Can collaborative planning go beyond locally focused notions of the “public interest”? The potential of Habermas’ concept of “generalizable interest” in pluralist and trans-scalar planning discourses

Introduction

This article explores the notion of the “public interest,” focusing on its relevance for planning under the current conditions of increasing cultural diversity and growing awareness of trans-scalarity of problem settings. It takes as its point of departure Patsy Healey’s (1997) classical and influential theory of collaborative planning, a theory presented in her work Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies. In its original form, Healey’s theory addressed predominately the ways in which the members of local communities can communicatively define the interests they share and have an influence on the shape of the places they share, while not necessarily sharing cultural backgrounds or ways of life in any other respects (Healey, 1997, see also 1992, 2003, 2010). However, as is well known, problem settings in planning are hardly ever merely local, but planning solutions in one place have typically repercussions in other localities. Moreover, different locally defined “public interests” often collide with each other in contemporary cities and urban regions, collisions being sometimes indicative of problems of urban justice or environmental justice. Therefore, it is important that collaborative planning does not merely respond to local problems of placemaking but can also go beyond locally focused notions of the public interest. Healey herself touches upon this problem at some points in her classical formulation of the theory of collaborative planning and addresses it in a more systematic manner in many of her more recent works (see especially Healey, 1999: 116, 2007, 2010, 2015a). This article not only discusses Healey’s answers to this problem but also revisits one of the main sources of inspiration of collaborative planning theory, Jürgen Habermas’ philosophy. Even though Healey herself does not follow Habermasian threads of thought far in searching for ways to go beyond locally focused notion of the public interest, the article contends that revisiting Habermas could provide some useful points of departure with respect to this objective.

Healey’s theory of collaborative planning belongs to the family of communicative planning theories that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, theories that have all been quite eclectic, but almost all of them originally drew in some respects on Habermas’ theory of communicative action (see, for example, Forester, 1989, 1993; Healey, 1992, 1997; Innes, 1996; Sager, 1994). One of the reasons for the popularity of Habermas’ theory was that it provided fresh viewpoints to the concept of public interest, a concept that has been an important point of reference for the legitimacy of planning but also a concept that has been increasingly contested in the latter half of the 20th century (see, for example, Campbell and Marshall, 2002; Moroni, 2004; Sager, 2012). Although Habermas has not favored the specific concept of the public interest, he has addressed the theme of public interest through other related philosophical concepts. The concept of public interest can be assessed focusing either on processes or on outcomes (Campbell and Marshall, 2002: 174), and Habermas’ assessments of the issue adopt a procedural approach. In his theories of communicative action and discourse ethics, Habermas (1984, 1987, 1990, 1993) approached the problem of public interest by discussing the “generalizability of interests.” In The Theory of Communicative Action, he maintains that we—being subjects capable of argumentative speech—can regulate our collective action by discerning argumentatively those interests that are generalizable from those that are merely personal or sectional ones (Habermas, 1984, 1987). However, only later in his Between Facts and Norms, he specified in a more detailed manner the position of the concept of generalizable interest in the process of public will-formation and the design of democratic institutions in modern societies (Habermas, 1996).

Habermas’ theory of communicative action is one of the starting points for Healey’s theory of collaborative planning, as it indicates that the identities and the interests of the subjects taking part in planning discourses are not pre-given and fixed but that the subjects can evolve and change their interests on a rational basis through the discourses they get involved in. However, Healey’s theory purportedly departs from the company of Habermas at least in two points so as to be able to do justice to cultural diversity and variety of discursive styles in contemporary cities and societies (see, for example, Healey, 1992: 151–152, 1997: 54, cf. 2003). Healey’s project differs from Habermas’, first, in that it largely turns its back to the universalizing moments in Habermas’ philosophy. Habermas’ moral philosophy leans on universalism especially in its conception of “practical discourses,” discourses where the generalizability of interests can be tested and where the subjects are supposed to abstract from their cultural embeddedness, adopting a perspective of “generalized other.” The conception of the subject that underlies Healey’s theory all the way through seems to be a phenomenologically or anthropologically grounded one, the conception according to which subjects always remain as situated and attached to places and local systems of meaning (Healey, 1992: 152). This article analyzes Healey’s conceptions of the subject in particular by exploring how they parallel with the ideas of those feminist philosophers who have argued that the issues of public interest should not be reduced to Habermasian abstract questions concerning the generalizability of interests, questions requiring departure from perspectival and situated thinking, that is, questions that Habermas labels as questions concerning “the just” or “the right.” Instead, these strands of feminism have emphasized the idea of culturally embedded subjects and “concrete others,” as well as situated judgments concerning “the good” and “the valuable” (Benhabib, 1992; Meehan, 1995; Young, 1990).

Second, and relatedly, Healey’s theory departs from Habermas’ thought in its ideas concerning institutional and organizational designs that could be facilitative of the emergence of the public interest or generalizable interests. Healey’s theory adheres here to informal and fluid, local or trans-scalar governance networks, within which “institutional capacities of places” are created and where the representatives of different cultures and places can meet and be sensitized to each other’s views (Healey, 1997, 1999: 116). Furthermore, Healey’s (1997, 1999) theory looks at the problem of institutional design from the micro-level perspective, focusing on the concrete everyday encounters between actors but arguing that these encounters bring about change eventually also at institutional level. Habermas’ theory, by contrast, is focused on formal, impersonal institutions of law and government. Especially in his Between Facts and Norms, he assesses normative change in society and its institutions from a bird’s-eye perspective, a perspective from which public appears as “subjectless” and communication as an “anonymous” flow of reasons (Habermas, 1996). Interestingly, Habermas’ reason to choose this position is the same as Healey’s reason for stressing personal face-to-face encounters in local and trans-scalar networks, that is, to do justice to the difference and pluralism in contemporary societies.

Although there are significant differences in Habermas’ and Healey’s theories, it has not always been clear which of the numerous criticisms targeted to collaborative planning theory should be directed to Habermas and which to Healey’s applications of his ideas. Healey herself reports the critical attitudes toward Habermas—and especially his notion of consensus—having been one of the reasons for the fact that she has taken distance to Habermasian philosophy, especially in her more recent works (Healey, 2015b: 441; Hillier and Metzger, 2015: 11). Healey’s shift away from Habermas has been welcomed for instance by the proponents of “agonist” planning, whose thoughts align at many places with the non-Habermasian, identity-questions-oriented part of collaborative planning (see, for example, Hillier, 2002: 9; Hillier and Metzger, 2015: 10–11). Nonetheless, communicative planning theories—collaborative planning among them—have also been criticized for having moved away from Habermasian ideals and at the same time from normative objectives such as those related to justice. This line of criticism has been typical of “Just City” theories, even though these theories do not typically draw on Habermasian viewpoints to justice (see, for example, Fainstein, 2000: 455, 2010: 31; Purcell, 2009: 141). Furthermore, Habermasian grounds of collaborative planning have appeared as worthy of preserving for those planning theorists whose focus is not on micro-level planning practice but on macro-level issues such as planning systems and law (March, 2012; March and Low, 2004).

Hence, this article sets out to re-evaluate the potential of Habermasian concept of generalizable interest for collaborative planning, assessing the concept not only in the light of The Theory of Communicative Action but also Habermas’ later works where he specifies in which situations this concept is and is not useful. This article argues that, seen in the light of these works, the idea of generalizability of interests opens up possibilities for the theory of collaborative planning to convincingly broaden its view beyond locally focused notions of the public interest but in a way that does not violate Healey’s aims to do justice to difference and plurality in contemporary cities and societies.

Communicative rationality and the normative aspects of planning

Habermas’ theories of communicative action and discourse ethics attracted attention from the theorists of communicative planning in the 1980s and 1990s for the reason that Habermas’ theories included an exceptionally broad view on rationality. Whereas the modern views of rationality had been mainly occupied with cognitive instrumental rationality, Habermas aimed to show that there is also a more fundamental form of rationality that is geared toward achieving mutual understanding, a form of rationality that is inherent in language and argumentative speech (Habermas, 1984, 1987). One of the central aspects of this understanding-oriented “communicative rationality” was that it covered not only questions related to finding means to pre-given ends but also questions concerning ends themselves, that is, questions concerning norms and values (Habermas, 1984). From a planning point of view, this meant that planning could be considered to be a rational form of action even if we acknowledged its value-laden dimensions.

In methodological terms, Habermas’ (1984) assessment of communicative rationality purported to provide a reconstruction of the “universal rules and necessary presuppositions of speech acts oriented to reaching understanding” and the “pre-theoretical knowledge that competent speakers bring to bear when they employ sentences in actions oriented to reaching understanding” (p. 138). In assessing the necessary presuppositions of speech, Habermas argued that the speakers relate to world in three different aspects, which are the relations to objective world, to social world, and to subjective world. Furthermore, his argument was that while we speak, we make implicitly or explicitly three kinds of validity claims that correspond to the aforementioned world relations: we make claims related to the truth, normative rightness, and authenticity or sincerity (Habermas, 1984: 15–16, 99–100). In everyday linguistic interaction, we typically take an affirmative position to these validity claims, but we also implicitly expect the speakers to be willing and able to vindicate these claims argumentatively when challenged (Habermas, 1984: 17–18).

Habermas maintained, contrary to many modern moral theorists’ views, that questions concerning normative validity, just as the questions concerning truth, can be assessed rationally and cognitively (Habermas, 1984: 19). Habermas’ discourse ethics, then, assesses “practical discourses,” within which normative validity claims are redeemed argumentatively (see especially Habermas, 1990, 1993). Discourse ethics has been of particular interest to communicative planning theorists, who have often linked up Habermasian ideas of discursive redemption of claims to normative validity to the concept of public interest (Sager, 2012: 32). The concept of public interest has been traditionally a central ground for the legitimacy for planning and public administration and also a ground that has been increasingly contested in our pluralizing societies (Campbell and Marshall, 2002; Moroni, 2004; Sager, 2012). Hence, although communicative planning theorists—Healey in particular—have utilized the concept to restore the legitimacy of planning, they also have been somewhat cautious in their usage of this term under the current conditions of increasing plurality of cultural identities and interests (cf. Sager, 2012: 32). Healey, in her theory of collaborative planning, is reluctant to take any firm position in the debate concerning whether public interests exist in contemporary pluralist societies, but she by no means rejects the concept as a point of reference. Even though she states that “the culturally homogeneous community with a common ‘public interest’ has been replaced in our imaginations by recognition of a diversity of ways of living everyday life and of valuing local environmental qualities” (Healey, 1997: 32), she still refers to Habermasian type of public interest, one that could and should “be established discursively” and that “has to reflect the diversity of our interests” (Healey, 1997: 296–297).

Habermas’ procedural approach to the issue of public interest

Although in planning theoretical discourse it is often—though not always—the concept of public interest that has been invoked when responding to the challenges of pluralism with communicative methods, Habermas himself has not favored this concept. Yet, he has approached the issue of public interest via a variety of related concepts. In his early work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas approached the issue of public interest by discussing the historical origins of the political “public sphere,” a sphere that mediates between civil society and the state and one within which citizens can leave behind their roles as private people—“private” referring to their roles related to both economy and the intimate sphere of family—and freely engage in rational, non-coercive discussion concerning the matters of their common interest (Habermas, 1991). As has been noted later, this model of the public sphere drew a sharp line between private and the public matters and interests, as private interests were excluded from the discourse that was oriented toward “common good” (Dahlberg, 2004: 112; Fraser, 1992: 129; Johnson, 2001: 45).

In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas’ approach to the problem of the public interest changed considerably, and together with the theory of discourse ethics the ideas of communicative action and communicative rationality contributed importantly to a renewed, normative conception of the public sphere (Dahlberg, 2004). In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas discusses the issue of public interest in terms of “generalizable interests,” that could provide a ground for coordinating and regulating our collective action (Habermas, 1987, see also 1993). One reason for Habermas’ avoidance of the specific concept of public interest may be that this concept has been often associated with the utilitarian tradition (cf. Campbell and Marshall, 2002). Habermas (1987) argues against the utilitarian conception of public interest where utilitarianism settles with a “generalizing compromise among fundamentally particular interests,” from which “we do not get an interest outfitted with the authority of the general interest, that is, with the claim to be recognized by everyone involved as a shared interest” (p. 93). In so arguing, Habermas has provided an important means with which also communicative planning theorists have challenged utilitarianism and its strong position in the modern urban planning. Utilitarianism has been observed to have provided justifications, for instance, for the extensive use of cost-benefit analyses and other such methods that have given administration and political decision-making opportunities for the promotion of “technocracy” through illegitimate derivation of value choices from facts (Fischer, 1990). For Healey, utilitarian attitude characterizes not only the history of modern technocratic urban planning but also some contemporary neo-liberalist political steering models within which particular interests are taken as fixed and pre-given, whereas Healey—following Habermas—would like to promote “open negotiation of values and ethics, beyond utilitarianism and consumerism” (Healey, 2004: 97, see also 1997: 43).

In arguing against utilitarianism, Habermas aligns himself with the Kantian tradition of deontological moral thought, especially Kantian categorical imperative. However, whereas in this case of categorical imperative subjects can “monologically” test the generalizability of a norm, the Habermasian theory requires that the claims to generalizability be tested in actual public discourses, discourses in which all those potentially affected by the norm in question can participate (Habermas, 1987: 93). Given that Habermas highlights the importance of the publicity of discourses, his generalizable interests could be argued to be public interests even in a stronger sense than utilitarianists’ public interests.

The ideal of public reasoning is incorporated for instance in Habermas’ famous notion of “ideal speech situation,” a contrafactual situation wherein, for instance, conditions such as “freedom of access, equal rights to participate, truthfulness on the part of participants,” and “absence of coercion” are fulfilled (Habermas, 1993: 56). Habermas emphasizes that these rigid conditions can never be met in actual discourses but that they still belong to the “unavoidable presuppositions” of argumentation, meaning that “[e]very speaker knows intuitively that an alleged argument is not a serious one if the appropriate conditions are violated” (Habermas, 1993: 56). As Habermas and communicative planning theorists following him have argued, the role of idealizations such as the ideal speech situation is not to provide a utopian vision of undistorted communication but rather serve as yardsticks for measuring the rationality of existing institutions and decisions (Blaug, 1999: 12; Forester, 1993: 3, 56; Healey, 2003: 113).

Habermas’ (1990) criterion concerning the public nature of the process is captured also in his “discourse principle”: “Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse” (p. 66, emphasis in the text). Even though both the ideal speech situation and the discourse principle are indicative of the procedural emphasis of Habermas’ theory, and even though Habermas and especially the planning theorists following him have also been criticized for accepting any outcomes as just outcomes if they result from a fair and just process (see Fainstein, 2000, 457, 2009, 2010, 9–10; see also Harris, 2002: 36), it can be argued that it is precisely the demand for generalizability of interests that touches also upon substantive issues—in this case the consequences of norms (Blaug, 1999: 10–11). Any outcome will not qualify as just, since in addition to the discourse principle, Habermas (1990) introduces also the “principle of universalizability” according to which a norm is valid only if all those who are affected by the norm “can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation)” (p. 65, emphasis in the text). The principle of universalization thus comprises Habermas’ often contested idea of rationally motivated consensus.

“The just,” “the good,” and the nature of the reasoning and speaking subject

Habermas’ theory of discursive redemption of generalizable interests and the concept of ideal speech situation underlying it have often been viewed as paralleling with Rawls’ concept of “original position,” a concept referring to a hypothetical and contrafactual situation wherein subjects temporarily bracket out their particularities such as their positions in society, their capacities, their tastes, their preferences, and the like in order to arrive at basic principles of justice from an impartial point of view (Campbell, 2006; Campbell and Marshall, 2006; Harper and Stein, 2006: 94–117). Yet, Habermas, unlike Rawls, does not rely on the conception of “unencumbered subject” stripped of from its particular features, a conception that has been typical to liberalist philosophy in general (Benhabib, 1992: 71). Habermas, by contrast, describes how the subjects are formed in the actual and real discourses they get involved in. This is the feature in Habermas’ thought that Healey strongly adheres to. In her view, when engaging in communicating communities that are “situated in the particularities of time and place,” the subjects gain capacities of creating “knowledge for action, principles of acting, and ways of acting” (Healey, 1992: 150–151, see also 1997: 49–54).

In further describing communicative processes, Healey (1997) leans on Habermas’ differentiation between types of validity claims and consequently also between “instrumental-technical reasoning, moral reasoning and emotive-aesthetic reasoning” (p. 51). Healey stresses, in particular, the need to separate the often intermeshed questions concerning facts from ones concerning values—questions that Forester names as questions concerning “uncertainty” and “ambiguity”—and the need to strengthen the position of questions concerning value in planning, a discipline that has been traditionally dominated by facts and scientific-instrumental reasoning (Forester, 1993: 88–90; Healey, 1997: 51). Yet, what is more interesting for the topic at hand is the way in which Healey and Habermas, respectively, would define the contents of the two last categories of reasoning, categories that are connected to questions concerning norms and values. In Habermasian scheme, the last category—one that Healey refers to as “emotive-aesthetic reasoning”—would include also the category of ethical reasoning, that is, reasoning concerning the questions of “the good life” or “ethical life” (Hegelian Sittlichkeit), whereas for Healey the questions concerning good life and ethical values appear to form the core of the middle category of moral reasoning. Habermas (1990) excludes these culturally embedded questions from the realm of moral reasoning, the realm of the questions concerning “the just” and “the right,” because, in his view, only the questions concerning justice can be rationally discussed in terms of the generalizability of interests so that they hold out the prospect of consensus (pp. 104, 106). Healey, however, does not thoroughly clarify her relation to the questions of “the just” in Habermasian meaning of the term.

Habermas (1990) maintains that the practical discourses, where the generalizability of interests is tested, need to go “beyond any particular form of life” and that “the consensus required of all concerned transcends the limits of any actual community” (p. 202). This is so, even though Habermas (1990) also emphasizes subjects’ “embeddedness in an intersubjectively shared web of relations,” maintaining also that it is only the actual contexts in place and time where the candidates for generalizable interests can be generated (p. 202). For Healey, however, it appears to be an anthropological fact that both the subjects and the discourses they get involved in always remain as embedded in their particular contexts. She furthermore suggests that if we wish to respect pluralism and the differences between the subjects and groups, we should not look at Habermasian discourses but sensitize ourselves to differences in styles of discoursing and local systems of meaning (Healey, 1992: 151–152, see also 1997: 54).

In rejecting Habermas’ rigid model of argumentative redemption of validity claims, Healey (1997: 54) refers to feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young, especially Young’s writings on the politics of difference (Young, 1990). Although Healey’s account on the theme of difference and plurality is not primarily based on feminism but, for instance, on anthropology (cf. Healey, 2015b: 440; Hillier and Metzger, 2015: 5–6), I assume that Habermas’ debate with feminist philosophers concerning the differentiation between the just and the good sheds light to Healey’s departure from Habermas’ thought.

Feminist critics of Habermasian moral theory have referred not only to the concept of generalized interest but also that of “generalized other” in criticizing universalism in Habermasian moral thought (Young 1990: 106–107, 118; see also Benhabib, 1992). Habermas links up the possibility of the discourses to transcend local, particular and provincial perspectives to the ability of moral subjects to assume the point of view of “generalized other.” Many feminist philosophers, by contrast, have argued against the prioritization of the perspective of “generalized other,” and emphasize the ability of moral subjects to encounter concrete and culturally embedded others. Seyla Benhabib, a sympathetic critique of Habermas, summarizes the differences between concrete and generalized others in the following way: In taking the point of view of generalized other “we abstract from the individuality and concrete identity of the other” and relate “to the norms of formal equality and reciprocity.” In this case, the relevant moral categories “are those of right, obligation, and entitlement.” In taking the point of view of concrete other, we “abstract from what constitutes our commonality” and “view each and every rational being as an individual with a concrete history, identity, and affective-emotional constitution,” relating to “the norms of friendship, love, and care.” In this case, the relevant moral categories are those of “responsibility, bonding, and sharing” (Benhabib, 1992: 158–159). The consequences that many feminist philosophers have drawn from Habermas’ prioritization of the viewpoint of generalized other have been interesting with regard of the theme of public interest. The argument has often been that Habermas’ prioritization—or the very differentiation itself—pushes “contextualized needs” away from the public realm, which becomes then the realm for the “rights and principles” only (Young, 1990: 118; cf. Healey, 1997: 211).

It is worth noting at this point that Habermas’ adherence to the viewpoint of “generalized other” in moral discourses is not a mere contrafactual philosophical presupposition, but he indirectly backs up his reconstruction project here with Lawrence Kohlberg’s psychological studies of the moral development of a person (Habermas, 1987: 174–175, 1990: 116–188). Kohlberg’s studies, in turn, were inspired by pragmatist G.H. Mead’s works that originally introduced the concept of “generalized other.” Based on empirical studies, Kohlberg divided moral development of a person into three main stages, which he named as pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. At the pre-conventional stage, the reasoning subjects are reasoning in a self-centered manner and remain oriented, for instance, toward punishments or rewards. At the conventional stage, the focus of the subject is on the social context and the attention is directed to the responses coming from the other members of the community. At the post-conventional stage, subjects adopt a reflective attitude toward the existing norms of a community, ending up with capability of abstract reasoning that leans on universal principles and the idea of taking the perspective of generalized other (Habermas, 1990: 116–188). As Habermas (1990) puts it, at the post-conventional stage, “moral judgment becomes dissociated from the local conventions and historical coloration of a particular form of life” (p. 109).

Kohlberg’s studies—and later Habermas’ interpretations of Kohlberg—encountered criticism from feminists already in the 1980s when Carol Gilligan argued that “conventional” forms of reasoning are typical especially for women, for whom webs of social relations and care and concern for others have traditionally been more significant than to men (Benhabib, 1992: 148–177; Meehan, 1995; Young, 1990). Feminists argued that conventional forms of reasoning are not inferior to post-conventional forms, but they just represent a “different voice” of reasoning, to borrow the expression of Gilligan (1982).

Benhabib (1992) shares the concern for ethics of care and the perspective of “concrete others” with many other feminist writers, and she reminds us that it is not of course only women who are concrete and situated others, but this viewpoint should be equally relevant for all people—planners and stakeholders included, we might add (p. 164). In fact, Healey is quite right in emphasizing the relevance of concrete and situated others in the field of planning, given that planning is for the most part a contextually embedded practice (cf. Campbell, 2006). However, Healey is by no means willing to settle with such concept of planning that would be reducible to local application of norms; she is also concerned with normative change at institutional level, and she wishes collaborative planning to be able to assess questions concerning rights and justice in urban context (see, for example, Healey, 1997: 130). Would not this require that the theory built not only on the relational networks between concrete others—however inclusive and trans-scalar the networks are—but also on the perspective of the generalized other?

In reflecting on the relation between communicative planning theories and the justice in urban contexts, Susan Fainstein (2000: 456–457) has suggested that communicative planning theorists’ insistence on the public relevance of planners’ situated and personal encounters—an insistence that she interestingly views as originating partly from feminist thought—may direct planning theorists attention away from the questions concerning broader institutional structures that make cities just or unjust (cf. Healey, 2003: 110). Fainstein’s criticism applies to Healey’s theory as well, although it is perhaps not primarily leveled against Healey, given that Healey has explored extensively also the institutional context of planning—an issue that will be discussed later in this article. Even though Fainstein’s solution here would be to move away from procedural approach, her criticism raises a question as to whether communicative and collaborative planning theories—as procedural theories—could be better equipped to answer questions concerning justice in cities, if the procedural requirements concerning impartiality in reasoning were stricter. Could it help if collaborative planning theory did not only emphasize the perspective of the concrete others but also that of generalized others?

Benhabib’s works could be useful if we wish to enhance collaborative planning theory’s capacity to assess questions concerning justice and rights in urban context, questions that often lie at the heart of collisions between different locally defined “public interests.” Benhabib has purported to bridge the gap between Habermasian and feminist thinking by pointing out that the project of communicative ethics should not focus on the difference between the viewpoints of concrete and generalized other but recognize the continuum between them. In Benhabib’s (1992) words, moral theories should lead “us to recognize the dignity of the generalized other through an acknowledgment of the moral identity of the concrete other” (p. 164). Even though she shares the concern for difference with Young and many other feminist scholars, she also argues that political theory of justice needs the perspective of generalized other and that reliance on the standpoint of concrete other alone would be likely to turn against feminists own objectives concerning women’s or suppressed minorities’ position (Benhabib, 1992: 164).

Following Benhabib’s thought, it could be argued that the idea of generalized other could be well accommodated in collaborative planning theory. By recognizing the continuum between the perspectives of concrete and generalized others, collaborative planning theory could, first, show that we would not even recognize the problems of justice in cities without being sensitive to the concerns of concrete others. This, I think, is one of Healey’s key points. Second, however, this would also provide the theory with such conceptual tools that allow us to find solutions to the recognized problems of justice from an impartial point of view.

System and lifeworld—aspatial logic of economy and administration against the local cultures of places

The differences between Habermas’ and Healey’s projects are not limited to the definitions of moral point of view and the underlying ideas of the subject in the respective authors’ conceptions of moral realm but they extend also to the ideas concerning institutional design and organizational structures in society. I will move toward the question concerning institutional design by looking next at Habermas’ conceptual differentiation between “the system” and “the lifeworld.” Healey makes references to this pair of concepts as she sketches out the role of planning in society, positioning it at “the critical interface” of these two realms (see, for example, Healey, 1997: 49–54, 2010: 55–57). Her ways of using these terms partly reflect the ethical priority of “the local,” “the concrete,” and “the particular,” but they also reveal that Healey has doubts concerning the very possibility that planning discourses could transcend private and sectional interests and give a rise to a moral point of view, whether it is understood in Habermasian universalist terms as referring to a justice point of view or in Healeyan terms of ethics and situated ideas of good life.

“Lifeworld,” for Habermas, is a concept that refers to a realm of action where action coordination is based on mutual understanding concerning norms and values, the possibility of which is inherent in language. “System,” by contrast, refers to the realm that has been “de-coupled” from the context of lifeworld and relieved of the burdens of communicative action coordination. Instead of communication and consensus, the system—referring in practice to the systems of economy and administration—relies on the steering media of money and power. Systems provide a context where individuals can act strategically and their actions can be based on calculative approach. Nonetheless, there are always limits to the systemic action context, and these limits—legal norms in particular—should originate from the lifeworld and its consensus-producing communicative processes (Habermas, 1987: 117–197, 259–282).

Habermas’ project, then, is not targeted against the system; quite the contrary, the system is needed since it not only increases efficiency in material reproduction but also facilitates the rationalization of lifeworld—meaning, for instance, that the differentiated spheres of culture can develop through communicative processes. The problem, however, is that the system has a tendency to turn against the lifeworld; it tends to “colonize” it, that is, to crowd out communicative rationality and deprive lifeworld from its potentials of symbolic reproduction (Habermas, 1987: 113–197).

Following Habermas’ theory of colonization, Healey defends “localized lifeworlds” against the intrusions of the systems logic, but she does not question the presence of the system as such. Habermas would surely share the concern of Healey for particularity of places and cultures when they are not juxtaposed with universal morality but with the placeless logics of the system. According to Healey’s portrayal of the interplay of system and lifeworld, there is a threat that abstract system colonizes local place-based cultures, which is why local planning needs “more capacity to resist the dominatory tendencies of the abstract structures associated with the economy and state” (Healey, 1997: 55, 207, see also 2003: 116). Habermas (1987) appears to share with Healey the spatialized interpretation of lifeworld as he describes, for instance, how system imperatives “make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation upon it” (p. 355). But again, a difference remains between the ways in which the respective authors make use of the concept of lifeworld: Healey speaks of “localized lifeworlds,” emphasizing the diversity of lifeworlds, whereas Habermas is mainly interested in the universally shared structures of our lifeworlds, structures that he derives from the rational reconstruction of the presuppositions of argumentative speech (Habermas, 1984, 1987; Healey, 1997: 62).

Yet, at this point, the difference is not only of that Healey wishes to invoke ethics based on care and concern for places and for the people who share the places with us, whereas Habermas’ relies on the potential of universalizing moral thought; it is also that Healey does not speak of localized lifeworlds only in the language of ethics and care for the places but gives a central place for the strategic interests that people have in places. For example, she speaks of publics that have “a collective stake in what happens in a place,” an interest that unites people so that they form a public (Healey, 2010: 49, see also 2003: 116). The frequent usage of terms such as “stake” or “stakeholder” has indeed been taken to be indicative of the fact that systems logic have a firm place in Healey’s conception of collaborative place-making (cf. Purcell, 2009: 157; see also Harris, 2002: 35). Philip Allmendinger and Mark Tewdwr-Jones (2002) illustrate the presence of systems logic in the project of collaborative planning in describing how this project reflects “the zeitgeist of global economic restructuring and local responses,” part of this zeitgeist being that the local communities build their institutional capacities “to compete for the better and attract foreign direct investment” (p. 6).

Healey’s portrayal of people and communities with “stakes” in places is surely realistic and captures well the actual motives that people and communities often have for their engagement in governance networks in local and trans-scalar level alike. Hence, even though Healey’s original version of collaborative planning seems to lean on localism, Healey cannot be criticized for falling into a “local trap,” a term used by Mark Purcell (2006) to refer to the assumption underlying many theories of urban democracy that strengthening democracy through participation would be more beneficial at a local level than other levels and scales of democracy. Healey acknowledges that local democracy can produce locally defined public interests that conflict with the interests of other communities and even with just city development. In assessing these kinds of conflicts, she writes, “Many planning conflicts rapidly take the form of ‘us’ and ‘them’, as if conflict was between groups. […]. Local democracy, if it takes this form, rapidly becomes an exercise in the exclusion of weaker interests by dominant groups” (Healey, 1997: 130).

But, if the common denominator between the participants of collaborative networks is not primarily the rationality inherent in language, not even respect and recognition of differences between people and groups but strategic stakes on places, can we assume that the public interest is likely to emerge from collaborative networks—let alone such public interest that transcends the local point of view and even amounts to being a generalizable interest? Are there any institutional designs that could facilitate the emergence of such broad-based public interests?

Institutional designs that facilitate the emergence of public interest while respecting difference

Since both Healey and Habermas build on a procedural approach, neither one of them is willing to provide any specific models for institutional or organizational designs that could facilitate the emergence of public interest or generalizable interests. Healey emphasizes the “complexity and contingency of development pathways” through which planning ideas, processes, and organizations have come into being and reminds us that we should not think that there are universally valid institutional or organizational models in planning (Healey, 2011: 191, see also 2003: 110). Also Habermas, in his latest major work Between Facts and Norms, sees the question of institutional design as contextually embedded, so he too would be willing to leave the concrete institutional designs to be ultimately decided in actual discourses carried out in some concrete place and time (Habermas, 1996; see also Blaug, 1999: 60–68).

Nonetheless, there is one major difference between Healey’s and Habermas’ ideals of institutional structures. Healey emphasizes the role of informal networks that cross the boundaries between civil society and political-administrative systems, private and public spheres, different administrative sectors, and also territorial jurisdictions. Habermas, by contrast, makes a division between “formal” and “informal” and puts the emphasis on formal institutions such as governments and law, although he also stresses the role of the input coming to formal institutions from informal communicative networks in the public sphere. Habermas turns to formal institutions such as law for the reason that the coordinating and integrative power of informal normative structures has weakened in our pluralizing societies (Habermas, 1996; see also Bohman, 1994; March, 2012: 34). Morality, then, needs to be complemented by law. Habermas stresses the role of the ideals of discourse in the process of legitimate law-making, but even more important, according to him, is the role of law in institutionalizing these ideals. In contrast to Habermas, Healey looks at the recent past and sets out from the observation that formal public institutions have lost much of their importance for collective action coordination and that power is increasingly shifting outside the formal arenas of decision-making (Healey, 1997: 59, 2007). Therefore, as she contends, the focus of planning and governance theory should be directed on the ways in which this power could be better brought to public control and made more legitimate (Healey, 1997, 2007, 2010: 18).

Habermas and Healey also have differing viewpoints to institutional change. Habermas looks at the change from the bird’s-eye perspective, focusing on the “subjectless” flows of communication and reasoning in the public sphere, flows that eventually should influence the norms and rules in society, culminating into law-making and design of formal institutions. Healey, by contrast, looks at the change from the grassroots perspective of concrete communicative networks. However, Healey has stressed—more than many other theorists of communicative planning who have underlined the importance of everyday interactions of planners—that micro-level encounters are relevant also for normative change and “institutional design” in a macro-scale. She turns here to Giddens’ idea of actors whose actions are restricted by the structures of society but who also change these structures as they act (Healey, 1997: 43–49, 1999).

Healey’s ideas concerning institutional design are based on the recognition of difference and pluralism in society, and she wishes to sensitize the participants of planning discourses to that difference—to the particularity of others and other cultures—through informal and fluid governance networks. However, also one of Habermas’ key purposes in Between Facts and Norms appears to be to do justice to the diversity of discourses and diversity of the ideas of “good life” in contemporary complex societies. Whereas The Theory of Communicative Action seems to imply a view that it is mainly the generalizable interests and the idea of rationally grounded consensus that are relevant for regulating our collective life, in Between Facts and Norms Habermas makes it clear that, when at issue is not the realm of morality but that of politics and law-making, questions concerning the ever diversifying conceptions of good life enter into picture as well (Habermas, 1996; see also Bohman, 1994; Scheuerman, 1999). As he argues, these questions can be assessed rationally but only “within the horizon of a life project already presupposed as valid.” Hence, he leaves room for “reasonable disagreement” over the ideas of the good life (Habermas, 1996: 60–61). Moreover, Habermas (1996) makes space also for purely pragmatic discourses where at issue are means for given ends, as well as for “balancing [of] interests that cannot be generalized but call instead for fair compromises” (pp. 154–156).

In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas shifts his attention from single discourses to complex webs of discursive networks in the public sphere, networks that host various types of discourses mentioned above. While Habermas’ concept of consensus in his earlier works had led commentators such as Iris Young to charge Habermas with implicit promotion of an ideal “unity of the civic public,” Habermas has clarified it later that “collective will formation […] cannot be correctly construed as individual will formation writ large” (Habermas, 1993: 16, see also 1996: 298). In Between Facts and Norms, he underlines the decentered and fragmented nature of society, public, and public spheres by speaking of “subjectless” public and “anonymous” flow of communication.

Habermas (1996) defines the public sphere now as “a network for communicating information and points of view,” a network within which “the streams of communication are […] filtered and synthetized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions” (p. 360, emphasis in the text). Habermas (1996) divides the public sphere into formal or “institutionalized” public spheres and informal “general public spheres,” following Nancy Fraser’s differentiation between “strong” and “weak” publics (p. 307). In Habermas’ scheme, formal public spheres such as parliamentary bodies remain as responsible for binding decisions, decisions that are made in the framework of procedurally regulated justificatory discourses. Informal “general public spheres,” in turn, are left with the task of discovering social problems and bringing them into the knowledge of formal public spheres (Habermas 1996: 136, 171, 299–315, 486–487; see also Bohman, 1994: 918). Because of their unstructured, “unconstrained” and even “anarchic” nature, informal public spheres are suitable for situated reasoning, for instance, for creative interpretation of the needs of a given community or formation of collective identities (Habermas, 1996: 307, 314). But the unconstrained nature of general public spheres also means that they are “vulnerable to the repressive and the exclusionary effects of unequally distributed social power” (Habermas, 1996: 307). This is one of the reasons why Habermas does not regard them as suitable for decision-making. In fact, Healey (2007: 260, 2010) has also emphasized the potential of the informal networks of communication primarily as the context of “discovery” and creative “imagining of futures,” although in her model informal networks have decision-making powers as well.

In assessing the flow of reasons and viewpoints from the margins of general public spheres to the center of formal public sphere, Habermas also sheds new light on the debate inaugurated by feminists, the debate concerning boundaries between private and public spheres, or private and public matters. In contrast to some feminist critics’ such as Young’s (1996) views, Habermas’ model can be argued to make room for such modes of communication that are grounded in the intimate spheres of people (Sorial, 2011)—the very modes of communication that Healey (1992: 151–152), following Young, wishes to make room for in the theory of collaborative planning. The space that Habermas gives for these modes of communication is located in the general public sphere. Habermas describes how, for instance, feminists’ struggles for recognition have started from the expressions of particular experiences in the margins of general public sphere, but eventually after “a long road” many of the concerns of feminist movement have acquired the status of public and political matters (Habermas, 1996: 312–314). Habermas here appears to agree with Frasers’ and Benhabib’s claim that the boundaries between private and public cannot be drawn by anyone else than the participants of a discourse themselves (Habermas, 1996: 312–314; see also Benhabib, 1992: 12, 99; Fraser, 1992: 129).

In discussing with his feminist critics, Habermas builds on his complex idea of “co-originality” of private and public autonomy. With the notion of co-originality, Habermas challenges—and eventually reconciles—both ends of the traditional spectrum of political philosophy: the “liberalist” view that prioritizes the conception of self-interested subjects, who are viewed primarily as bearers of rights, and the “republican” view within which the subjects are oriented to the search of the public good and shared ethical ideals (Habermas, 1996; see also Baynes, 1995: 214–216). These both traditions have been challenged not only by Habermas but also by feminists, who do not subscribe to the liberalist conception of the unencumbered subject but for whom the republican view is also problematic, as it does not appear to recognize and give respect to differences between “publics” in pluralizing societies. Relatedly, Habermas also challenges both the “liberal” and the “welfarist” paradigms of law. From this perspective, feminists’ dilemma boils down to the dilemma between equality and difference (Sorial, 2011). Liberal thinking has been mirrored in a paradigm of law that has emphasized formal equality and freedom, but, given that there have always been such groups in society who do not have actual possibilities to actualize this freedom, law in modern welfare states has directed attention to material conditions that would guarantee not only formal but actual possibilities for these specific groups. This, however, has led to paternalistic solutions where the state interprets the needs of those groups the private autonomy of which it originally aimed to protect, affirming thereby stereotypical conceptions concerning their identities (Sorial, 2011: 29–33).

Habermas has been argued to contribute substantially to the resolution of this multifaceted dilemma, taken up by feminists, with his discourse theory of law, a theory that emphasizes the role of those affected by laws and regulations in law-making (Johnson, 2001; Sorial, 2011). According to Habermas’ idea of co-originality of private and public autonomy, an idea echoed also in the co-originality of rule of law and democracy, a private individual is not just “a bearer of fundamental rights” but also “a potential contributor to those discursive processes through which the idea of common good gains legal sanction” (Johnson, 2001: 45). Although the system of rights and the principles of equal treatment are central for Habermas, he directs attention also to the actualization of rights, which, in turn, requires that differences between particularities of subjects and groups be appropriately recognized. As Habermas (1998) writes,

private legal persons cannot even attain the enjoyment of equal individual liberties unless they themselves, by jointly exercising their autonomy as citizens, arrive at a clear understanding about what interests and criteria are justified and in what respects equal things will be treated equally and unequal things unequally in any particular case. (p. 208)

Although Habermas makes efforts in responding to his feminist critics, some important questions still remain unanswered. It has been asked whether there are any elements of radical democracy left in Habermas’ “two-track” model (see, for example, Benhabib, 1997; Scheuerman, 1999). Relatedly, given that Habermas still adheres to practical discourses and the prospect of consensus in justification of law and policies, the question has been whether his model ultimately leaves room for such differences and dissensuses that make “agonistic politics” possible (cf. Mouffe, 2013). As is well known, the latter question has been central for the recent years’ planning-theoretical discourse (see, for example, Hillier, 2002, 2003; Pløger, 2004; Purcell, 2009). Jean Hillier (2003), for instance, criticizes Habermas’ adherence to formal institutions such as law, arguing that Habermasian legalist project eventually “replace[s] politics by rules or laws” (p. 41). Hillier is probably not only referring to the fact that along the emphasis put on formal institutions, the rules of discourse and certain formal, neutral, and argumentative modes of speech in general may gain a position of hegemony in public life, which is the concern of feminist “difference democrats” such as Iris Young (1996). If I interpret Hillier correctly, she is more concerned here with the “normalizing” effect of rules and regulations in Foucauldian sense of the term (cf. Dahlberg, 2004: 121–122; Hillier, 2002: 39–42, 50–51). Yet, Habermas’ intention is surely not to replace politics by law but, by contrast, to encourage different types of public discourses that challenge existing rules and norms and reveal the existing gaps between facticity and validity of law (Habermas, 1996; see also March, 2012: 36; White and Parr, 2012: 40). Although in Habermas’ “two-track” model “socially bounded” and “temporally limited” formal publics eventually have the legislative power, his model aims at preserving the multiplicity of voices in the wider and general public sphere. Decisions made in formal public spheres are seen in this model as “fallible” and challengeable (Bohman, 1994: 919; Habermas, 1996: 306–315, 474–477). As has been also pointed out, Habermas stresses in Between Facts and Norms that mature democracies should even tolerate civil disobedience as a way to challenge democratically and legitimately enacted laws (Thomassen, 2007; White and Parr, 2012; see also Habermas, 1996: 382–384).

Questions concerning power and motivation

As is well known, it is not only the proponents of agonist politics and planning who have charged both Habermas and the theorists of communicative planning for having misconceived the nature of power and failing to deal with power in practice. Space does not allow me to go deeper into the discourse concerning power, but I will pick up on one practical question, a question presented by the proponents of agonist planning, Foucauldian planning theorists and Just City theorists alike. The question is, why should we expect that people would be willing to search for consensus in the specific realm of planning, a realm that is infused with private and sectional interests (see, for example, Fainstein, 2000; Hillier, 2003; Tewdwr-Jones and Allmendinger, 1998; Yiftachel and Huxley, 2000)? This question is not perhaps directed to Habermas, since he has not purported his theories to be applied in everyday administrative contexts but in democratic processes of law-making and in processes where formal institutional designs are laid out (Habermas, 1996; see also Campbell, 2006; Campbell and Marshall, 2006). However, we might expect Healey’s theory to answer this question. Seen from Habermasian perspective, the problem with Healey’s theory is that when planning is located at the “critical interface” between the system and the lifeworld, some of the actors can freely rely on calculative and self-interested logics of the system. This being the case, we might not need to go to Foucault or to any other theorists than Habermas to understand why it is often power and not rational search for consensus that shapes planning decisions (March, 2012: 33–35, 69).

Healey does not draw sharp lines between the system and the lifeworld, and this is probably for the reason that she is not only a proponent of communicative approach but also of “institutionalism,” a term that is rather vague, but in Healey’s case, it refers especially to new institutionalist economics (see especially Healey, 1999). One of the tenets of institutionalist economics has been that the actors in the market are not only pursuing their strategic interests but that their actions are often also influenced by values and traditions (Healey, 1997: 211, 2003: 106; see also Kim, 2012: 72). Similar arguments against the system–lifeworld differentiation have come also from the field of philosophy—again especially from feminist philosophy. Nancy Fraser, for instance, has argued that “[i]n few, if any human actions contexts are actions coordinated absolutely nonconsensually and absolutely nonnormatively” (Fraser, 1995: 26). Habermas agrees with this, but his point is that steering media—money and power respectively—set “the standards by which conflicts are ultimately resolved” (Habermas, 1993: 166–167). In cases of conflict, some actors can legitimately resort to power instead of arguments.

If we take Habermas’ system–lifeworld differentiation seriously, Healey’s approach to normative change and “institutional design” in planning and governance appears as problematic. Healey leans on the conception that micro-level action shapes macro-level structures in society (Healey, 1997: 43–49, 1999). This micro-level action is, however, power-laden and many of the actors can legitimately resort to calculative and self-interested mode of action. Healey’s model of change may be a realistic one, but if we look at the issue from the normative point of view, can we expect that the change in structures and institutions is for the better?

This criticism might not be as severe as it appears at the outset, since Healey probably speaks of institutions in a different sense than Habermas. In fact, as Stefano Moroni (2010) has pointed out, many planning theorists actually refer to organizations when they use the term “institution,” organization meaning not values and rules in society but “systematic arrangements of resources for achieving explicit, shared goals” (p. 277). Organizations, then, can be interpreted to belong to the action context of the system. Healey’s collaborative planning is in many respects a theory of everyday work of planning organizations in the systemic contexts and an attempt to mobilize governance networks to search for more creative, innovative, and effective solutions to reach the goals that are already given. But Healey would not surely reduce her theory to the theory of organizations, since there is also a normative aspect to the theory (cf. Healey, 1999: 113).

Some of the critics of communicative planning have suggested that the normative goals of communicative planning theories, in general, could be strengthened if the theories took “critical distance” from the “daily” and the “local” so as to see the structural constraints of the ideals of communicative planning (Yiftachel and Huxley, 2000: 908–910; cf. Fainstein, 2000: 456–7). This is actually what Habermas does in turning his focus to macro-level issues such as the design of those institutions that lay down the framework for the action context of the system. While the theories of communicative planning—collaborative planning included—might be criticized for not being able to explain why we might expect people to be motivated to search for public interest of generalizable interests, we might expect that democratically organized processes of law-making form a context where rationally motivated processes of legitimation can occur, if they are to occur anywhere. After all, we typically expect that there are no considerable gaps between the facticity and normative validity of law in modern rationalized societies (cf. Bohman, 1994: 910).

But this is not to suggest that all planning problems could be solved with legal regulation; it is only to suggest that “hard infrastructures”—to borrow Healey’s term—can have their advantages with regard to questions that call for impartial resolution, the fact of which is recognized also by Healey (1997: 269, 284–310). Nor is this to argue that Habermas’ discourse theory of law—or theory of deliberative democracy—is without problems. By contrast, its usefulness for practice, in particular, has been questioned on a regular basis. For example, it has been argued that even though Habermas’ turn from the theory of single discourses to a model of “anonymous” flow of reasons makes sense in terms of the objective of achieving greater rationality in decision-making, it does not seem to provide an adequate normative model if we wish to see increase in people’s motivation to enter into discourses or comply with norms. Habermas assumes that the emergence of post-conventional moral consciousness occurs through the actual discourses we get involved in, but does the splintering of discourses into anonymous flows of reasons support the emergence of post-conventional moral consciousness? (Munro, 2007: 461–464). Are we back in the dilemma, originating from Kant, that situated forms of reasoning have a capacity to motivate while lacking the rationality brought about by impartiality and the perspective of generalized other? Also, the universalistic forms may be argued to be rational, but rationality alone bears only a weak motivating force (cf. Munro, 2007). Healey’s model of situated reasoning explains well why we might be motivated to take part in the discourses concerning the future of the places that we have stakes on and why, in spite of all the stakes and interests, the discourses may eventually lead to the emergence of more impartial forms of reasoning. However, Healey’s model is in many respects more vulnerable than Habermas’ model to criticisms related to the issues such as power-originated distortions in communication and prioritization of private and sectional interests.

Conclusion

This article has argued that if collaborative planning theory wishes to respond to questions concerning justice in cities—questions that may lie behind the collisions between different locally defined public interests—it could benefit from revisiting Habermas’ notion of “generalizable interests.” Healey originally departed from Habermasian theory as she wished to respect the pluralism and the differences between subjects and groups in contemporary cities and societies. Healey’s adherence to the embeddedness of subjects and discourses may originate from her history with anthropologically oriented planning research, but she also refers to Iris Young’s criticisms of Habermas’ one-sided conception of discourses, a conception that supposedly makes Habermas unable to do justice to diversity and pluralism. Habermas has, however, responded to feminist theorists of difference, such as Young, at many works published after The Theory of Communicative Action, and also many feminist writers have recognized the relevance of Habermas’ later ideas of political discourses for the agendas related to difference and pluralism. As this article has maintained, in the light of Habermas’ recent works, it seems that the idea of generalizable interests is not necessarily in conflict with the respect of concrete others and situated reasoning.

The notion of consensus—and Habermas’ universalizability principle with it—still surely remains as a contested concept. Philosophers are still debating whether the universalizability principle is too strict to allow any actual consensuses to emerge and whether there is a need to reconstruct the principle (Blaug, 1999). However, as Seyla Benhabib (1992) has pointed out, even though it would not be possible to reach consensus in real life, the concept of generalizable interest can still be relevant as a “regulative ideal” (pp. 9, 38).

But could there be a place for generalizable interests in Healey’s theory, or is it all about situated practices or local identities and meanings? In a recent collection of Healey’s works, her notion of consensus has been interpreted to refer to “something that is inevitably context-dependent and which fundamentally concerns the questions ‘what’ and ‘how’” (Hillier and Metzger, 2015: 11). Furthermore, her collaborative planning has been viewed as a theory that is not all about consensus but also of “struggle” and “conflict” (Hillier and Metzger, 2015: 11; see also Healey, 2003: 114), a fact which would align her with agonists rather than Habermasians. But Healey (2011) also seems to adhere to a weak form of universalism, for instance, when she discusses “planning ideas” that sometimes incorporate “contingent universals.” Healey does not unpack the concept of planning idea or differentiate between its political, ethical, moral, and pragmatic dimensions. However, as I believe, Healey does not only speak about universal validity in the realm of means-ends relations but there is also a normative dimension in “contingent universals” for her. If this is the case, then Habermasian “generalizable interests” perhaps could be accommodated in her theory, though surely not as something that planners should be constantly concerned within their day-to-day place-making work but as something that could be relevant in cases where the questions of justice arise and in cases wherein formal institutional structures might be in need of revision.