Justification,compromise and test: Developing a pragmatic sociology of critique to understand the outcomes of urban redevelopment

Abstract

The outcomes of urban redevelopment projects are never predictable, nor do they conform perfectly to any single ideological expression of contemporary development approaches, whether that of rational master planning for the public interest, a market-driven neoliberal approach in the name of the competitive world class city or some other vision of utopia. We argue here that a critical pragmatic analytical lens can be applied usefully to improve our understanding of the justifications, qualifications and compromises that contribute to shaping such projects in their contexts. The critical pragmatic approach, deriving from the work of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski and others, is offered here with illustrative applications to the case of a major redevelopment project in Vancouver, Canada. The approach is situated within planning theory related to governmentality, communicative action theory and American pragmatic philosophy. We establish the utility of studying disputes in the public sphere surrounding development projects, in terms of the objects and actors involved in particular contexts (as opposed to a pure discourse approach) and in terms of the nature and trajectory of compromises attempted and attained in the process (as opposed to consensus-seeking or governmentality approaches).

Keywords

American pragmatism communicative action critical pragmatism discourse ethics Habermas sociology of critique urban redevelopment Vancouver waterfront redevelopment

Introduction

Large-scale urban redevelopment projects have been criticized extensively on grounds of civic equity, economic cost, environmental impacts and democratic accountability; however, from other perspectives, the same projects may be heralded for these very reasons. We consider the potential of a pragmatic sociology of critique in planning theory. We evaluate this potential in terms of how the approach can improve our understanding of progress being made and regress suffered in particular redevelopment projects. The pragmatic sociology of critique seeks a discursive understanding of communication as key to resolving public disputes, but at the same time recognizes the limitations of communicative action theory. The approach also embraces the key insight of post-Foucauldian critical realism, that parties to a dispute are the subjects of structured-in power relations (Flyvbjerg, 1998). We stop short of the tendency for analyses of governmentality to conceptually ‘flatten’ power as a social force, such that actors are portrayed as cynically ‘playing the game’ or seeking ever more complex means of avoiding exploitative central–local relations. Similarly, while we recognize the importance of the neoliberal ‘syndrome’, which pulls even apparently non-neoliberal tendencies into its hegemonic thrust towards capital accumulation (Brenner et al., 2010; Fuller, 2012), we refuse to discount the possibility of genuine divergences from this higher order trend shaping development processes and outcomes. These divergences, we suggest, may become visible with finer-grained attention to the disputes and contests that urban developments face in contemporary cities. This said, we are not the first in planning theory to suggest as much (Hoch, 2007).

Indeed, planning theory already owes a debt to American pragmatic philosophy in ways that theorists including Healey (2009), Holden (2008) and Hoch (2007) most recently document. Not surprisingly, planning theorists interpret the offerings of pragmatic philosophy in a number of different ways, each to suit their particular needs. Healey’s direct point of reference to sociology, Anthony Giddens (1984), provides her with a bridge from the philosophy of pragmatism to the theory and practice of collaborative planning. To Hoch (2007: 275), lessons from sociologist Peter Marris (1975) along with Habermasian communicative action theory permit him to apply his deeply held pragmatic orientation to the real challenges of planning practice:

planners … want to learn how people come to believe in plans and use them. They also want to study when the use of these plans works to meet purposes, overcome obstacles, and remedy confusions – especially as compared to unplanned activities.

Forester (1993), drawing from both Habermas and American pragmatists like Richard Bernstein, brands his own approach ‘critical pragmatism’. Forester’s critical pragmatism seeks to mobilize understanding and resources for planners to resist injustice, through ‘critical exploration of the practices and potentials of the communicative dimensions of social action in public sphere contexts’ (Healey, 2009: 284).

The attraction of planning theory to pragmatic philosophy can be considered to draw from a deeply felt need for a position that bridges the two worlds of the critical realists, who see the world into which planners intervene as fundamentally structurally determined, and the social constructivists, who interpret this world instead as constructed by more or less free agents. By starting and ending with the conditions, thoughts and actions that can be demonstrated to ‘make a difference’, a philosophically pragmatic approach negotiates – ‘abducts’, to use the language of C.S. Peirce – between both polar views. Where the philosophy of pragmatism has lacked in methodological detail that planners demand in order to think and act defensibly, in planning contexts, pragmatic planning theorists have sought further help from different pages of sociology.

In this article, we hope to add to this bridge-building interdisciplinarity in the service of planning theory better fit for the world we encounter. Our specific aim is to demonstrate the deep complementarity and further value offered to planning theory by the pragmatic sociology of critique, also referred to as French pragmatism or (confusingly) ‘new’ critical pragmatism. We do this by building upon the existing pragmatic and communicative insights of planning theorists.¹ While analyses within communicative, governmentalist and neoliberal frames duly pinpoint and elucidate the fixed political–cultural, institutional and economic barriers to democratic progress, a critical pragmatic approach focuses instead on the more fluid, interactively and discursively constructed forces that actors mobilize in public disputes.

The key theoretical assertion behind the analytic approach of French pragmatism is that within the overall social–political landscape of liberal democracy, there exists a plurality of layers of understanding within which people will try and organize other people and specific actions in specific public contexts. In so doing, political actors face requirements that they give reasons for the representations they make and the actions they take. Public representations and actions are in this view a form of argument, and an exercise in democratic pluralism. An argument requires that actors who are party to it offer justification for their position. A second assertion is that this justification must be considered legitimate by others in some public sphere. That is, where a discussion or debate focuses on a contentious social issue, a ‘good’ justification appeals not only to blatant private interest but to some established general interest or common social value.² Different actors addressing the same problem, such as a proposed development, make appeals to the public that encompass the development using different justifications, and different mixtures of justifications. A critical pragmatic analysis of cases of disputed value, therefore, does not only focus on the dynamics of the arguments that actors use to justify their positions: on a development as a deliberative process, for example. Such an analysis additionally takes aim at the institutional, technical, legal and material ‘order of things’ that frame the debates in which they participate and which they may call upon in support of their arguments that the development should or should not proceed in particular ways, or at all.

Our use of the French critical pragmatists’ work here builds upon recent turns within planning and urban theory, away from strict emphasis on communication and deliberative process (Healey, 1996; Innes and Booher, 2004) towards the nature of practices and outcomes. Regarding practices, we refer to moves by Watson (2009), Parnell and Robinson (2012) and others to emphasize that the range of urban processes and practices currently operating and circulating exceeds that which can be explained by any totalizing development theory (e.g. certain critiques of neoliberalism). This drives a need for ‘locally legible accounts that give due weight to the diversity of drivers of urban change relevant to specific urban contexts’ (Parnell and Robinson, 2012: 597). In process terms, justice entails the search, in public disputes, for compromises (Young, 1990), metanarratives (Schön and Rein, 1994) or consensus and/or meta-consensus (Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2010), each or all of which should be able to speak across the values of different parties to a dispute and to find new understandings which all parties can, or rather, do accept. In light of this emergent analytic and normative requirement, we now explain how the critical pragmatic approach to inquiry might provide the basis for interpreting the meaning behind critiques and justifications offered by actors in disputed, contentious and complex contexts in liberal-democratic societies.

Justification, compromise and test: critical pragmatic theory and method

The French pragmatists are not the first social scientists to point out that offering a justification for acting in one way and not another creates a demand that reasons be given. Similar starting points have been set by Rawls (2001), Kant (Bohman 1997) and many in between. The French pragmatists create the term ‘order of justification’ to group together the predominant aspects of thinking and behaving that tend to be co-associated. So, justifying an action based on a market order of justification, for example, signifies that the actor is going to view profit as key determinant of success, profit-driven businesses as the organizations most qualified to determine right from wrong, and the free market as the key institution to defend. That is, to use Thévenot and Boltanski’s terminology, a justification represents the giving of a reason and therefore must offer some indication of the criteria and framework or mode of evaluation that is called upon in validating or legitimating it as a contribution to the good. The mode of evaluating a market-based justification is via arguments about price, for instance, whereas for a civic justification, the mode of evaluation could be distributive equality among citizens. More so, a justification must be based in the mobilization of a form of relevant proof. An argument justified in terms of industrial efficiency would draw upon statistics as relevant proof, whereas a market-based justification would refer to monetary proof, and a civic justification to official votes cast and motions carried. Such proof is mobilized through qualified objects – for the market, this means freely circulating marketized goods and services, whereas for a green justification system, a healthy natural ecosystem would count in this respect. Different ways of understanding how to promote the good carry different understandings of who is qualified to make a decision, as well as a different landscape of focus in both time and space, from the historical past to the immediate future to future generations, and from an understanding of space as local and embedded to global, from a network of virtual connections to a living ecosystem.

That is, French pragmatic analysis places an actor’s discursive entreaties under the analytic lens simultaneously along with the terms on which their representations classify or define objects within ‘a duly qualified reality’ (Thévenot, 2007: 411). Offering a justification for acting in one way and not another or denouncing the acts or arguments of another therefore relies upon the view that the dispute takes place among equals and that the (social) whole is greater than and not equal to the sum of its parts. Analysis in this perspective therefore explores the ways in which disputants attempt to defend their positions through

various types of ‘generalized arguments’ – that is, arguments which make some claim to general applicability by reference to different sorts of values, principles, or models for judging what is good, worthy and right (e.g. equality, tradition, the free market, or environmentalism). (Thévenot et al., 2000: 236)

Hence, Boltanski, Thévenot and others have worked since the 1980s to identify particular ‘orders of justification’. These are defined in terms of seven principles of equivalence: as above – mode of evaluation, form of relevant proof, qualified objects, qualified human beings, time and space formation.³ In light of Boltanski and Thévenot’s original six orders, separate research by Lafaye and Thévenot (1993), Thévenot (1997) and Boltanski and Chiapello (2005 [1999]) has since described the establishment of three ‘new’ orders under conditions of globalization arising in the ‘post-industrial’ West since the 1990s. For Lafaye and Thévenot, the impact upon society of the environmental movement in the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to a ‘green’ order of justification (see also Dryzek et al., 2003). From a different angle, Thévenot (1997) describes an ‘informational’ order based on his observation of the increased influence among policymakers of quantitative social science research. And, Boltanski and Chiapello find that beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, successive waves of industrial relations policy reforms, designed to maintain economic growth in the context of de-industrialization, as well as the rise to prominence in business administration of libertarian and formerly countercultural pre-occupations with individual self-realization, authenticity and creativity, gave rise to a new ‘network’ order of justification.⁴

Taken as such, this approach is able to recognize the emergence of new ‘orders’ of justification against the backdrop of changing socio-historical conditions. This is because actors, as parties to an argument or debate, tend to test the fit of different orders to different possible courses of action and eventually either to clarify the domination of a single order or to ‘muddle through’ and make local, temporary arrangements in relation to a specific situation. This understanding of the play of social understandings and actions resonates strongly with the ‘unique method’ of American pragmatist John Dewey to engage in a continuous practice of questioning and testing different pieces of social evidence, and to understand social actors as engaged in a similar process of continual, intersubjective experimentation and partial judgment (Bernstein, 1983; Healey, 2009: 280).

When one or more orders of justification are evoked and maintained against others, actors may fail to establish a generally acceptable new test by which one or other order of justification emerges as a better fit yet still settle on a compromise (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006 [1991]). Importantly, compromises remain fraught. However, sometimes, when conditions shift, compromises may morph and conditions for a new test may emerge. This principled position towards the value of compromise in the public sphere answers Sanyal’s (2002) call for more constructive and robust theories of compromise within planning theory in particular. Hoch (2007: 279) agrees that better understanding and supporting compromises in planning contexts is often as good as it gets: ‘Compromise represents only one strategy for adapting democratic planning to the political demands of complexity. There are many other less promising and more potentially destructive strategies: passivity, withholding, deception, and so forth’. Hence, compromises, their breakdown or resolution, or indeed the establishment of a new test and commensurate principles of equivalence are important because they point to the possible emergence and potential concretizing of a new ‘reality’: a new generally acceptable ordering of social reality and new ways of justifying the good.

The logic of orders of justification is based upon an enduring sense of the values and understandings of the common good that, given the ‘qualified reality’ that encompasses these, are available to all, in any given dispute. The critical pragmatic view emphasizes observation of positions and justified actions advanced through public discourse, objects and actions, not the identification of particular individuals with particular types of worldviews and storylines to which they are expected to adhere in any context. This approach, then, is less biased than a discourse approach towards finding coherent narratives constituted by representative individuals. Rather, it is designed to steer observation towards uncovering the ontological (material-technical) and epistemological (ideological, ideational) dimensions of a situated public argument, what actors mobilize when they justify or denounce an action or viewpoint in a dispute.

To realize the promise of French critical pragmatism as an analytical framework for understanding public disputes in policy and planning, we move directly to establish four tenets of the approach. These are designed to set into relief its complementarity with and distinguish it most meaningfully from other predominant approaches in planning theory. Specifically, to move forward with a critical pragmatic approach, we must be able to agree that

disputes in the public sphere can result in changes to discourses, policies and practices;

individuals can express multiple perspectives on a public issue and can change their minds; as such, what they say they will do, what they do and the consequences of their actions are more important than how they feel or what they profess to believe;

the domain of the public sphere makes demands on actors that they justify their arguments in terms of some version of the common social good; and

our framework for sorting through the diversity of understandings can evolve through time and context, via analysis of compromises and tests.

These four tenets will be shown to be both consistent with and to advance contemporary developments in pragmatic and communicative planning theory in meaningful ways when it comes to understanding the effects of political engagement in the public sphere. American pragmatism gave us a new definition of truth as social consequence, and Habermas a new understanding of how social action is coordinated. French pragmatism builds upon both of these key insights to offer a post-Foucauldian ‘realist’ understanding of the contextual play and evolution of multiform justifications that go into efforts to establish new truths and so, new winners, new losers and systemic relations in contemporary social settings.

Next, we elaborate upon this scaffold, discussing examples from the case of Vancouver’s Southeast False Creek (SEFC) waterfront redevelopment to illustrate the analytical value of these offerings.⁵ While a wide diversity of public disputes has arisen in the decade-and-a-half timeframe of this particular development, here we will focus inter alia on those surrounding: citizen representation in the development process; the pro-development stance of local government; aspirations to cater to an elite socio-economic demographic; and the partial resolution of tensions between demands from different actors for affordability, liveability and sustainability. While it is hardly novel to uncover tensions between, for example, market demands that the prime measure of success be price and industrial demands that it be efficiency, on the one hand, and civic demands that primacy be granted to collective welfare on the other hand, we contend that the critical pragmatic approach offers a potentially significant advance in understanding disputes over urban redevelopment. This is because of the ways that

(ad1) it gets behind theories that totalize political domination to reveal more nuanced dealings with and expressions of power,

(ad2) it resituates ideas about the common good to a background or framing position rather than an ideal situation, such that we recognize that agreement on the common good may in the end hang on the rational compromise first rather than on ‘communicative’ rationality, such that

(ad3) actors appeal to each other against the backdrop of a ‘duly qualified reality’ that

(ad4) may remain open to dispute and as such, potentially foster new grounds for claims that reframe our understanding of the success or failure of a development.

In illustrating these features of the analytical method, we will refer specifically to the following aspects of the case of SEFC redevelopment, in turn:

We will see evidence of how a non-dominant ‘green’ understanding of value in the SEFC development did force a compromise to the development’s design from the perspective of a market-based understanding of value.

In the case of SEFC, we will see how the surprises that the particularities of the development process revealed have called into question what were accepted understandings of the common good in, for example, public ownership, local subsidiarity and green innovation.

In the case of SEFC, the market order perspective can be seen to have hitched itself to a green order understanding, in pursuit of a larger common good.

In SEFC, the composition of affordable housing is presented as a new test at the intersection of civic, green, market and inspired relations.

The case: Vancouver’s SEFC redevelopment

By way of briefly introducing the case, SEFC is a post-industrial urban redevelopment situated on some of the last remaining undeveloped waterfront in downtown Vancouver. The development of 80 acres has a high-density residential component, mixed with approximately 25 acres of parkland and amenity space. The built form consists of medium- and high-rise buildings, closely interspersed with public and quasi-private greenways and corridors, connections to road, rail and water-based transit and is integrated into the city’s pedestrian and cycling infrastructure and seawall promenade. The first of three phases of development, completed in 2010, occupies approximately 22 acres (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The Village at SEFC (Design Studio/Scot Hein/City of Vancouver, 2010). Reproduced by permission.

The SEFC site was identified as early as 1990 by city leaders and residents as a key location for a model sustainable neighbourhood, to offer both ‘an important addition to Vancouver’s non-market housing supply’ and ‘a showcase for the best in green building design’ (Kear, 2007; Laski, 2010: 43, 49). When the first phase was developed as the Athletes’ Village for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, SEFC was recognized as only the second LEED-ND Platinum certified neighbourhood in North America, based on its utilization of environmentally sustainable design and construction principles. The neighbourhood has suffered from slow uptake by home buyers, contrary to the dominant situation throughout Vancouver, has been criticized by many for its failure to deliver on the very high planning, policy and design expectations held for it by different groups, and for its treatment as a political football, with public lands being delivered into private hands, and then taken back over by the City following bankruptcy of the developer. Notable also is that parties across the political spectrum have played a role in decision-making for the development.⁶

Disputes in the public sphere can make a difference

For this first condition to hold, we need to answer to the critical realist perspective, those who claim that compromises and new understandings can be reached in public disputes but that these in the end have no power to change outcomes, which remain driven by deeper, in some iterations immutable, political forces (Fainstein, 2010; Flyvbjerg, 1998). Such a critique is core to the often-used analytic frame of governmentality theory (e.g. Cowell and Owens, 2006; Huxley and Yiftachel, 2000; Rydin, 2007). Studies of governmentality often seem to evoke a predetermined and implicit definition of the source of political domination – for example, the capillary workings of biopolitics – to explain social processes and policy outcomes. The result is that such analysis can only seek to uncover more insidious means by which political domination may be carried out or experienced. While Fainstein (2010), for example, seeks no less from planning theory than more just outcomes, one does wonder whether she is able to hold out hope for any such thing coming to pass. Through a critical pragmatic lens, governmentality thinking ‘flatten[s] out the different levels at which people [reach a shared understanding or consensus] … and [levels] the difficulties that such a community architecture raises for its members’ (Thévenot, 2007: 411). Knowledge is, of course, subjected to interests and manipulation along power lines, but key to a pragmatic (or, indeed, communicative) understanding is that the interactions of knowledge, contextual understanding and power in all its forms operate in complex ways ‘that cannot be reduced [solely] to manipulation strategies’ (Thévenot, 2007: 414). That is, the flattening of analysis that governmentality approaches apply comes at a cost. This cost may sometimes be too much to bear. We suggest that this is the case in relation to ambiguously ‘successful’ developments such as SEFC.

There is an optimistic pulse within the French pragmatic approach, which it shares with American pragmatism and communicative action approaches. While critiques abound of the power-blind or naive nature of Dewey’s pragmatism, the French pragmatists join Dewey in building their theoretical programme on dissatisfaction with the structural analysis of processes of domination.⁷ Like Hoch (2007: 275), they too find it not pragmatically helpful to stop here in analysis: ‘structural critique alone does not provide practical political or professional savvy … [it lacks] relevant insight for practical planning action’.

To pragmatists and communicative action theorists alike, ‘the problem of creatively achieving consensus’ is centrally important (Joas, 1993: 84) and the behaviour of groups seeking consensus may in certain cases approach such rationality. Maintaining this position requires a reorientation of our understanding of rationality, which was of interest to both Frankfurt School theorists and American pragmatists. Habermas (1987 [1984]: 384), in articulating three types of rational action – instrumental, strategic and communicative – achieves this reorientation, to the degree of recognizing that rational action can be communicative as well as simply utilitarian or strategic. However, American pragmatism offers a radical break from Habermasian universalist rationality. American pragmatists see rationality as ultimately anchored in history, centring the articulation of truth and rationality squarely in an available, fallible, contemporary community of citizen-inquirers. In planning theory, Forester (1993) sits at the end of this radical path, adding nuance and value to the overburdened category of communicative action by identifying a rationality that includes ‘desires, moral inclinations, and feelings of planners, as well as rational strategic judgment’ (p. ix). Nor does Forester shy away from asserting a normative goal of this understanding of rationality: It must shape ‘public attention to public possibilities’.

Indeed, within theories of communicative action taken into the realm of planning, we find reason to believe that attaching better ‘process’ to a dispute can bring about better outcomes. Dryzek and List (2003), for example, show that participatory, democratic deliberation oriented by the ideal of communicative rationality can induce truthfulness in the presentation of individual views and preferences, narrow the domain of preference profiles in a collective choice situation, produce agreement on the set of relevant alternatives, and yield agreement on criteria for evaluation.⁸ Thus, even in situations where participants in a deliberation are shown to be behaving hypocritically, advancing personal interests in the guise of public interests, for example, Elster (1998) locates the ‘civilizing force of hypocrisy’ (p. 12). For Elster, this is created as negotiators may come to believe in the public principles that they pronounce, and push others to state their positions in terms of more general principles, beyond their private concerns. Moreover, we suggest that this is what Thévenot (2007) refers to as raising the generality of a claim, albeit with the aim of raising the status of an argument, a justification, to encompass what others would likely experience as a good.

A critical pragmatic approach thus allows us to bring to light personal and political motivations, insofar as they are expressed in justifications, and to highlight the material-technical and ideational considerations (the principles of equivalence) that undergird interventions in disputes – and to ‘count’ all of this within a more expansive understanding of rationality. This approach opens up possibilities for recognizing the new compromises and embedding new understandings of worth, value and fairness, or conversely, worthlessness, lack of value or unfairness that may result from a dispute.

Example in the case of SEFC

Public debate surrounding the failures of SEFC, especially voiced in terms of a failure to live up to citizen expectations for the area as a model sustainable neighbourhood, stands in contrast to the process conditions for public engagement which existed early on. As early as 1997, a coalition of local activists formed the SEFC Working Group. The group held monthly meetings and organized periodic public events and opportunities for dialogue, actions sanctioned by the City Planning Department from this time through to the group’s disbandment in 2007 (Vaughan, 2008). The group maintained a sense of ongoing and open public scrutiny of the development process, generating several leading-edge collaborative planning initiatives. One key innovation was the April 2006 2-day Integrated Design Process (IDP) that followed Council’s approval of the Official Development Plan but preceded construction. Central to the IDP was enunciation of a mode of evaluation for the proposed project. SEFC as a project would generate innovative green design as well as economic value, qualified according to both market (profit for the developer) and civic proofs (return to the public purse). The divergence at the meeting, described by some as being ‘“suits” on one side, “bike helmets and backpacks” on the other’ (Vaughan, 2008: 52), concerned the question of reconciling potential trade-offs between innovative and inspired design and functionality, and the extent to which the model sustainable development should benefit citizens at large (civic, green and inspired tests), neighbourhood residents (domestic test) or economic interests (market test): ‘success’ was in the process hitched to the question of for whom the neighbourhood was being built.

One tangible object which confronted participants in the IDP was the choice of cooling technology. For developers and marketing agents, advocating market principles, but also recognizing the importance of civic (maximal returns to the public purse) and domestic values (comfort for future home owners), this was a non-issue: air conditioners were a prerequisite for selling the units at the price premium envisaged. For citizens, speaking from within a green order legitimating limits on resource consumption, an inspired order of re-orienting expectations of comfort and convenience, or a civic order, in terms of the integrity of the city’s promises, the installation of air conditioners in these supposed sustainable living units was a betrayal of all other sustainable plans for the development. The developer’s marketing agent elaborates on the role played by ‘green’ innovations: ‘I stood up and I said I wanted heating and cooling, and if what I’m selling you is over a million dollars … people expect that luxury’. The compromise struck was the decision to install a capillary cooling system powered by the development’s sewage-driven Neighbourhood Energy Utility. Acceptance by the city and developers that conventional air conditioning would undermine the development’s overall sustainable design ethos represents a compromise between green and market justifications, given that the system installed offers ‘Not the air conditioning that you get in your Mercedes Benz, no. Just cooling. I [the developer’s agent] signed off on that, let’s move the consumer along to cooling as opposed to air conditioning’. The green expectations of citizens who had been engaged intensively in policy planning for the neighbourhood ultimately shaped the outcome of the dispute. Advocacy of certain ends, each presented as generalizable goods, was crucial to the need among all actors to seek compromises that would progress in this domain.

Multiplicity in individual positions and preferences

If we can accept that disputes activated in public can have an impact upon process and policy, as discussed above, we need next to accept that meaningful change can occur at the level of the actions taken by individual actors. The multiplicity and variability of stances, positions, interests and roles played by individuals in a public dispute are key factors that differentiate the approach taken here from those of Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith’s (1993) advocacy coalitions⁹ or Schön and Rein’s (1994) policy frames.¹⁰ The key distinction is that a critical pragmatic approach recognizes the fundamentally overdetermined yet uncertain qualities of actions. Actions are overdetermined because of ‘the arrangements of objects that qualify the various situations in which persons are acting when they attribute value to these objects’ (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006 [1991]: 216). They are uncertain because the positions that individuals take vary strongly in relation to context, so can only be referred to with any sense of solidity in relation to those specific, contextual terms. As a result, the task of analysis is to look to what people do, and with what objects and other people they align themselves, as well as to their expressed ideas, to understand why they acted in practice.

The approach begins by recognizing multiple co-existing rationalities in which one’s ideological position in a given context is not the object of attention so much as the discursive and material actions taken. In a complicated world, what we do in a given situation may or may not be consistent with the beliefs we purport to uphold. Different situations, then, might present different alternatives to an individual, making one or more competing discourse(s) more appealing, more resonant and more available. This is demonstrated when actors mobilize the same objects but apply different principles of equivalence to put them to use. Although it is sometimes necessary to identify individuals with particular discourses, we should recognize that individuals may align with competing discourses in various contexts, and might never wholeheartedly align with any given order of justification. This latter situation does not necessarily imply hypocrisy, but may instead be viewed as an opportunity for compromise, if the discrepancy, partiality or distance between the competing views can be brought into focus.

The flipside of this situation becomes visible when shifting from attempts to opine upon the psychology or subjectivity of an actor and towards uncovering the tensions that emerge when multiple actors and multiple orders of justification co-exist in what would appear to normative discourse analysis as inconsistent ways. This gives inquiry the breathing space to look at how actors avoid settling their affiliations and how they confound effective argumentation by arguing across multiple orders on the same occasion:

Our own framework seeks … to preserve uncertainty about people’s actions, an uncertainty that has to have a place, it seems to us, in a model purporting to account for human behaviors. Although the room to maneuver is strictly limited by the way the situation is arranged, a model incorporating several [orders of justification] gives actors the possibility of avoiding a test, of challenging a test’s validity by taking recourse to an external principle, or even of reversing the situation by introducing a test that is valid in a different world. (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006 [1991]: 216)

This becomes a particularly valuable strategy for those who, appearing to recognize deficiencies in their position in one world, may then appear to make claims on the very same ‘real’ basis in a different world. What is evidence of sloth in the industrial order may be the hallmark of success from within the purview of a green order. What appears to be ‘shallow gladhanding’ in the domestic order is ‘relationship-building’ in the network order.

Here, American pragmatism and communicative action theory both have frequently confronted the critique that their emphasis on understanding the ‘situation’ detracts from larger, more lasting projects to understand institutions and practices that transcend individual contexts. Healey (2009) explains that ‘Both James and Dewey recognized a plurality of ways of being and knowing but without much awareness of what this could mean in the governance practices of complex societies’ (p. 288). Indeed, in establishing a synoptic picture of the architecture of possibilities for achieving justice through action, French pragmatism moves beyond the more exploratory efforts of the American pragmatists and enriches the communicative action framework via its categorical ‘architecture’ of an open-ended but contained number of realities that people operate within and between. Offering an ‘architecture’ of different orders of justification, the French pragmatists offer a way out of the pragmatic bind of being stuck in the ‘situation’. This works because any situation is multiform, structured and predetermined to a certain extent by context, while also radically open to emergent, even transcendent understandings that may come about through the process of public dispute. The approach’s understanding of diverse and multiple orders of justification operating in conflictual situations precludes a sense of a common, commensurable root that could ever feasibly connect all of these. However, the approach does not posit ‘communicative rationality’ as its sole foundation. At the same time, the positioning of this architecture of justification as the site of analysis lowers the focus of the researcher’s gaze. Analysis looks across orders and how they operate – neither above the whole scene as an omniscient revealer, nor stuck within the particularities of a single ‘communicatively rational’ order of justification within a given situation. A French pragmatic approach can take us beyond understanding or facilitating the achievement of a normative consensus to understanding the emergence of new normative institutions and material formulations of culture, new and possibly ‘irrational’ realities, through the play of compromises and tests.

At the same time, this pragmatic stance does not require abandoning universal normative goals. Joas (1993) makes a strong case that a pragmatic quest for a universal ethics exists, particularly in Dewey (1934) and George Herbert Mead. For Mead and Dewey, the capacities of invention and creativity demand a conscious ‘“playing through” in imagination of alternative performances of action’ (Joas, 1993: 249). This allowance for creative playing through and experimentation means that pragmatic possibilities for resolving moral problems include not merely the application of pre-existing normative rules but also the construction of new possibilities for moral action. In this way, the pragmatic act of engaging in public dispute with due respect for the conservative constraints and radical possibilities for new paths of resolution is the aspect recognized as a universal normative good, rather than anything specific about the outcome. A universal pragmatic ethics does not reveal ultimate and eternal human values because these values can only exist in given action contexts. Instead, it attempts ‘to reconstruct empirically the procedure for resolving situations requiring moral decisions in such a way that in it a procedure becomes recognizable that can itself serve as a basis for its own self-perfecting’ (Joas, 1993: 252–253). Joas’ project resembles very closely that of the French pragmatists, whereas the French pragmatists add systematization via the construction of a formal architecture of justification which serves as a sort of game board for the ‘playing through’, and establishment of an empirical means to proceed in using this framework to evaluate given situations and grasp their creative evolution. For planning theory, this implies that processes for achieving outcomes can be universally practiced and learned, applied and improved. Plurality is a recipe for conflict, certainly, and lots of it; but ‘plurality does not mean that we are limited to being separate individuals with irreducible subjective interests. Rather it means that we seek to discover some common ground to reconcile differences through debate, conversation and dialogue’ (Bernstein, 1983: 223).

Example in the case of SEFC

Following the announcement by the City in its 1990 Clouds of Change Report that the site would be redeveloped for primarily residential use, debate raged over the specific built form that it would take (tower-podium high-rise, medium density low-rise), the land-use mix (all residential buildings, residential–commercial–community building mix, building–open space mix), the type of housing to be supplied (luxury apartments, mixed income housing) and the on-site amenity to be delivered.

The City played an unaccustomed role in this case: as land owner and developer. It retained ownership of the land throughout the development process, and in 2010, took over the work-in-progress when the private developer went into receivership, seeking permission from the Province of British Columbia to assume new levels of debt to do so (City of Vancouver, 2011). The City also built and operates the Neighbourhood Energy Utility for the neighbourhood, a key green feature. This situation continues to raise questions about the presumed values of public ownership and local subsidiarity in urban governance, including and not limited to concerns about the City’s ability to efficiently provide and maintain large and/or highly innovative projects over the long term.

Indeed, such an interplay of institutional forces prompted the abovementioned real estate marketing agent, ostensibly a bonafide proponent of a market order justification, to describe the conflict between his personal and professional understandings of decisions made in relation to SEFC’s green features. Repeatedly orienting his calls for scaling back innovations in green design and technology to fit with high-end home buyers’ expressed preferences, and therefore to guarantee return-on-investment to the city as land owner, he attempts to separate these understandings clearly: ‘There’s how I would wish to live and then there’s I know what consumer tolerances are, and those have nothing to do with each other’. Moreover, in the same interview, he speaks candidly about his support for civic order values in his role as a lobbyist of the provincial government for increased investment in affordable housing. At the same time, he does not hesitate to pass judgment on the City for surpassing him in its market-justified actions: ‘I’ve got to work with the City but cities [have] become more entrepreneurial than the [so-called] greedy developer’.

The demand for justification in terms of the common good

If compromises can make a difference and if individuals can represent a range of positions in public disputes, we have established the basis for investigating the relational element of these disputes. We have yet to establish the need for justification, that is, the need for individuals to articulate a connection between their preferences and an order of justification that points to a higher good. Communicative action theory tells us that most people do not reason with each other in public disputes with a view to strategic consequences of any kind (Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2010: 24). Without this insight, it seems unlikely that parties to a public dispute would be seen to offer reasons in terms of a common good beyond their individual self-interest.

The demand for justification in pluralistic contexts relates to notions of reciprocal agreement, by which people involved in public arguments generally accept that if they want others to accept their position, they need to translate their position to grounds that others can accept. Speaking within a pragmatic tradition, Habermas (1993) asserts that ‘we must ask what is equally good for all’ (p. 277). In practice, this implies that arguing on the basis that something is required by one’s religion, personal affection or taste does not persuade those ascribing to different religions, affections and tastes. A translation is required to demonstrate that a position, even if motivated by a personal reason, is also compatible with some public reason. Pragmatism, here, goes one step further than communicative action, by refusing to recognize ‘internal beliefs of participants’ (Hoch, 2007: 275) antecedent to an action context.¹¹ A pragmatist wants to refer to what is ‘en-believed’ as well as enacted – in context. Beyond examining the communicative action outcomes of ‘ideas about collaboration, consensus building, cooperation, and other kinds of democratic activity’ (Hoch, 2007: 280), a pragmatic approach seeks also to grasp the meaning of the objects of action in context (Beauregard, 2012).

Importantly, the demand to translate justifications into publicly acceptable forms is not an act of selflessness. The task of translation into a more generalized good always risks being seized and narrowed by those holding particular interests. Hence, those who are well equipped to manipulate public opinion by invoking popular and appealing symbols and metaphors for positions that they favour merely privilege their interests over others. Dryzek and Niemeyer (2010) refer to this as ‘a cognitively cheap solution to the problem of constructing preferences in relation to complex problems’ (p. 111). Habermas recognized the limits of these functionalist accounts of social processes, admitting that ‘real processes that are functional in themselves are theoretically precluded’ (Joas, 1993: 143). At the same time, he did not find a way out of this functionalism. Key evidence of this is the way Habermas separated out rational economic activity and rational administration from the creative potential of communicative action: ‘the demand for communicative regulation would be out of place, because it would never be capable of competing, from the standpoint of effectivity, with the other kinds of regulation proper to these spheres’ (Joas, 1993: 141). The architecture of justification within a French pragmatic mould includes the market and industrial models, representing identical principles of equivalence as those outlined by Habermas, but neither is separable from the lifeworld, neither more free of norms and socialization than any other order of justification, and always open to compromise.

While we follow the Habermasians such as Dryzek in normatively regarding the achievement of ‘communicative rationality’ as a highly desirable natural ideal, the argument here is that in practice what people agree on fails to stem directly from or falls short of the ideal and that analysis can account for this condition. Our view is that a demand or claim that a particular course of action should be followed tends to garner support when, pragmatically speaking, it points to or ‘hitches itself’ to a prevailing discourse of the common good (not a universal ideal but a situated norm). This maintains, yet sets the communicative ideal at one remove. That is, such a demand or claim ‘qualifies’ reality. Importantly, this is not to argue for a normatively conservative position that humanity is necessarily imperfectible, and that attempts to perfect it will always result in worse outcomes (e.g. Oakeshott, 1991 [1962]). While actors may or may not aspire to reproduce ‘communicative rationality’, or indeed a ‘veil of ignorance’, they do in fact reproduce agreement on some notion of the good. To reiterate, an argument in public generally fails to garner support from other actors with different interests if couched in terms of narrow self-interest alone; either such a claim won’t be successful or, if successful, the resulting action on the issue will later fail to be accepted as legitimate and will remain controversial and open to dispute.

Example in the case of SEFC

The possibility of redevelopment was used in SEFC as an opportunity to redefine the groups which would constitute those worthy of special allowances in the planning process, the groups that would benefit from design and commercial decisions made for the development, and who would embody the achievement of the common good in its eventual realization. Justifying the marketing of SEFC and more sustainable housing options to luxury buyers, the marketing agent evokes the green credentials of the development to make a similar argument that the ‘rising (green) tide lifts all boats in the long run’:

I believe that the rich are starting to buy a Prius like jewellery. It sounds so good for them to say oh, I bought a Prius. And it’s okay to get people in any way you can … The first time buyer is not a philanthropist. He is not interested in paying 10% more for green initiatives and help save the planet when he could get an extra den, a double microwave oven instead.

In this view, the wealthy buyer can afford ‘fashionable’ green innovations, while the middle-income buyer is locked by dint of her or his limited income into pursuing narrow self-interest. As a result, creating housing and lifestyle options for the green-image-conscious and wealthy constitutes the most direct and rational route to embedding sustainable built forms and lifestyle habits in the city as a whole, the inspiration of the wealthy serving civic and green orders directly, a market order only incidentally.

None of this denies the existence of processes of discourse structuration;¹² certain perspectives and forms of justification may certainly fail to be articulated and others to dominate, in systematic ways, within this way of understanding public disputes. However, this way of understanding moves us somewhat beyond psychologizing assumptions about the interests that motivate people, as well as taking us beyond the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur, 1986 [1975]) that offers cynical manipulation of power as our only analytic tool. It moves us towards assessing the values and the kinds of justifications that have purchase in the public sphere, their interaction and their impact.

The common grammar of justice is dynamic through the negotiation of tests

So far, we have established the potential of compromise, the multiplicity of individual positions and preferences, and the demand for justification. Together, these factors extend the array of variables in a public dispute considerably beyond what most discourse-based analyses offer. It remains only to speak to the dynamic between these models, their prioritization and reprioritization in particular contexts, that is, the formulation of potential new understandings of justice over time. From a critical pragmatic perspective, this dynamic operates through the critical moment of a reality test.

A new test is defined by the emergence and stabilization of new ways of justifying an argument. A new test also opens the way for a new grammar of denunciation. Effectively the opposite of justification, actors who debate socially important issues can and do denounce the justifications offered by others, by demonstrating the legitimacy of their denunciations and of their own claims that a test of the good should be ‘conducted’ on particular terms. The emergence of a test out of a compromise situation highlights the refashioning of an order of justification, such that those objects that do not ‘fit’ or ideals that are conceived differently (from the new order that is created) are excluded. As set out above in ‘The case: Vancouver’s Southeast False Creek redevelopment’ section, analysis in this perspective explores how disputants defend their positions by evoking various types of ‘generalized’ arguments – that is, ‘arguments which make some claim to general applicability by reference to different sorts of values, principles, or models that make possible a judgment on what is good, worthy and right (e.g. equality, tradition, the free market, or environmentalism)’ (Thévenot et al., 2000: 236).

The concept of a test is in some senses comparable with that regarded within communicative action theory as the contestation of discourses. Such approaches take the wider view of discourse as a set of storylines as well as practices associated with facts, values, perceptions and identities. The contestation of discourses happens over time, as people and practices are transformed, through momentous as well as everyday decisions, through representation and deliberation (Dryzek and Niemeyer, 2010: 37). Discourse contestation can also, of course, be manipulated by ‘the incensed and the articulate’ (Carson and Martin, 1999: 57), using tools of strategy, resources and power.

We suggest that the critical pragmatic presentation of an architecture of justification with multiple intersecting orders presupposes the need to engage with radical diversity via a better understanding of objects and discourse within given democratic contexts. Pragmatists and communicative action theorists alike have given us a means to understand the ‘“power of agency”, of human capacity to invent, create, and transform’ (Healey, 2009: 281) in conditions of democratic pluralism. In the context of a particular dispute, certain discourse(s) prevail over others because they define what is accepted as good. However, contexts can change. Indeed, the urban redevelopment literature is emphatic that ‘changes over time can be characterized not by the shift from one model of governance to another, but by a shift in balance between competing discourses’ (Newman 2001: 139).

Example in the case of SEFC

Vancouver’s SEFC has been subject to critique on equity grounds, for having generated limited amounts of affordable housing. This, in spite of the redevelopment’s delivery to the city of new affordable housing, an expansive and expensive public realm, significant public engagement and advances in green building. Shifts in the dynamic tension between civic, market and green orders of justification are particularly apparent. In particular, a test has emerged here in debates over the relative status of affordability, sustainability and cost as goods. The City’s initial call for proposals to develop SEFC, including the development of the Olympic Village, included a new principle of civic equity in housing mix: ‘proponents had to create a development model that could support a diversity of housing types: 1/3 market housing, 1/3 “modest” market housing and 1/3 affordable housing’ (Millennium, 2010). This reached well beyond the City’s existing inclusionary housing standard for new developments of an 80% market–20% affordable housing mix. However, after long public (and, surely, not-so-public) debate among councillors, developers and the community, the housing mix eventually achieved in this phase of the neighbourhood is 252 units of city-owned non-market housing, 737 units of market condominiums and 119 market rental units.

However, the affordable housing in SEFC is targeted not at the city’s homeless but the ‘nearly needy’, such as core civic workers, families and seniors, while market housing is some of the most expensive in the city, with list prices up to US$7 million. Former director of city planning Larry Beasley protests that this is an unacceptable compromise: ‘We [the City] also haven’t done well on creating a social mix … that was a patently bad, retrogressive step, not in the interest or philosophy of the City’ (quoted in Millennium, 2010). From the other end of the justification spectrum, the real estate marketing agent is also able legitimately to say, looking at the resulting housing mix, that ‘The best green initiative [that] the Village has is the diversity of the fortunates living with the less fortunates. That’s about as green and sustainable as we’re going to get’. Again, we find that those in relatively authoritative positions publicly justify the SEFC achievement by referring to civic welfare and solidarity, filtering these appeals by referring to green and inspired values.

Conclusion

In this article, we have presented the potential contribution of critical pragmatism in the French tradition alongside better known theoretical and analytic frameworks used in planning theory, namely American pragmatism, communicative action theory, and to a lesser extent governmentality and discourse analysis. We make a case for the incremental contribution to be made to understanding planning in action by further applications of the French critical pragmatic framework. We have shown how its key contributions meet the demands of the discipline in the context of understanding the political and material dynamics of an urban redevelopment project.

We contend that it is not only recognition of the exercise of different forms of rationality that is needed to better understand urban development processes and outcomes, but also the interplay of these different forms of rationality, and their embodiment in specific public debates over the common good as redevelopments proceed. Attention to this interplay in context draws our focus away from an ideal goal of consensus and towards a better understanding of actually existing pluralisms and the work that they can do. Critical realist voices hit pragmatists and communicative action theorists with the warning that to focus on the creative and innovative potential of social groups engaged in experimentation and experience is to ignore the heavy hand of power that represses all such efforts in the ‘real world’. In this view, compromises, when they occur in real instances, are typically plagued by systematic exclusions and imbalances of representation and voice.

Iris Marion Young (1990) argued that compromise is essential for operating in an urban mode in a way that pursues justice. That is, we cannot possibly all understand one another, all agree with one another in all (or even most) respects, but through compromise, we do gain the opportunity to live with our differences and find a way to move forward in spite of them. Various compromises to existing models of justice may arise from tests long before a new model of justice may emerge, fully formed. Similarly, Sanyal (2002) argues for a useful theory of compromise to enable planners to address the challenges and opportunities of globalization in an effective manner.

The quest for compromise may seem to be a reduction in expectations compared to the quest for consensus – but it offers a way out of the impasse of overburdening efforts at consensus-seeking in pluralist, democratic society. This approach is in line with advances in deliberative democracy, but with an emphasis on analysis of disputes in context. It emphasizes provisional understanding as opposed to design of more optimal processes for interaction. While the communicative ideal is forever elusive, it remains in place, and while self-interest drives a good many actions, these are regarded in the critical pragmatic lens as vectors for more generalizable interests. The principle of common humanity that pluralist democracies formalize makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for an actor who is party to a dispute to argue on the basis of self-interest alone. The road to a better city is path- and context-dependent. Prescriptive theorizing from an abstract first principle (whether founded on instrumental or communicative conceptions of rationality) is only somewhat helpful for understanding what goes on in a dispute ‘on the ground’. Inquiry as we present it here looks not upon the exercise of calculated, replicable, rationalized sovereignty but upon the messy actions of those engaged in setting up and living out ‘the city’. Such actions in turn reproduce and ‘qualify’ the reality that actors must inhabit. While institutional authorities may indeed seek efficiency, calculability, prediction and control and market-anchored actors seek profit and rents, such ends are rarely achieved ‘cleanly’. As the critical realists and governmentality theorists show us, the exercise of power and authority are replete with complications and shifting alliances. Similarly, however, inquiry is also bound to recognize that in a dispute, which does not descend into violence or venal corruption, actors do compromise based on shared assumptions, be this compromise a ‘communicative’ achievement or a mess of goods and bads.

For pragmatism, the guiding metaphor is neither poetic expression nor material production nor revolutionary transformation of society, but instead ‘the creative solution of problems by an experimenting intelligence’ (Joas, 1993: 247–248). We advance this intelligence to the degree that we relinquish faith in the force of strategy alone within social processes, recognizing instead a somewhat indeterminate notion of sociality with a human drive for creative accomplishments, including an element of aesthetic experience as key to the creation and recreation of worlds that are meaningful to their inhabitants.

What we find in applying this critical pragmatic framework is that public disputes both propounding and denouncing civic, market, domestic, industrial, inspired, opinion and green orders of worth or modes of justifying the value of an urban development project all abound, in numerous venues, spanning the life of the project. These disputes, engaged by both formal and informal actors, help shape the justifications used and the material processes and products of the development, sometimes in ways that neither analysis of the interests of the most powerful actors nor a strict interpretation of the weight of discourse would reveal. Disputes surrounding developments which have taken place in public fora, policy committees and reports, local newspapers and other venues have had tangible effects upon the developments themselves. In some cases, we find that actors who ‘ought to’ hold a particular (say, market-based) position on the basis of their professional status, instead articulate and act out a different position (say, inspired, civic or green). More than hypocritical or purely rhetorical moves, these are sometimes genuine moves towards establishing compromise between different ways of ordering what is just and valuable. If we are to recognize, as governmentality theory implores us, that actors are never completely powerless, then we must recognize that the powerful justify their actions in the context of evolving understandings of more generalizable goods. In the interstices between winners and losers, the sheer diversity of perspectives and justifications can be read, bringing to light marginal as well as mainstream and powerful positions.

Joas (1993) has argued for the value of the social sciences in adding resolution and solidarity to contemporary challenges of practical philosophy, ‘in a world destitute of metaphysical certainty’ (p. 257). Pragmatism, as a philosophy of social hope and human potential, stands to gain from its interpretation and use by, among others, communicative action theorists and critical pragmatists within the social sciences. But planning perhaps has an even more intimate connection, as a field created and informed by such a ‘will to believe’ (Healey, 2009: 278). This essay represents an effort to entreat planning theorists into this fold of ‘human beings who collectively recognize and discuss their earthly problems and creatively solve them’ (Joas, 1993: 257). By maintaining a spirit of common work within the constantly surprising and confounding play of human action, we can maintain a sense of optimism about the creative meaning of the actions people take together, even in dark times. In so doing, we do justice to the ongoing work of those who take to the public sphere to make sense, take action and form beliefs in the midst of it all, including us ‘planning bricklayers’ (Hoch, 2007: 280).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the journal’s anonymous reviewers in improving this article. The article is part of a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (820-2010-176).

Funding

The article is part of a research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (820-2010-176).

Notes

Author biography

Meg Holden (PhD Public and Urban Policy, New School for Social Research) is Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Holden’s published research crosses the domains of urban and social theory, sustainability and climate change policy, planning, and assessment, and investigation of urban environmental pragmatism and social and policy learning.

Andy Scerri (PhD International Studies, RMIT University 2007), is Assistant Professor, Environmental Politics, Policy and Ethics in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. His published research covers two areas: environmental political and social theory and comparative studies of debates over urban sustainable development policy.

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