Book review: Pragmatic Spatial Planning: Practical Theory for Professionals by Charles Hoch

This book brings together Charles Hoch’s contribution to the planning field over five decades of scholarship. It marks his key contributions in bringing insights from pragmatist philosophy to planning theory and, as the volume clearly exemplifies through numerous on-the-ground examples, to planning practice. A good deal of the material is developed from previous papers (many of them published in this journal) but their adaption for this volume, with the additional material, enables the reader to appreciate in full the culmination of Hoch’s distinctive approach to planning and, I would say, to pragmatism. The book represents a welcome encapsulation of his various insights into professional practice and intellectual reflection on planning and the idea of the plan for an era beyond the dominance of rationalist master planning. As such it encompasses a sustained critique of rationalist planning, whilst at the same time offering an alternative in the form of pragmatist (-infused) spatial planning. It is in this second register, in the construction of pragmatist planning, that the book not only makes a contribution to planning theory and practice but also reflects back towards pragmatic philosophy itself. It does this, not by rejecting all ideas of rationality and reasoning, but by working through – theoretically and empirically – an idea of practical reason in a pragmatist vein. It operationalises practical reason and judgement through planning practice. Along the way it gathers various strands of social and political theory (such as Martha Nussbaum (2003) on emotions, Eleanor Ostrom (1990) on the commons, James Bohman (1996) on publicity and deliberation, as well as numerous others) along with the work of fellow planning theorists, to construct a fuller theoretical understanding, as well as richer empirical illustration, of practical reasoning.

Planning theory as a discipline has given sustained attention to pragmatist thinking and has drawn on wider political theory in its move beyond rationalist planning. One core strand has been a development of the pragmatist elements of Jurgen Habermas’s ideas on deliberation, the normative value of an idea of consensus and the application of communicative rationality to the planning process (Healey 1997). But the value of linking a pragmatism to planning theory and practice in a wholehearted way has been established for some time (see Healey 2009) and not least of which in two early and influential papers by Charles Hoch (Hoch 1984a; 1984b). This has, I would say, taken planning theory towards John Dewey’s pragmatism and this Pragmatic Spatial Planning makes that case abundantly clear. There are elucidations of several of Dewey’s ideas in the volume.

The first key insight is, as I take it, that planning is ordinary. But it is ordinary in the best, pragmatist, sense of that word. Planning is ordinary in the sense that, as Hoch pithily puts it, ‘everyone plans’ (p3). The kinds of anticipations, reflections, projections and strategies that go on in coping with the exigencies and dilemmas of everyday life, and in seeking a way forward, are on a continuum with the sort of expert, strategic exercises that planning practitioners engage in. It reflects the continuities Dewey (1986) identifies from everyday problematisations through to scientific expertise. This ordinariness of planning has several implications. If planning is an ordinary, everyday activity that involves everyone, then it is also irrevocably pluralist, given the myriad worldviews, situations and visions out of which ordinary plans are made. Furthermore, the assumption that everyone engages in ordinary practices of planning reinforces the deepest pragmatist democratic instincts (that assume all people are capable deliberators and decision-makers (see MacGilvray 2004). This is especially instructive and challenging for the planning process in which a plurality of views and capacities to decide (between residents and between residents and public and private stakeholders) are brought together, and often in conflict. The development of these arguments and their serial illustrations throughout the book (and especially in Chapter 8 on planning in two suburbs of Chicago) also makes the case for democratic inclusion and the responsibility of experts to communicate the bearing of expert knowledge on the specific, everyday problem. It is an exemplification of Dewey’s (1984 [1927]) argument against Walter Lippman (2004 [1927]) to the effect that the complexities of modern society and technology do not necessitate the rule of experts. The communication of expert technical knowledge meets the input of expert knowledge of living in a particular place in a way that puts the planner in an intermediate role, in what John Forester (2000) has called the role of deliberative practitioner.

The deliberative decision-making process is a rational one but, rather than assuming a priori reasoning in which a plan is the outcome in terms of ongoing strategic action, the process is reversed (or rather iterative) in which the plan shapes the rationality, which is itself, acted out (rather than being confined to abstract cognitive reasoning – Chapter 1 ‘Practical Judgment and Planning’). In this way, Hoch argues, the centrality of action is recovered from its paradoxical absence in the models of rational action (choice) theory, which had hitherto dominated assumptions about the planning process. Thus, reasoning is distributed and realised through action (as an active, ongoing process), which Hoch discusses as reasoning in communities. This recovery of action is also very much in keeping with Dewey’s sequencing of action (from problematisation to reconstruction) in Experience and Nature (Dewey, 1981) and in Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Dewey 1986). As well as being more distributed, it is a reasoning process that is also informed and inflected by emotion. Hoch (Chapter 2 ‘Emotional Intelligence and Planning Judgment’) draws on Martha Nussbaum’s (2003) work on emotions giving salience to objects of analysis. Continuities between emotions and reasoning again reverberate with Dewey’s arguments on how competing emotions fuel reasoning, but in Hoch’s rendering, also act as an antenna, a source of sensitivity between worldviews and in the arbitration between interests and worldviews in which planners are involved. It also relates to the importance of non-discursive interaction in this sensitivity (and, I would argue, is itself deliberative, as well as giving a perch to discursive reasoning – Bridge 2005). As well as being more active (involving action) and with broader components (including emotion) Hoch argues, (and illustrates how in Chapter 7 ‘Evaluating Plans’) this reasoning should be sustained, not just in the decisions over plans and implementation but on to evaluation of projects. Here again Hoch insists (again I suggest in true Deweyan spirit) that evaluation should be a process of democratic inquiry and not rationalist analysis. Hear, hear, to that.

All this lays out how planning, and reasoning over planning, can and should occur in complex situations. And it is to situations, in the philosophically deep Deweyan sense, that many of the appeals of the Pragmatic Spatial Planning relate (the book could have been called ‘Pragmatic Situational Planning’). Planning occurs in complex situations, often uncertain and conflictual in which the particularities of the context matter a great deal to process and outcomes. Rather than the rationalist planning vision in the view from above, this is embedded, messy, and involves emotion and calculation. In this, planning situations often resemble pragmatist ideas of problematic situations. Where this is most evident is in the way it is through reasoning (according to Hoch and to the deliberative planners) that problematisation, inquiry and the problem-solution are achieved. Deliberative planning often involves agreeing on just what the problem is, and the constituents of problem-solutions are determined by the material and social conditions of the context. Logic operates as a form of democratic inquiry within the situation and working outwards from the situation. Hoch illustrates how pragmatist planning replaces a hitherto abstract, a priori identification of abstract problems to be solved, into living, less-defined problematic situations that must be reconstructed. It is a situational logic that (Chapter 7) involves plausibility rather than precision, similarity rather than correspondence, consensus rather than principle, stewardship rather than expertise.

The complexities of situations, Hoch argues, are poorly coordinated by markets and far better represented by commons, in the Eleanor Ostrom (1990) sense of understanding how different institutional frameworks can make a difference to the fate of common goods (Chapter 4 – ‘Anticipating complex spatial change’). Anticipation invites projection but also requires acts of imagination, of which one stand-out form in planning and architecture has been utopianism and futurist planning (Chapter 5 ‘Utopia, Scenario, Plan’). Hoch gives us a pragmatist version of utopia that involves envisioning a destination at the end of practical steps, as an act of imagination built in the present and out of present materials. This again chimes strongly with Dewey’s account of the importance of imaginative reach, both in the common recognition of what a problem is, and in the emergence of a public that takes responsibility for the effects of actions by which its members are not directly affected. Learning to be affected, in a Latourian (2004) sense, is also an act of imagination in which planning can act as a catalyst.

Imaginative capacities should also be accompanied by the craft of planning (rather than rational-technical analysis and implementation – Chapter 6 – ‘Crafting Plans’). This combines emotional intelligence and awareness of diverse perspectives and interests and a feel for the situation and how plan making can be made to reflect the logic of the situation. The argument can be pushed further, I think, in that Dewey collapsed the Platonic distinction between craft (techne) and art, in the aesthetic and imaginative remaking of the possibilities of the situation (Dewey 2008 [1934]). Imaginative reach can also be extended in other ways to take in other constituents of the situation (including non-human actors and objects) in the way developed by Latour and adapted into planning via Beauregard’s (2016) work, which Hoch discusses, and the role of planning in a wider politics of enunciation.

There’s an awful lot at stake here (not least in the pragmatist sense of situational inter-relations at stake – Boltanski and Thevenot 2006) and a lot of it seems to fall on the shoulders of planners – who must possess almost super-human skills; imbued with emotional intelligence, craft skills, diplomacy, technical expertise and mediation skills as well as a kind of peripheral vision. Although institutional questions are raised theoretically (via Ostrom and others) and empirically (in the way institutional arrangements are used differently in the Chicago case studies – Chapter 8 – ‘How Planning Theory Informs Planning Practice’), this approach could push further into institutional issues, and especially to questions of institutional design and experimentation, as well as the role of institutions as mechanisms of participation in convening publics. Institutional innovation is key to achieving greater deliberation, situational sensitivity and craft in pragmatist planning (as well as in taking some of the theoretical weight and expectation off planners themselves). Archon Fung (2007) sees this kind of institutional innovation and experimentation as helping to achieve a kind of pragmatic equilibrium (active, imaginative and experimental) in contrast to the reflective (cognitive and rational) equilibrium of Rawls’s (1971) Theory of Justice.

Pragmatic Spatial Planning is centrally concerned with dilemmas of participation, pluralism and democracy over complex questions, and in its deep engagement with pragmatism, brings to mind a parallel effort within the pragmatist canon: that of environmental pragmatism (Light and Katz 1996; Minteer 2012; Norton 1991). This distinct strand of contemporary pragmatic thought also wrestles with the role of democracy, participation, pluralism, policy formulation and planning – in the context of pressing problems of environmental change. Environmental pragmatism is informed by practice and explores the deep interdependence of practical and normative questions. Pragmatic Spatial Planning prompts the thought that there could be a much more sustained conversation between environmental pragmatism and pragmatic urban planning – because of the similarity of the dilemmas they wrestle with, but also given a host of contemporary arguments on the co-implicated nature of cities and environment; of how cities encompassing bio-material-social processes are ‘natural’, and that these processes involve wider environments that are urbanised in all kinds of ways.

The possibilities of greater interaction between branches of pragmatism only underscore what has already been established by pragmatist-oriented planners such as Charles Hoch, Patsy Healey and John Forester and Donald Schön – not just in the application of pragmatist planning theory to planning practice, but, equally, in the development of a philosophically sensitive and empirically grounded set of arguments that work through problematic situations and in turn are informed by them. This canon of scholarship offers an invitation (of which Pragmatic Spatial Planning is a leading example) to a much broader traffic of ideas from planning theory to pragmatist philosophy and to social science more generally.