of the plan, the hierarchy of the goals embedded here, the kind of space and the kind of community that are envisioned, might be hard to distill. The synthetic nature of plans implies complexity, and ambiguity. Plans in the traditional sense, as visuals, share this interpretation problem, and additionally suffer from the natural ambiguity, the loose coding, of visual language (Karmanov, 2009: 12). In Peircean terms, iconic signs, based on resemblance, are not enough by themselves to reconstruct the object that is referred to. The sign requires further development by means of symbolic signs, shared conventions telling the observer what stands for what in an iconic sign (Savan, 1988: 21; Van Zoest, 1978: 14). A Modigliani portrait might be iconic, but familiarity with his oeuvre and with early 20th-century art tells that he did not strive for photographic accuracy (Vanbergen, 1986: 78). In the case of plans, and the supporting visuals offered by landscape architects and urban designers, the different documents are often coded differently, without making this explicit. For plans, as map-based visuals with scale and symbols, the symbolism might be hard to read for non-experts, and their accuracy is generally overestimated. Furthermore, many of the glossy visuals provided by designers suggest an atmosphere indicative of the overall vision by underestimating the level of detailing already decided on, or by ignoring the possibility that later detailing might undermine the spatial identity communicated (Van Assche et al., forthcoming; cf. Scott, 1998: 103–7). Metaphorical silence, as omission in the plans, and literal silence, as absence of explanation, can combine here to multiply the ambiguities and instability of the interpretation.

The polyvalence of plans plays out even more in participatory planning, where many actors are involved in the process, and the resulting document is used by many. Such a process incorporates many sites of decision-making and interpretation, many sites of silence. On each site, professionals and lay people read or pretend to read different intentions in the documents, weigh the various goals and intentions differently, and come up with diverging strategies for implementation (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 118–20; Hillier, 2002: 193–5).

A plan attempts to simplify and synthesize communication and decisions on the future organization of space, yet, paradoxically, the document itself adds complexity to the game of signification. While its overall goal is closure, it adds new openness (Van Assche, 2004: 240–4). It leads to new, unintended interpretations by parties involved in the process, and reduces further the predictability of interpretations, and thus appreciations (Ferguson, 1994; Scott, 1998: 142–4). Silencing users in the planning and design process, therefore increases the chance that the intentions of planners and designers are silenced later, by those users.

Silence and the planning process

Planning can never be fully inclusive of all the voices in society, and it can not guarantee win-win situations for all the actors included (Gunder and Hillier, 2009: 31–3). In other words, coordination of spatial organization can never be innocent. There will always be hard decisions causing losses (Hillier, 2002: 177–9; Van Assche, 2007: 108). Invoking a common interest will not always work to smooth the resulting tensions, as a common interest is not common or important for all actors to the same degree (Cortini, 2001: 170; Healy, 2005; Innes and Booher, 2002). So, if we consider a participatory planning process, certain voices, present or absent, will be silenced, before or after negotiation. Some of these will be disgruntled afterwards, while others never identified with the common enterprise of plan-making (Duineveld, 2006: 113; Ferguson, 1994; Keohane, 1998: 89).

Some parties might have followed along, calculating that their real intentions could be realized independently of, or by means of, the stated intentions of the plan. Since it is, to speak with de Toqueville, ‘impossible to look in the hearts of the people’, it is extremely hard to discern a real consensus, to distinguish official and unofficial agendas, to find out what the real support for a plan is, and which voices were given which weight (Hillier, 2002: 251–60; Howe, 1992). In other words, the plan as embodiment of the desire of the community, its intention for the organization of its territory, probably silenced voices in the community (Gunder and Hillier, 2009: 131–3), while some voices in the choir that produced it, were not honestly there.

If we consider a planning process as a series of decision sites, then those occasions for decision-making offer room for reinterpretation of prior decisions (Seidl, 2005: 13). This in turn enables the silencing of voices previously included, while it simultaneously opens up silences that were embedded in prior decisions. Since silencing voices in decision-making implies silencing interpretations of space and plans, silencing narratives of past and future, each decision site can potentially reshape the plan, its intentionality, its concept of the common good, and each time a new mosaic of silence and voice will emerge (Kroskrity, 2000; Lacan and Wilden, 1994, for a similar perspective on silence and reinvention). After each decision, it becomes increasingly difficult to trace the origin of fragments of discourse to this or that actor, since they all perceive the plan through the lens of prior decisions. They all reinterpreted the fragments and the pattern of the mosaic numerous times, incorporating and assimilating discourse of various origins.

Authorship and intentionality therefore become scattered over the community if the process remains participatory for the whole duration. If a designer takes over at the end, and ‘translates’ the goals laboriously formulated in a participatory visioning process, it is very well possible that the translation becomes more of a re-creation, that resemblance with her other designs is closer than with the community vision; that in other words the authorship can more realistically be attributed to the designer than to the community. In case this does not happen, community authorship cannot be naively taken to represent a perfect and perfectly stable consensus.

This erasure of meaning, this introduction of silences, can be ascribed to the difference in discourse between user and designer, but also to the interpretive polyvalence of space mentioned earlier, and to its properties as a different sign system (Van Zoest, 1978: 112; Van Assche et al., forthcoming). Mental visions of reordered space, visual and textual representations of those visions, and the material spaces after implementation are four different things. Space being a medium and a sign system by itself, an object and background of objects, the differences between those four constructs are bound to introduce new erasures, new silences. Each step is more than a translation, and involves partial autonomy of the sign system (Keane, 2003: 414; Vanbergen, 1986: 122). A thought expressed as a painting is not that thought any more. It is altered by the materiality and the visual coding of that painting, inspiring new thoughts or reformulations of the original one (Niebylski, 1993: 4). The polyvalence of silence and the polyvalence of space mutually reinforce each other, producing new and unexpected meanings.

Intersections with discussions in the field: case stories

The multiple roles of silence in interpretation, and the emphasis on communication in much of present-day planning theory, bring an investigation of silence close to the heart of the modern planning enterprise. In the previous sections, we already analyzed the roles of silence in planning in general terms. Now, we will illustrate some of these roles by means of planning situations, in turn linked to recurring topics or issues in the discipline. The examples are grounded in our experiences in the Netherlands, Belgium, the US, and Eastern Europe. They rely on extensive fieldwork, published elsewhere. The roles of plans and planners varies widely in these areas. We maintain the distinction between silence in space, in the documents, in the process.

Georgia

If a place is silent and green in Georgia (Caucasus), it might be labeled ‘nature’ and be appreciated positively, but it also invites noise, since life is joy and joy is noise (or at least sound). So, the silence invites music, and parties, grilling, swimming. These activities are quintessentially social, so a fairly large group of people, or a number of smaller groups, are needed. In terms of (large) park planning, this means that the entrance ought to be located near flat open spaces and water. It also implies that most of the park will be rarely used by visitors, thus reducing the pressure on natural resources, but also creating enforcement issues.

If a new park is being considered, and the designers or planners are not foreigners, this preference for social use will not be stated openly, but it will appear in the resulting space. The consensus is silent but strong. The documents that will, on the surface, guide decision-making, are comprehensive ecological studies and detailed architectural designs for special sites – reflecting Soviet conceptions of nature and design (Van Assche et al., 2010). In practice, the studies might separate a core area from other uses, but have little other impact. The designs might be implemented, but usually only partially, since a silent assumption is that there won’t be enough resources. The design, its overshooting, is part of a negotiation process that is not visible in the formal planning and design meetings. In the Soviet period, the silence of these negotiations was even more dense, since three parallel planning and steering systems could formally all account for the creation of rural places: the agro/irrigation system, the planning system, and the system of construction and design norms (SNIIPs). In reality, usually one of those dominated the decision-making (Van Assche and Djanibekov, forthcoming), but only insiders could figure out which formal rule, which document, had a real impact. Because in the USSR planning was a matter of distribution of scarce resources, and all knew the difference between paper and reality, one can say not only that the documents are silent as to the process, but also that most actors in the process were bound to remain silent afterwards. All parties involved had an interest in maintaining the paper facade, in maintaining the silence.

Belgium

For many years, Belgian planners considered Dutch planning superior, and much of their efforts were directed at copying Dutch planning instruments, including comprehensive plans at local and regional level (Van Assche and Leinfelder, 2008). Dutch planners, in their rhetoric, systematically overstated the objective, scientific character of their tools and their system, remaining silent about the web of interdependencies and shared cultural assumptions that made Dutch planning possible and overall successful in the Netherlands. Belgian planners had to work in an environment that did not share these assumptions, in a society that can be characterized as more individualistic, with planning revolving more around individual property and development rights. Often unable to decipher the silences in Dutch planning discourse, Belgian planners then assumed that they themselves were just unlucky to work in such difficult environment. This in turn made it very hard for them to listen to their own constituents, leading to plans that created a lot of resistance and to a general backlash against spatial planning. With the exception of small-scale designs, the Dutch comprehensive plans, basically designs for the community, proved an inappropriate tool for the Belgian context, all the more so since the Belgian planners had less experience with design firms who could imbue these design with a degree of ambiguity (and hence flexibility) that was sorely needed. In Belgium, the plans-as-designs spoke loud and clear, making it very hard to disguise that local voices had barely been heard.

The Netherlands

In the Netherlands, the only plan that is legally binding is the local zoning plan (bestemmingsplan). However, in practice most projects at the local level are at variance with that plan, while many other plans, produced at higher levels of administration, have in reality an impact that is at least as strong. This means that it is too simple to say that local powers subvert the nationally envisioned funnel-shaped planning process, where general plans are made at the national level and later detailed at regional and local levels. This indeed happens, but the practice of generalized variance also allows for inversions, subversions and negotiations at other levels to have an impact (Van Assche, 2004: 90–94). Such hidden flexibility is sorely needed, especially because the complexity and ambition levels of Dutch planning make the funnel-procedures impossible to implement. The formal facade silences a much more chaotic practice, but the facade in this case also serves to maintain flexibility. Because of the shared understanding in the planning community that the generalized variance is an ingredient of the system that cannot be missed, and because of the assumption that the general public would lose trust in the planning system if it transpires too directly, generalized variance, as a silencing rhetoric, is silenced itself (cf. Van Assche, 2006).

Design plays a prominent role in Dutch planning, creating consistency and synergy in zoning efforts, but also enabling a reinterpretation of the design at later stages and at smaller scales. A large urban development project close to Utrecht chose to ignore the fossilized Rhine river as a potential spatial structure (Van Assche, 2004: 95). A different structure was preferred, in reality the outcome of negotiations between municipalities and provinces, but presented as a site-specific spatial ‘concept’. In other words, the plan and surrounding rhetoric silenced the negotiation process, and the questionable presence and absence of voices in that process. However, partly because of the ambiguity of the sketches produced by the leading landscape architects, and partly because of their professional focus, the local archaeologists who were included in the negotiations with developers brought, in some neighborhoods, the ancient riverbed of the Rhine back into the picture. Sometimes, it was not more than an oblique reference in the design, while in other cases the whole structure of the neighborhood refers to the erased river landscape. In this case, the silencing strategies at different levels cancelled each other out, and the strategic use of silence at the lower level was made possible by the ambiguity of designs. The sketches that were supposed to represent and impose one spatial structure, in fact enabled and even inspired an alternative structure.

Romania

In Romania, planning does not escape communist legacies. But Romanian communism differed from Georgian communism, and Romania is now also subjected to the pressures of legal harmonization in the frame of the EU. For the governance of the Romanian Danube delta, EU membership (and its prospect) implied that after the fall of communism the delta had to be managed as a natural area. The ‘green’ governance of the delta was supposed to emulate European models of participatory governance and planning, during and after the production of a master-plan. More recently, the EU water directive imposed participatory watershed governance, in effect necessitating participatory environmental planning (Van Assche et al., 2011). In practice, the interaction between old hierarchies and a newly imported rhetoric of participatory environmentalism produced a situation where the already disempowered local residents are further marginalized – as ‘enemies of nature’ – and natural resources are further monopolized by old elites, under the label of ‘sustainable management’ (Van Assche et al., 2009). The silencing of the locals is the product of a complex interaction between strategies at various levels: at the regional level, the master-plan, officially the result of an inclusive process, is kept hidden, and thus silent. At the local level, the residents of the villages were, in a first round of participatory planning (early 1990s), directly silenced by the bullying behavior of local and regional elites, while in a second round (2003–5) they were given a voice, but it was never included in the final plan (Van Assche et al., 2011). On the part of the international organizations, the perceived pressure to save the remaining ecological assets was so high, and the insight in the strategies of local/regional elites so minimal, that they too initially overlooked the residents of the delta. Thus, almost no actor with influence had an interest in listening to local voices, an attitude further reinforced by an image of locals as backward and marginal (Van Assche et al., 2008).

The silencing of locals in this case is not only the result of direct exclusion in planning, but also of a simultaneous process of re-description of the locals, with every new description still enabling other players to keep the locals out. From enemies of nature, the locals evolved into folksy communities with tourism value and into poor people that had to be educated. The stated answers were more study, more commodification, possibly infrastructural improvement and communication efforts, but no meaningful participation in decision-making.

Minnesota

In Northern Minnesota, silence played a major role in a new narrative on the region (‘the Canoe Country’) that in turn influenced policy and planning. After decades of devastation, of ruthless mining and logging, the lobby efforts and literary endeavors of environmental writers such as Sigurd Olson, Ernest Oberholtzer and Aldo Leopold changed the interpretation of the place from trove of natural resources into ‘wilderness’. Especially for Olson, who was most successful as a writer, silence was a key ingredient of the wilderness experience. Silence allowed him to take a distance, to reflect, on the place, on life, on his own life. Silence for him was thus not only a key ingredient in a re-narration of the landscape that brought conservation efforts and environmental planning to the region, but also a key to a reinterpretation of self (Van Assche and Lo, forthcoming). Verlaine comes to mind, expressing the narrative character of self and place, and their mutual constitution: ‘Your soul is a chosen landscape.’

Olson reshaped himself in and through the combined efforts of his explorations and his writing. Silence for him was a sine qua non for such spiritual encounter with the landscape, and his insistence on the landscape and its silence brought a ban on motorboats, large-scale development, flyovers, and other disturbances. Here, planning emerged literally in the sign of silence.

Visual plans did not play a significant role in the process. And neither did participatory planning. De facto, forms of participation crystallized as lobby efforts against the conservation effort indirectly emanating from Olson’s narrative of silence. A re-branding of the whole region as ‘canoe country’ summarized the new narrative of quiet and respectful use effectively, and was able to silence both the history of human intervention, and the dissenting voices of local government and timber and mining barons. The tourism sector, first opposed to the pressure for subdued recreation in ‘wilderness’, soon found out that the ‘canoe country’ brand was stronger and more valuable than alternative interpretations of the place. They became an ally, and eagerly copied narrative fragments from Olson in their place promotion (Van Assche and Lo, forthcoming).

When visiting some former mining towns in the region, places now often thriving on tourism, one can observe that the silencing of dissenting voices is never complete. No discourse can dominate completely. While the new narrative of silence (in place interpretation) may have inspired federal and state policies affecting the area, locally one can observe a combination of genuine embrace of the narrative, pragmatic commodification, and barely latent opposition. In Ely, for example, dependent on tourism and devoid of mining activities for half a century, the groups that still construct the place identity as ‘mining town’ tend to glorify the past of mining, thereby glossing over stories of dissent and social upheaval that marked the place in the past. In conjunction with such silencing of historical voices, one can see that these people do not care much for the silence that is at the core of the wilderness narrative. Making noise, using snowmobiles or motorboats where it is not allowed, becomes a sign of resistance, an assertion of local identity.

These examples from different countries might serve to illustrate the context-specific and path-dependent entwining of silences in planning practice. Silences in the interpretation of place, as ambiguities, as gaps, and more literally as concepts of silence, might spark off different planning strategies, and a different selection of planning tools. Conversely, the adoption of certain planning strategies, processes, and tools co-determines the selection of voices, and of place interpretations. Narratives on history, place and self shape each other, and the silences in one construction will resonate elsewhere. A planning process never escapes such interplay of narratives (cf. Throgmorton, 1996). The examples also illustrate the paradox of openness and closing in silence. They illustrate the difficulty of reintroducing silenced groups, narratives and place interpretations, but at the same time show the cumulative effect of silences (of the three types distinguished) in creating openings for reinterpretation of places, plans and futures.

An analysis of silence in planning can thus play a role in discussions on participation and inclusivity, on power in planning, on the links between planning and place interpretation, on the role and limits of scientific and artistic communication in planning. It can also shed a light on issues of steering power, predictability and contingency in planning. More broadly even, but not less important, it can contribute to the analysis of the multiple embeddings of planning in society: cultural, political, institutional. Each of the contexts will deal differently with silences as input and will exert different silencing techniques. In addition, we can say that analyses such as these can be helpful in re-articulating certain discussions in planning ethics, revolving around transparency, direct representation, fairness, and, in a Derridean sense logocentrism (Lagaay, 2008). As such, analyses of silence can play a role in the ongoing post-structuralist reconstruction of planning theory, and linkages with Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Zizek and Derrida himself are plentiful and only partially explored. A focus on silence can be a healthy corrective to the modernist assumptions on communication and signification that linger on in the planning community (cf. Duineveld, 2006; Gunder and Hillier, 2009; Van Assche, 2004).

Conclusion: silence as limit and the limits of planning

In Ecrits, Lacan (1966: 392) asserted that in the symbolic order ‘nothing exists except on the foundation of absence’. Similarly, we conceived silence as a place of paradox: silence is absence, and therefore allows for easy recognition of presence (Dauenhauer, 1980: 61). We treated silence as fullness and emptiness, as a condition where all meanings can be projected on the environment, and a condition where meaning dissipates. Silence is simultaneously a limit of and a precondition for meaning. The invitation for projection can also be conceived, in Lacanian terms, as a potential to stand in for the object of desire, for the objet petit a. Silence can shift patterns in the symbolic order, but it can also break open that order, by the power of desire and the imaginary order it fuels. As the objet petit a stands in the symbolic order for what is exterior to it (Zizek, 2005: 372), silence, as presence/absence, easily takes on this function. Furthermore, silence, in its quality of openness, can confront us with the radical alterity of the Real, a mute Nature and mute gods that remind us, like in the films, that our symbolic order might be self-delusion and our desires do not touch anything essential in the world. Thus, the power of silence to shift between orders of experience and signification, and its call for radical self-reflection (and re-narration; cf. Bilmes, 1994).

In planning, silences manifest themselves at many levels and in many sign systems. Silences create flexibility in the interpretation of maps, policies, places and direct interactions. Especially in participatory planning, with its multitude of voices and interests, and its use of many different sign systems, silences are multiplied, radically undercutting the illusion of control many planners still have (Gunder and Hillier, 2009: 31–3). Positively, the same silences can naturally loosen some of the rigidities produced by expert-illusions (Van Assche, 2004: 240).

Intentionality is a second key issue: while clear authorship is no prerequisite for the interpretation of planned spaces, intentionality is. What is intended by a plan will not entirely be communicated in the materialized space, introducing new silences and hence sites of polyvalence and reinterpretation. Conversely, if no intention at all is perceived, the whole place remains silent as a product of planning; alternative interpretations will emerge, relying on prior experiences with similar places, or personal histories in that particular place. If intentionality is perceived, its relative importance cannot be predicted, and even a dominant design can move to the background, into silence.

Silence in decision-making excludes certain interpretations of space and plans, of their patterns of silence and meaning. It delineates openings for further reinterpretation. In the physical space resulting from plan implementation, literal silence can catalyze more dramatic shifts in interpretation. The ambivalence of space and of silence reinforce each other there, inviting the projection of new meanings, enabling the stretching of familiar interpretations. In silent places one can hear more clearly the double message of silence to communicative planning: planning cannot impose an interpretation of planned space (silence introducing radical ambiguity), and it is never too late to reinterpret or redirect a plan or planned space.

A study of silence greatly contributes to the study of spatial signification. The paradoxical nature of silence partly creates the complexity and unpredictability of the meanings places have for people. If we really want to learn from the missteps of modernist architecture and planning, each fostering an illusion of objective spatial semiotics, then we will have to understand the shifts, transformations and erosions of meaning in place. Silence is a prime shifter (cf. Silverstein, 1976: 12). Planning does not become pointless in the face of silence, but is destined to study its cultural surroundings continuously, and destined to regularly revise its goals and ambitions accordingly. A study of the meanings and roles of silence in space also indicates that planners, in their determination of the physical environment, tinker with the semiotic matrix in and through which people narrate themselves. If indeed (Jacques Hassoun in Nasio, 1997: 121) ‘Silence is the modulation of two “I love you”s impossible because of the incompleteness of the terms used to evoke them’, then a community’s desire for a shared future, and for beautiful places, both embodied in the planning enterprise, is destined to be at the mercy of silence. Plans and planning become subjected to the positive modulations of silence, bringing people closer together around plans and processes that are inherently ambiguous, but also to the disjunctures and de-centerings that spring from the silent link between the symbolic, the imaginary and the Real.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Paul Manning and Martijn Duineveld for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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