Abstract
When a highly esteemed colleague as Prof. Alexander looks back at his distinguished career and observes a stockpile of problems in the planning discipline, to the extent that both planning and planning theory seem to lose their unity and validity (Alexander, 2016), there is ample reason to listen.
As we are not talking about family planning or vacation planning, it seems obvious that there is some unity in the field, notably planning as spatial planning. That makes planning a field of action and reflection with an interest in the organization of space. With that comes a natural interest in coordination, as one can assume that more people, more land-use activities, more policies and laws, and more forms of knowledge will come to bear on the organization of space (Allmendinger, 2009; Dobrucká, 2016; Van Assche and Verschraegen, 2008). Planning usually has the ambition to intervene in spatial organization, toward some form of improvement, and such intervention tends to be guided by an image of a better future.
One can imagine planning without planners, that is, specialists with planning degrees and titles, planning without plans, or planning largely relying on informal institutions (e.g. Roy, 2009). One can analyze planning from different theoretical perspectives, some linked to clear normative stances, others not (Allmendinger, 2009). Planners can idealize places and societies, where planners occupied powerful positions. Or they can say that every society and every community within that society chooses its own forms of spatial organization, as we tend to do. With all this diversity, the basic unity in the field sketched above seems to persist. Even in the context of political and ideological polarization, such basic definition of planning can be maintained, and the combination of right and left wing arguments for early American zoning can remind us of that.
What exactly then is the problem? Is planning facing a deep crisis, and might it be on the verge of vanishing, as philosophy has left us, as the novel has been declared dead, together with God? Well, for many, God, philosophy, and the novel are very much alive, and the proclamations of existential threat are usually marks of a transitional stage, not the end. Even the boogeyman of neo-liberalism did not kill planning, nor did the competition with other expert groups. What seems at stake here is the soul of planning in a very modernist understanding of the field—a field where modernist philosophies lingered on much longer than in neighboring disciplines and fields (Van Assche et al., 2014).
What, indeed, looks highly unlikely at the moment is a degree of cohesion in theory and practice which can only exist in a modernist fantasy of planners assisting governments to optimize spatial organization in a scientific, that is, unambiguous manner. In this myth, the plan is endowed with magical powers of coordination, leading to its own implementation, and power/knowledge dynamics suddenly stops after the planner enters the room.
This enduring bewitching by modernism one can easily discern in planning theory and praxis. One can see it in the continuous confusion of analytic and normative statements within and beyond academia, in the general lack of reflection on normativity, in the overly high expectations of theory, as somehow able to tell practitioners what to do. It is present in the courses on planning ethics, which pretend to know what correct behavior is, without even trying to engage with the variety of ethical theories. The witchcraft is at work among the adepts of collaborative planning, where many still expect to find a magical formula which reveals the ultimate balance between participation and representation, in procedures enabling the perfectability of space and society.
It looks like even esteemed colleague Alexander, with his prodigious experience, is still in the grip of this magical modernism. As he knows, better than most of us, that the planner-oracle usually stumbles after a few steps, he draws the conclusion that planning does not exist, like the disappointed Romantic who denounces Love and only sees people doing things on the backseat of the car.
We would rather take the position that Love, and the Love of better places and communities, can be understood in many ways, and has many manifestations, none of which exhausts the multiplicity of Love, and none of which can be entirely known from within one single conceptual frame. What we see as the good community, which role we attribute to government and its experts in working in that direction, how spatial organization plays out in that process all this is contingent on many factors which are only half understood in the community itself.
What planning needs in the already aging Age of the post-modern is not a renunciation of theory or practice, or a loss of hope in the face of dashed expectations, but, quite simply, a broadening of perspective, an openness for what the diversity of communities and the multitude of expert groups has to offer. Reflexivity on roles is the key message here: planners had to invent and reinvent their roles all the time and being aware of this helps to invent and reinvent their roles. This contingent nature of planning and the planner became invisible for the modernists because of their latent assumptions. Now that we know these don’t hold true, the confrontation with contingency can be renewed and cultivating reflexivity can help planners to navigate new landscapes of risk and opportunity.
To assist this endeavor, theory is more useful than ever. This journal has contributed more than any other, we believe, to the rejuvenation of planning theory, and, consequently, to open new horizons for planning practice, and for the delineation of new roles for planners. With Machiavelli, and closer to home, with planning theorists like Gunder and Hillier, we believe that each community and each perspective require rejuvenation every now and then, a confrontation with basic assumptions and key concepts (Gunder and Hillier, 2009). With various contributions in Planning Theory and beyond having opened the doors of the discipline for a bewildering richness of new perspectives, such rejuvenation can yield quickly evolving insights, and the opportunity to tailor theories to topics, times, places, and roles.
In our view, a simple yet useful starting point to break the spell of modernism is to re-introduce some forgotten distinctions, a conceptual move we also made in our earlier work (Van Assche et al., 2013).
A few of those distinctions we can still present here in the offering of a nutshell. First, one should make a distinction between planning practices and naming those practices. Those who are called planners are not the only planners in society and they don’t always need plans, as formal institutions in the form of visuals outlining future spaces. Many actors can be involved in the coordination of spatial organization, and they can use many approaches, strategies, and tools. People professionally involved in planning do not necessarily have the title of planner, maybe didn’t go to a planning school, and it’s likely they do not work for a planning department. What and who is allowed to carry the name planning is a matter of contingent power/knowledge interactions, which are distinct from the actually evolving field of practices.
Second, the profession is not the discipline. The discipline practices reflection on what planning is, and next, only next, what it could be and how it could contribute to improvements in spatial, and maybe socio-economic, organization. Especially in North America, with its system of accreditation of schools, teachers, and planners through professional associations, this important distinction seems lost. The necessity reflection on assumptions, which can open the door to true innovation, is constantly undermined by a profession projecting “best practices” on aspiring planners and their teachers.
Third, planning practices are not the same as planning perspectives, and many things carried out in the name of planning do not amount to planning, as there is no conscious attempt and no practical reality of coordinating the organization of space. In terms of reflection on planning practices, it is therefore important to look beyond what is officially called planning, and pay attention to the rich variety of ways in which people all over the world are actually coordinating space (Roy, 2009; Winkler and Duminy, 2016).
Finally, there are actual roles of planners, as well as imagined and aspired to roles. Planners can imagine they can plan, while de facto others do it. Or they can be aware of their current limitations, and aspire to a more substantial role in ever evolving governance. The game never stops, and roles are never defined for eternity. Contingency thus shows itself not as the death of planning and the planner, but as a force opening ever-new windows on new roles and practices. The projection of alternative futures including serious roles for planners can exert its magic, can become performative, when others become persuaded and organize governance anew, allowing for a new planner to arise.
This new magic, however, will only work when the spell of modernism is broken. Unfortunately, even the wisest observers in planning, even people who are keenly aware of the pitfalls of modernist planning, seem to remain under the influence, when they capitulate in the face of impossible “real” (i.e. modernist) planning theory and praxis.