Abstract
Sara Westin’s The Paradoxes of Planning promises, as the subtitle states, a psychoanalytic perspective on planning. This book starts with the author’s complaining that she felt bored encountering the Hammarby Sjöstad development in Stockholm. Accordingly, she raises the question whether planners think about cities in ways that differ from how people want to experience them and, as a result, plan cities so as to produce boredom and unhappiness.
This book was a doctoral dissertation in geography at Uppsala University. This background defines the scope of this book in several ways. To begin, it is a theoretical work intended to address certain philosophical arguments in geography about urbanity, connections between space and social relations, and urban design and planning. It engages primarily literature in geography. It mentions a small number of planning writers, most in passing, and it refers selectively to a narrow range of psychoanalytic literature, much of it secondary, often by unorthodox interpreters. In addition, it does not consider empirical material about, for example, planning, urban design, or person–environment relations. This book’s geographic focus is on Sweden, mostly Stockholm; it gives little attention to planning or cities elsewhere. This book explicitly makes no distinction between planners and architects and refers to them interchangeably. This may be a convenience to facilitate a theoretical argument about planners–architects; it may also reflect planning practice in Sweden. Although this book refers throughout to the diversity of human wishes, it regards diversity as purely a matter of individual difference and does not consider differences of race, ethnicity, or class. This usage may be related to the theoretical argument this book pursues; it may also reflect Sweden’s racial and ethnic homogeneity and relative economic equality.
To begin, this book argues that planners interpret the city with a rationality that misunderstands—and hence leads planners to disserve—people who live in it. Enlightenment rationality misleads planners in two ways. First, it urges them to live only in their minds, to regard as real only what they consciously think. Implicitly, it admonishes them to act as if they had no emotions—as if they did not respond to others with either attachment or antagonism—and to disregard any feelings as dangerous distractions from understanding, rather than information about themselves and the world they inhabit. Second, this rationality urges them to regard city inhabitants as if they were similar: automata who think only logically, choose only reasonable goals, act only in ways instrumental to serving these goals, and never have passions or act in “irrational” ways. If residents act emotionally, rational planners should disregard whatever they say or do under these conditions. This rationality serves planners in two ways: personally, it offers them the illusion that they can control themselves, and professionally, it offers them the illusion that they can plan cities so as to keep everyone under control. In reality, this book argues, human beings have and enjoy passions and feel most alive when living in cities where possibilities are open and life is unpredictable. (To the criticism of planners as rigidly rational is added a criticism of architects as narrowly aesthetic, regarding as real only what they can see and thus neglecting all the intangible things that matter to human beings.) Such planning practice produces boring cities where residents are unhappy.
This is a valid, familiar critique of planning rationality. This book brings a psychoanalytic slant to it in emphasizing planners’ psychological interests in certainty and in characterizing planners as agents of a societal superego or moral authority. This book’s greatest psychological attention, however, goes to interpreting the nature of city inhabitants. As fully human beings, unlike planners, who occupy only their minds, and architects, who reside in their eyes, they live in their entire bodies. They are passionate. They are active, and they want to engage the city and its people in all manner of complex, ambiguous ways. The essential city dweller is the flâneur, and Virginia Woolf is the prototype. Although this book says little about the term, a flâneur as conceived by Baudelaire and elaborated by Walter Benjamin is someone who saunters, lounges, or strolls lazily through the city. This book quotes Woolf in offering a robust image of the flâneur as part of a critique of planners’ thinking:
Where planner x is seeking to control the environment, reduce complexity, avoid conflicts and develop facts and predictions about the present and the future, private person x longs for movement and unpredictability, for “[the] sudden capricious friendships with the unknown”—yes, perhaps even to “rub against some complete stranger” … (p. 100)
Drawing on some psychoanalytic literature, this book goes on to emphasize the wildness of human desires and to argue that planning, to be useful, must design cities that allow expression and satisfaction of desires.
The flâneur serves as an ideal type with which to critique planners, but the critique suffers both empirically and theoretically. For one thing, it does not describe real cities. In my city of Baltimore, for example, race and class divide residents, where the poor, most of them Black, despair of getting economic opportunity and where race is constantly and anxiously on people’s minds. No one wants to rub against some complete stranger. There are, undoubtedly, flâneurs in the city, but few people regard flânerie as their main occupation. Many who saunter aimlessly, lounge, or stroll lazily through the city would prefer to be engaged in wage-paying work. While most residents, presumably, desire interesting social encounters, the last thing they want is unpredictability in economic conditions or race relations. Peter Marris (1996) emphasized the importance of certainty in people’s lives, particularly the lives of the poor, onto whom others constantly cast down their own uncertainty. Although many rail against planners or other city officials for being insensitive to their needs, their experience of the city does not appear in this book.
Moreover, because this book treats “planners” as an abstraction and does not engage the planning literature, it does not recognize studies that show the variety of planners’ thinking and practices. Perhaps, the majority do associate their professional identity with a rationality similar to that described in this book, and perhaps as professionals they seek to think and act according to norms that suppress emotion and avoid recognizing passion in others. If so, they would be, as this book suggests in associating planners with a societal superego, culturally normal. However, there are also planners who think and act differently. Kevin Lynch (1960, 1972), who is never mentioned in this book’s lengthy discussions of the complexity of relations between physical space and social and inner lives, pioneered a field of study that has sought to understand how people experience their environments and what they want from them. Herbert Gans (1962, 1968) showed planners that cities are places where people live in communities and admonished planners to plan for communities, not spaces. Gans’ work illustrates a general point: even if planners want to see residents as “rational,” as soon as planners encounter residents and communities, they cannot help seeing them as complicated, and if the planners take their responsibilities to residents seriously, they must make efforts to understand and accommodate their desires. In various ways, advocate planners, equity planners, communicative planners, collaborative planners, and the like have recognized the political and psychological unruliness of urban life and tried to incorporate it into city planning.
This book cites psychoanalytic theory to make the general point that human beings are passionate, not simply rational, and that planners’ focus on “needs” inevitably neglects diverse human “desires.” Moreover, this book emphasizes a central psychoanalytic finding: human beings think unconsciously as well as consciously. When individuals begin to have ideas that are unseemly, unrealistic, dangerous, or likely to arouse others’ disapproval or punishment, they try to protect themselves from the consequences of thinking and acting on these ideas and desires by forgetting them, imagining that they do not know them, pushing them from consciousness. Nevertheless, these wishes persist unconsciously, and because people can consider them out of conscious scrutiny, they can proceed to design actions to serve unrealistic, unacceptable, or dangerous aims unimpeded. For this reason, unconscious wishes may dominate personal actions. This book notes that, as a consequence, people may not even be aware of their own desires.
This last observation, however, sends the book’s argument down a slippery slope. If people “have no idea what they really want” (p. 32), then there is no way of establishing what appropriately responsive planners should do. This book’s perspective is influenced by Herbert Marcuse, frequently cited, who believed that human desires could be self-regulating. If so, then Freud’s problem of “civilization and its discontents,” arising from an inherent tension between human desires and the order required for civilization, is a false one. Against Freud’s concern, this book invokes Richard Sennett in support of a view that cities of flâneurs could spontaneously govern themselves.
This book may assert such a position, but it departs from mainstream psychoanalytic thinking, which emphasizes the insistent nature of sexual and aggressive desires. These desires can lead to unrealistic views of one’s own needs and relations with others and, in turn, can lead to self-defeating action and conflict with various others, from family members to work associates to government officials to members of society at large. There is no reason to believe that these conflicts, on top of realistic conflicts of interest, will naturally end up in a safe, secure, and prosperous society. Psychoanalysis emphasizes the importance of establishing structures that can both support personal development and maintain a good-enough society. One way of reducing civilization’s discontents is to provide vehicles that allow individuals to express sexual and aggressive desires in socially constructive ways. Sublimation is the psychoanalytic term for converting “base” desires into “noble” actions, and culture is one valued product of such activities. For example, an artist may paint a beautiful picture of violence instead of committing mayhem on family members or neighbors. This book, however, condemns sublimation as a form of repression (which psychodynamically it is not) and, invoking Norman O. Brown, declares that “alienation is exacerbated by sublimation, the channelling of sexual energy into culture, art and beauty” (pp. 128–129).
This book may side with Marcuse and Brown, who have sought to apply psychoanalytic theory to understanding society, but they are not orthodox interpreters of psychoanalytic theory, and a book that claims to offer a psychoanalytic perspective should locate their particular views within psychoanalytic debates. In fact, it is unclear whether the author intends to use psychoanalytic theory to understand planning or just to invoke it selectively to make a specific argument. For at the beginning of the discussion of the psychoanalytic concepts id, ego, and superego, the author states, “I let the concepts define themselves as I use them” (p. 101).
In the end, this book should not be judged by whether it takes an orthodox psychoanalytic position. After all, creative use of psychoanalytic theory is necessary for understanding the thinking and actions of professions, as well as other groups, such as communities, organizations, and societies, because psychoanalytic theory refers mainly to individuals. But this book should be assessed in terms of whether it follows a psychoanalytic method, the essence of which is interpreting empirical data. The reason that psychoanalytic theory refers to individuals is that it was developed by practitioners who spent thousands upon thousands of hours listening to and talking with individuals. This book makes an argument about abstractions: “planners,” “architects,” and “flâneurs.” That may satisfy the conditions of a philosophical study in geography, but it does not produce an analysis of real planners and city residents. There is certainly something to this book’s critique of rational planners, but this book does not contribute new information or analysis to that critique.