Abstract
Introduction
Intellectual biography does not substitute for theoretical inquiry. But what theorists believe and how they conduct inquiry shapes the ideas they create. This seems to me especially relevant for scholars who wear theoretical ideas like garments adorning empirical arguments and political beliefs. They change theoretical views with shifts in intellectual fashion. My exploration of pragmatist ideas has spanned decades. I am no slave to fashion. However, while character offers no substitute for argument, it does tell us something useful about how ideas emerge and travel. As each of us conduct theoretical inquiry, we journey among a cohort of scholars doing the same. We craft arguments and narratives about our ideas that we expect will stand on their own, even as they draw deeply upon the wisdom of other scholars. Mostly we do this work as writers using quotes, paraphrase, and citation. Sometimes if lucky we receive the gift of commentary and review in the flesh. I am a grateful beneficiary.
In his essay Bish captures some of the intellectual currents critiquing the emergence of neo-liberal hegemony. Left leaning political economists adapted Marxist ideas creating compelling structural critiques of capitalist urbanization. John Forester and I were deeply influenced by these critiques but wanted to understand the complex ways that people cope with problems of inequality, exclusion, domination, exploitation, and complexity. Sometimes people comply hook, line, and sinker, but other times they just nibble at the bait or refuse altogether. Democratic societies offer conventions, practices, and experiences that allow for counter movements, protests, and experiments in social change. The emergence of modern professions tapped into such movements often providing intellectual fuel for political reforms and cultural innovations. The architects, landscape architects, engineers, and lawyers who focused attention on urban congestion and slums in the early 20th century did so with professional knowledge and skill to make plans for improved places. But many other market actors and agents made plans as well. Local governments adapted ideas from the plans of professional reform like subdivision and zoning regulations adapting these tools into clever rules for reducing risk for widespread speculative land development (Talen, 2012). The many private and public plans that helped fuel the modern sprawling metropolis bound the inventive instrumentalism of scientific engineering with misplaced confidence in the future of urban growth. I spent my childhood in those suburbs becoming part of the first of the sprawl generation. Instead of expecting more of the same for myself, I took a detour where I learned how to release my grip on certainty and embrace the possibility of freedom. I started my professional career in the early 1970s working as an environmental planner trying to figure out how the belief in urban growth became popular. By the end of the decade, I had adopted a critical pragmatist approach as Niraj describes.
Knowing
Niraj Verma recovers the insights of Charles Peirce who pushed past the boundaries of conventional philosophical discourse to bridge the elusive gap between abstract logic and the meaning each of us construct as we encounter the consequences of action. We combine the familiar apprehension of a situation with focused attention on distinct relationships assessing meaning based on the ensuing tangible consequences. The assessment includes a reflective critical reconstructive evaluation that reconnects with the value and method of inquiry. For Peirce, the conduct of inquiry included generations of critical testing and revision to render practical consequences into a truthful description of the relationships that compose the reality of that puzzling situation.
Peirce used the concept of abduction to describe how we conceive a fruitful hypothesis from the multitude of possibilities that we can imagine that might resolve the puzzle at the heart of a specific inquiry. We feel the inference as it draws together strands of meaning, like we feel the music composed by musicians playing in an orchestra. The tacit emotional intelligence acquired over a lifetime of musical experience shapes how I feel the symphony judging the quality of the performance. Abduction refers to those imaginative inspired insights that selectively adhere to the mind’s eye anticipating a practical resolution susceptible to future test and experimentation. Active inquiry anticipates the future through the imaginative creation of a possibility worth pursuing framed against a vast horizon of infinite alternatives. 7 Inquiry does not discover the truth but helps working order emerge in the unfolding understanding of a complex world.
Pragmatism does harken back to the slippery dialectic of Socrates and the practical reason of Aristotle. 8 But the path of inquiry does not follow the wisdom of singular philosophical reflection, but the social adaptation of an increasingly intelligent and actively adaptive community of humans. The pragmatists understood the profound irony that knowledge of evolution set in motion. Humans do not come with a purpose, even as we share a very long legacy tied to the emergence of living organisms. The invention of science and the powers to put it to use serving human interests and desires makes learning the most important activity for grasping our past and making a future. That communities, societies, institutions, and organizations use these powers to buttress old traditions, promote warfare, exploit the weak, and conduct all sorts of socially and environmentally destructive actions violates pragmatist values and expectations. The pragmatist offers no simple reassuring answer to the many nasty problems that modernity has wrought, except to remind us in as many practical ways how we can devise clever alternatives that anticipate and cope with those who would force or persuade us to stop learning together. It was no accident that Dewey focused his practical activity developing and promoting innovations in elementary and secondary education. The practical arts of scientific inquiry provide a guide for the kinds of social collaboration necessary to govern modern societies. Planning plays a crucial role mediating the demands of complex social interaction, but not if plan making does not include the people and institutions involved in reproducing the complexity. The emergence of individual autonomy requires intentional social attention and effort as each person learns to become a person within a community tied to a set of cultural institutions and the multitude of practices that keep these alive.
How did this work for me? I offer a brief example. When I started studying the homeless problem in the early 1980s, conservatives argued they were lazy criminals using drugs; while liberals claimed they were disadvantaged citizens suffering from addiction. I turned the clash of moral stereotypes into a question for historical and empirical research focusing on the meaning of the homeless concept in relation to changing historical conditions shaping housing provision for the poor in Chicago over a century (Hoch and Slayton, 1987). There were historical precedents for each ideological position, but the real culprit were city urban renewal practices that targeted high-density single-room occupancy buildings and suburban land use regulations that outlawed their construction. The book received supportive reviews from conservative and liberal critics. Both missed the irony of the argument. Pragmatism does not promise that we will persuade others to believe our claims.
Acting: practice makes perfect
This proverb captures how intelligent repeated effort transforms competent play into excellence. But it also holds out the unpragmatic expectation of optimal completion. When John Forester, Howie Baum, and I decided to focus our research attention on planning practice in the 1980s, we had a very different conception in mind—action. Action evokes intentionality and forethought tied to social conditions and context. We practice how to do something right, but also to accomplish something good. Interestingly, we did not talk about pragmatism as a skill or doctrine, but shared stories about our experience learning and teaching about planning activity and ideas. We shared relational conceptions of power that integrated feeling, knowing, and acting within practical social situations tied to specific places. We learned from Donald Schon (1994) who wrote an intellectual autobiographical note published in Planning Theory. He writes how he used the insights of John Dewey in his 1955 dissertation to critique a too instrumental and narrow conception of professional rationality. The pragmatist conception of inquiry shifted his attention from the rigorous pursuit of truth and its confident dissemination to others. Inquiry proved a humble form of joint learning among those facing uncertainty conceiving and testing what changes might yield relief. The inspiration for his book The Reflective Practitioner was Dewey’s conception of active inquiry within problematic situations. We cannot usefully understand situations as spectators, but only as agents actively transacting experientially to invent adaptive novel resolutions.
We all shared criticism of the Rational Planning Model (RPM). The model persists because it can guide and justify the development of institutions, infrastructure, and landscapes that are efficient and profitable. This success generates destructive consequences that appear within conventional liberal accounts as incidental, mere externalities susceptible to technical remedy down the road. RPM elevated to a theory for planning legitimized the institutions involved in building and governing cities tied to the enterprise of urban growth. Liberal pragmatism meant bending rational principles to fit tough political circumstances. Doing what worked for the powerful regardless of nominal ideals. We adopted a critical pragmatism instead.
I used this approach as I taught students planning theory and in workshop classes. John Forester captures a portion of this work in his generous account of my efforts teaching planning theory. The list of student alumni I supplied John included those who would have offered more critical accounts than those who agreed to share their stories. Perhaps the most telling corrective is the metaphorical nickname I overheard students using to describe my teaching some 20 plus years ago: “fire hose.” [Imagine a wide hose with a forceful rush of water streaming relentlessly onto a clueless student].
Doing
Bish has more ambitious hopes for planning theory. He wants a planning theory that can offer more powerful political ideas to challenge the threats to democracy posed by conservative public officials and political movements. He weaves an account of our respective intellectual journeys that captures how consequences matter for each of us as we attend to the meaning of practical planning efforts in the United States and India. Responding to his worry that the compromises public planners make may fuel only cynicism (Sanyal, 2002), I offered the following argument:
If we envision planning theory as a kind of practical reasoning rather than a kind of template or primal rationale, we avoid creating an epistemic gap between theoretical judgment and practical judgment. We can distinguish between theories about what we believe (e.g., global complexity and its causes) and theories about what we desire (e.g., global efficiency and equality). Practical judgment finds us drawing on both . . . Compromise . . . offers a practical way to intelligently and sensitively respond to inescapable complexity and unnecessary injustice in globalizing places. We can judge the quality of those compromises using technical, moral, and political evidence to assess how far their consequences foster tolerance for stupidity or moral indifference to suffering. If we are fortunate, we conduct our assessment with others who share our comprehensive outlook. But many times, we do not enjoy moral and political support and so find we must accept a compromise that betrays the hopes of our own comprehensive plan. We need not abandon the value of comprehensiveness when we consider the necessity of compromise but focus our attention on those practical aspects susceptible to influence. (Hoch, 2007: 279)
Conclusion
The ideas we conceive come to us not as newborn infants but grizzly old demanding demons that we must tame and nurture into civilized citizens behaving sensibly in our imagined systems of thought. We share these with each other awkwardly hoping that others will witness how well our citizens behave. The critical testing that we conduct and endure launching and receiving these systems constitutes our scholarship. I am proud to be part of the small community of pragmatist thinkers who have in the past four decades nurtured a stimulating if ungainly band of ideas about planning practice. The citizens of our systems often speak to each other across our differences and to those doing professional work.
People everywhere every day create alternatives to the indoctrination of globalizing forces. The pragmatist does not hand off the future to an abstract ideological claim but trusts in the multitude of practical efforts people take to find ways to resist and conceive options for improved ways to build homes, avoid floods, reduce traffic, and so much more. This involves conflict and struggle as many people use powerful institutions to frustrate and coopt these efforts, and to promulgate beliefs that ridicule and dismiss such options as puny or utopian. Spatial planners use professional skill and know-how to help conceive and guide interventions that meet the technical and practical demands of competence. But beware embracing the “Smart City” lexicon with its reliance on rational systems thinking tied to a global corporate culture. The powers of RPM remain ascendant among the IT planners who still do not grasp the irony of using a source of the problem as a solution. The practical techniques of spatial planning require that people learn to adapt digital innovations along with other less exotic, but wonderfully adaptive ones like bicycles, fans, crop rotation, human waste compost, and so much more.
I cannot imagine what ideas will inspire the pathways people must travel to make good and useful plans for improving places. I have published some ideas about how professionals make plans and some ideas about how we might think more expansively and robustly about planning activity. I have done some research on policies for the homeless and the provision of water. I continue to marvel at the complexity of the problems for places and continue to explore with others how to anticipate and prepare for future consequences—good and bad. My critical pragmatist approach embraces a passionate commitment for bottom-up democratic learning as a resource for resilient planning. The foundation for efforts to remedy the problems for places flows from active experimental collaboration. Theory offers a toolkit for the critical inquiry that accompanies such efforts. Our journal Planning Theory provides a shop for crafting these tools and testing their coherence, relevance, and promise for adoption among planning students and scholars.