Abstract
Just prior to being asked to review Willem’s new book, I had read James Comey’s (2018) A Higher Loyal. What I took away from that book was not any new truths about America’s current president, but rather a stronger insight about the role that largely unwritten institutional public norms play in constituting a functioning democracy. Of specific relevance in Comey (2018) were two key insights. First, the necessity of political or other neutrality within an effective justice system, portrayed by the blindfold on the Scales of Lady Justice, both in its actual actions and especially in its public appearance. Second, that the American presidency itself is more than just that of the elected person, rather it constitutes an executive institution, comprising a set of public norms, like the other two branches of American government – the judicial and legislative – many of which the current incumbent appeared to be largely unaware of, at least in his repeated appearance of transgression of their public norms.
Willem Salet’s (2018: 3) book also notes that ‘[t]he presidency is larger than the president’, and it goes on to contend that the president will be ultimately constrained by the public norms of those governmental institutions that inherently bind his actions. I trust Willem is correct. Indeed, his observation and book are very timely in their engagement with the importance of evolving public norms and aspirations, even though the book is written from a European perspective, and it largely retains its European focus throughout, this one-off observation on the Office of President, aside.
The author sets out over the book’s six chapters to present methods for understanding planning practice and research through the prism of institutions. However, as laid out in the introductory first chapter, for Willem, institutions are not synonymous with the concept we call an organisation, rather importantly institutions comprise ‘sets of public norms that condition the interaction between subjects . . . [so that] public norms are general conditions and rules shaping a context in which aspirations may be realized [so to] provide normative guidance to processes of purposive action’ (p. 1). Essentially, institutional public norms set the boundaries for acceptable actions, for example, that justice must be neutral in regard to political partisanship. But perhaps unlike the norms of justice, many other public norms shift and evolve to retain relevance in a changing world. Accordingly, the author’s methodology deploys pragmatic philosophical insight to engage with the processes of action bounded by public norms of ‘tacit reciprocity’ between subjects that produce co-evolving institutional change and innovation in the achievement of public and private aspirations. The first chapter illustrates this process through a precis of Dutch spatial planning evolution between 1960 and the present.
Chapter Two considers the precursors underlying contemporary institutional understandings. The chapter draws on the early planning theorists of the 1960s and 1970s through to those of today, such as Flyvbjerg, Healey and Hillier. It also draws on the sociology of the 20th century from Weber through that of Giddens and Bourdieu; the pragmatism of Dewey and James; the nomocracy versus teleocracy of Hayek as well as Moroni’s planning theory take on it, as well as the relevant texts of other researchers. It draws on these authors and their varying perspectives to provide an overview demonstrating the various modes of social science able to pragmatically engage with spatial planning action and the institutional norms bounding and conditioning this action.
The next chapter considers the logic of pragmatism and institutional legality. The first half of the chapter focuses on pragmatism. It commences with pragmatism’s wider historical emergence in the works of Dewey in the early parts of the 20th century and then explores its interactive approaches within the planning literature of Healey, Innes and Booher, Hoch, and Harper and Stein. It then engages with communicative approaches of Forester, Hajer and Wagenaar and then follows with the learning approaches of Schön, Argyris, Bertolini and Kolb. It concludes this engagement by considering the critical dimensions of pragmatism drawing again on Dewey, but tempered by Bernstein and other contemporary philosophers. The latter half of the chapter reflects on the philosophy of the state and law, with an initial focus on Ostrom’s pragmatic logic of public choice analysis. This is followed by a consideration of legal institutions drawing on Gualini, Moroni and Healey. It then explores the concept of legal obligation predominantly drawing on the work of Fuller, prior to considering a Dutch example of the legitimacy of action for organising that country’s national housing policy. The chapter concludes with a consideration of legal principles, rules, material standards and procedural norms at the national and international level in the seeking of pragmatic solutions for spatial planning issues.
The next two chapters are, in this reviewer’s opinion, the most important contribution of the book. Chapter Four considers the relevance of paradigms for shaping institutional research and is the most insightful theoretical component of the work. It starts by defining what constitutes an institution. Here, astutely, Salet (2018: 84) contends that institutions and their constituting set of public norms provide understanding of ‘mutual expectations about what is appropriate to do and what is not’. They provide shared codes that have evolved over time, which tacitly govern the collective behaviours of individuals. Furthermore, what is common to the diverse range of institution paradigms of public norms are four general themes: how individuals adhere to collective norms, how the issue of compliance may occur within ‘aggregate norms by subjects in their practices of action’ (p. 87), how all public institutions are constituted by non-neutral power relations and how all paradigms in various ways must address how institutions change and evolve. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the inherent limits of human understanding and the need for researchers to be methodologically modest and support the value of comparative research that allows and encourages the application of a wide range of diverse research paradigms for various situations of institutional enquiry and investigation, a research perspective that this reviewer highly commends.
Chapter Five then considers the strengths of five different research paradigms appropriate for institutional planning enquiry. These are as follows: (1) historical institutionalism and ‘path-dependence analysis’, (2) institutional-actor approaches with a particular focus on public choice analysis, (3) regime studies with a particular focus on ‘urban-regime analysis’, (4) critical political economy with a focus on the ‘regulatory school’ and (5) cultural institutions with a focus on the sociology of Bourdieu. Each paradigm is explained, and its specific attributes and potential constraints are briefly outlined, as well as exemplars of research questions where they may be of specific relevance. The conclusion considers how these different paradigms may overlap with each other and contains a very useful observation: Paradigms do not deny the complexity of reality but – precisely vice versa – they pay tribute to how difficult it is to explain full reality, and they deal with this complexity by deliberately selecting alternative ‘lenses of observation’. (p. 124)
The final chapter considers institutions in action by considering the various attributes of different changing city-regions. The chapter begins by arguing for new ‘place qualities’ for the emerging prominence of city-region spaces, drawing on Lynch’s (1984) five critical dimensions of space quality: vitality, sense, fit, access and control. The author considers emergent trends constituting the contemporary metropolitan city-region as a reconstruction of institutions in action. In doing so, he considers the path dependency of built infrastructure and the power relations involved in intentional changes to this hardware, such as those of existing and new rail system alignments and other public transit provision, as well as the symbolic representation of these urban transitions. In this regard, he considers, in some detail, the evolution of the Dutch city-region of Randstad South. The chapter and book closes with a brief consideration on the implications of climate change over the next decades on city-regions, especially their flows of water and energy and what this may mean to the evolution of public norms to accommodate this emerging reality.
I am not fully convinced by Willem’s arguments in this final chapter for multiple territorially governed city-regions as ‘the’ new form of urbanisation that public norms need to universally evolve to accommodate. This is particularly so due to the recent creation of large area metropolitan single government cities (which are regional in area), such as my own city of Auckland (1.6 million people inhabiting a combined urban but still predominantly rural area of 1086 sq. km), or new narratives arguing for globalised urban space without territorial boundaries, such as that of planetary urbanisation (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). In addition, in this final chapter, the author tends to lose much of his institutional focus on public norms, as this core issue tends to get obscured in the more factual contexts of the cases being described.
The English expression and readability of the text is generally good throughout, although in the last chapter, it seems to have missed being copyedited by a native English speaker, with some missing articles, or their incorrect use, and some word choices being rather peculiar, for example, ‘bus trajectory’ rather than ‘bus route’ (p. 159) or ‘urbanists’ rather than ‘urban residents’ (p. 160). In addition, it seems rather strange to have the references at the end of each chapter as though this was an edited book, when it is a monograph – why was not a bibliography used to avoid repeated references for the same text? Furthermore, the final chapter is not really a conclusion to the text, rather it is basically an example of applying an institutional approach, and not a particularly robust one, to the rather generic planning topic of city-region development. A more formal concluding chapter summarising the work and perhaps speculating about areas for further institutional research would have been most welcomed.
However, those comments aside, this book, and especially Chapters four and five, will be mandatory reading for my first-year PhD candidates along with the other key works, such as Flyvbjerg’s (2001) Making Social Science Matter, as foundational methodological texts as to how to undertake advanced planning research. Of course, for this reviewer, with his interest in poststructuralism and ideology, the work’s lack of engagement with these critical perspectives, apart from a brief regard for political economy and cultural institutions, is a disappointment. Foucault is mentioned in one sentence and the term ideology is only mentioned in passing, but with no real engagement. I look forward to others building on Willem’s engagement with institutional public norms and aspiration to explore this institutional perspective through the lens of Foucault’s governmentality, or through the critical interaction of institutional public norms and aspirations within, or as a dimension of, neoliberal ideology, as these may well provide two further research paradigms of potential value for enquiry about institutional public norms. I also encourage others to read this important book and to consider how their research may engage with and build upon an understanding of institutional public norms in their role of helping to shape and bind spatial planning endeavour.