Planning and caring: A reflection

Care/caring: words or concepts?

In the field of planning scholarship, we planning academics frequently use the terms ‘care’ and ‘caring’. The strong normative emphasis in much of our writing implies that we ‘care about’ how place futures evolve, who benefits from such evolutions, and how actions now affect our collective planetary future. But while there is an extensive literature on places, place qualities, planning as place-shaping and place-making; on values and ethics; and on the affective as well as intellectual dimensions of place-making activity, little use has been made of care and caring as orienting concepts in our field. Instead, the terms appear ‘in passing’, or as a field of public policy, as in ‘health and social care’. In a recent book, an account of how a particular place-community generated initiatives to shape its future, I used the title Caring for Place (Healey 2023). The book includes a chapter on ‘place’ and another on ‘community’. The account emphasises the way care for the future of where people lived motivated people to collective action. It provides examples of the labour of care – for the future of the ‘High Street’, the availability of housing for young people, for the situation of isolated and vulnerable people in a rural area, and generally initiatives intended to shape the future of ‘our place’. But I write nothing explicitly on the concepts ‘care’ and ‘caring’, and there is no index entry for these terms.

As with many other words, these words turn up in an everyday way in accounts and descriptions. ⁶ They are often used as synonyms for other words such as compassion, empathy, kindness/loving kindness, nurturing, paying attention to, solicitude, thoughtfulness. And the words can refer to kinds of work and to obligations – as in doing care work, unpaid care labour, the obligations of care and caring as a burden. These uses of the words suggest that they have a dark side as well as a kindly one. But are these terms just words? The growing interest in the concepts of ‘care’ and ‘caring’ in several fields of enquiry suggests they are not merely descriptive words or a call to re-focus action. They are being linked to a shift in perspective, a new conceptual lens. In addition to the fields of health and social care policy and practice, such conceptual use of the words can be found in feminist work, building especially on the writing of Joan Tronto. ⁷ This conceptual use has flowed into other fields, including community development, geography, socio-technical systems, the ethics of care, and ecology/environmental ethics. ⁸ The pandemic experience has expanded and accelerated these inquiries. Within these literatures, the terms are used in several ways: as a noun (the provision of care), as an adjective (a care perspective, a caring approach), as a verb (to care/caring for, about, with). As concepts, the terms can be both descriptive and normative. They also identify different foci, from care for the self (both mind and body), to care for a social collective (a group, public, polity), and care for bionomic relations and planetary existence.

Exploring literatures which examine the care/caring terms as concepts suggests that they are used to emphasise qualities and values which have been discussed in the planning literature for some time. Clearly, whenever we planners talk about the values that motivate people to become ‘planners’, or the concerns which mobilise people to protest about proposed developments, or initiate some new project or platform to generate political voice, we tend to refer to what ‘matters’, to what people ‘care about’, to the affective as well as intellectual motivations which spur inquiry and fuel action. Two figures in our planning theory debates have been particularly important in foregrounding these normative and affective dimensions – John Forester and Leonie Sandercock. Back in 1989, in Planning in the Face of Power, Forester tells us that “in planning practice, fact and feeling, reason and emotion, are often tightly intertwined” (p.107). Speaking to planning practitioners in his fine chapter on the art of ‘listening’, he says: “listening is crucial if we are to learn what others care about or fear, what common interests we might share, what arguments or strategies or offers we might try tomorrow” (p.109). Forester’s focus is on the micropractices of performativity and planning practitioners as organisers of attention, though always set in a wider context. Most recently, he has been urging planning thinkers to pay more attention to the empathetic orientation expressed in being ‘kind’, in ‘kindness’. He links kindness, compassion and care (Forester 2021, p.64). Compassion is, he suggests, awareness of the suffering of others; kindness is acting on this awareness. Is care, as he uses it, just a synonym for other empathetic words (affection, warmth, gentleness, tenderness, goodwill?).

Leonie Sandercock’s work has evolved from an initial radical political economy of city development practices to an exploration of the challenge of promoting justice in diverse, multicultural cities, and then to insights she has learned through grasping the cultural dimensions of deep difference, combined with the experience of systematic oppression among indigenous peoples in western Canada with whom she has been working most recently. She charts her intellectual and personal journey in her most recent book, Mapping Possibility (Sandercock 2023). Continually searching for what it means to work towards a more socially just world, she has come to underline, as Forester does, the emotive/affective dimensions of human relationships and responses to the world around us. In conditions of great social diversity, as in contemporary cities, managing co-existence in shared spaces, and even more so of creating common purpose, requires working empathetically with others, reaching out for mutual recognition and respect. Proceeding as much through story-telling as through analysis, working empathetically may provide more secure and trustable relations through which to build shared futures, in contrast to the transactional kind of relations typical of many partnerships and other negotiations between citizens, officials and market actors. ⁹ Sandercock stresses that, in situations where people have experienced the traumas of disasters, displacement or prolonged oppression, therapeutic interactions are needed before any collective future-shaping work can proceed. Throughout her work, synonym words for ‘care’ and ‘caring’ are to be found, and her ‘care’ for others and how we humans manage to live together and create better worlds infuses her work. But she does not make use of any specific meaning of care/caring.

Many more contributions to planning literature display strong normative concerns. The motivation to ‘care for’ the future, to ‘build a better world’, underlies why many of us have become involved in the planning field and orients the scholarly work that we do. The field has been deeply concerned in recent years about redressing social injustices and the future of our planetary environment. Susan Fainstein’s landmark book, The Just City (2010), which has inspired so many, is imbued with her deep concern with social justice in neo-liberal societies which impact adversely on the less well-off and other marginalised groups. Her book explores how to promote the values of equity and the recognition of diversity, along with democracy, as counter forces in such societies. My own earlier work is also deeply imbued with ‘care about’ how we humans can co-exist in shared spaces. In Collaborative Planning (Healey, 1997/2006), and Making Better Places (Healey, 2010), the terms care and caring crop up, but in passing. Yet in both I tried to express the significance of the affective dimensions of knowing and interacting in planning activity, and was myself motivated by a search for ways of promoting more inclusive and environmentally-sustainable well-being. It is Jonathan Metzger I have to thank for noticing that Making Better Places is all about ‘caring for place’, (Metzger 2014) and in my recent book, I have clothed myself in this phrase. Metzger uses the concept of care to discuss the way people become stakeholders as they are drawn to recognising what is at stake in a situation (Metzger 2013). In his 2014 comment, he opens up the rich literature on the concept of care from geography, socio-technical studies and feminism. Another scholar, Ihnji Jon, inspired to hope by the pandemic experience, has also explored the ‘care’ concept, drawing in particular on an ‘ethics of care’. For Jon, a “planning of care” could chase out “neo-liberal individualism” and promote a “kinder” relation with non-humans (Jon 2020, p. 339). Juliet Davis (2022) draws on the same literatures as Metzger to explore practical examples of caring for, with and about in urban design practices. ¹⁰

I have been greatly helped in thinking about the meanings and implications of the terms ‘care’ and ‘caring’ by a recent collections of essays: Care and the City, edited by Angelika Gabauer and colleagues (2022). The contributors reflect on the idea of care in relation especially to cities and the public realm, and in doing so, draw on the various literatures which make use of the terms care/caring as a distinctive concept. The result is a rich discussion of the concepts of care and caring which opens up multiple dimensions, connecting to many of the concerns about the importance of affective relations in place-making/shaping already raised by authors such as Forester, Sandercock and many others. Are these other literatures merely catching up with where the planning literature has been for some time, but using different words? Or is there more which could inspire and orient planning theory and practice?

Care, caring, city and community

The project which became Care and the City arose out of a conference held in TU-Wien, Vienna, in 2019, but the chapters were developed during the pandemic experience, which enhanced its relevance. This experience not only generated a sense of humanity in crisis and in need of care, but also a flourishing of everyday practices of care. The project of the book is to “introduce the care debates into the field of urban studies as an analytical prism on the urban crisis” (p.4). Angelika Gabauer and her fellow editors comment on the range of fields in which the concepts of care/caring have been explored, noting especially feminism and the environmental field. They identify three meanings of care: as a kind of labour, as a relation, especially of reciprocity, and as a reflective ethical practice. They conclude:

“Openly caring attitudes between people, if combined with soulful moments of encounter in public space, can provide the glue that holds together urban societies even in difficult times .. Deeply caring about others, in this regard, requires realisation and respect of others in their human subjectivities, an exercise which can best be trained in openly and accessible spaces that provide room for caring with, caring for and caring about one another” (p.12)

Drawing on a broad literature, the several contributions to the book explore what it means to ‘think with’ a care lens in relation to the challenges of urban policy and planning practices. ‘Thinking with care’, inspired by the work of Maria de la Bellacasa (de la Bellacasa, 2017), involves drawing on capacities involved in caring: reciprocity, mutual aid and stewardship of common resources (p.25). Other chapters discuss the relations between care givers and care providers in the labour of care, and what it means to care for and about the public realm and public infrastructures,

The collection of essays links to a wide field of urban concerns and from broad framing perspectives to specific practices. Many of the contributors are inspired by the feminist scholar Joan Tronto. For her, care and caring is everything we (humans) do

“to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Fisher and Tronto 1990: p.40).

Environmentalists might add to this formulation everything we do in interaction with other species and our material world. The concepts of care and caring are mobilised in these essays not just as a description of what it means to live in the world, but as a philosophical challenge to notions of humans as individualised consumers guided by economic rationalities. The concepts promote a relational view of human life in which we are always interlinked with others – humans, other species and the objects which surround us and upon which we depend, the resultant relational webs forming multiple and overlapping ecosystems. In such a world, a ‘caring’ perspective promotes an ethical obligation to recognise, respect, nurture and create these multiple relations, and in this way to maintain and generate the social world outside ourselves – not just family and friends, but the public realms of institutions and materialities we share with each other, the material, social and spiritual infrastructures which support us through life, and the public spheres in which we come together as collective political communities (polities) to shape this caring activity. To do such broadly-imagined work well involves care for selves, care for and with others and care for the wider world. Politically, then, the concepts of care and caring as mobilised by Gabauer and her contributors challenge the overriding current policy emphasis on ‘promoting economic growth’ through releasing individual entrepreneurship and technological innovation. Instead, their aim is to fill the concept of care and caring with a sense of mutuality, of shared experiences and endeavours to sustain lives and life-giving possibilities in a world increasingly threatened by the legacy of capitalist and colonialist resource-extractive practices. Care and caring, in this perspective, is not merely an exercise in philanthropic benevolence, but an active process creating solidarities among those involved.

For these authors, therefore, ‘care’ and ‘caring’ have become more than just words, or a field of public policy and practical labour. They are being used as a call to take a distinct perspective, which highlights relational mutuality. There are many parallels with the broad shifts in thinking which have been underway for some time in the planning field. In our field, such a relational understanding is now well-established, emphasizing the social and ecological webs of relations (ecosystems) through which ‘places’ come into focus and futures evolve. We planning scholars are accustomed to think in terms of collectivities, and the ‘public’ dimension of inhabited worlds. We are as alert to the need for environmental care as to the social justice of the institutions and practices of collective life. We increasingly promote an inclusive view of human flourishing in all our variety while working to sustain a supportive planetary context for diverse life forms. Many are searching for ways to extract planning ideas from a predominantly capitalist focus on growth promotion ¹¹ , as others have repeatedly done in the past. Most recently, and arising especially from the challenge of relating ‘planning’ ideas and practices to the deep injustices experienced by indigenous peoples in many parts of the world, scholar-practitioners such as Leonie Sandercock, Libby Porter, Janice Barry, Aftan Erfan and others have been asserting the importance of an ethics of care in which heart and soul are engaged as well as mind and skill in any situation where outside ‘experts’ are drawn in to work with local communities. ¹² These authors also shift the focus of ‘planning’ thought towards a holistic, ecosystemic sense of the lived experience of community life in all its multi-dimensional relational complexity, ¹³ challenging the preoccupation of much planning practice with land use, physical development and the aesthetics of townscape and landscape. Does a ‘care’ perspective as an analytical lens then merely follow a parallel path, but with differences in vocabulary, or does it add additional dimensions to this relational understanding of co-existence in shared spaces? Can the concept be ‘strategically deployed’ to frame both our thinking and proposals for urban interventions, as Gabauer and her co-authors suggest?

The potential of a care perspective

My sense is that the discourse associated with a care perspective is a valuable addition to the ontological and epistemological shift in planning thought, and in the social sciences more generally, to an emphasis on relational complexity, interdependence and indeterminacy. The emphasis on ‘caring with, for and about’ can be brought into thinking and acting of planning scholars and practitioners at several levels. At the broad level of understanding social dynamics, it reinforces the realisation that human lives are lived in complex relations with others, both other humans and other species. We humans are social animals and as such create norms and practices by which we, as political communities, manage our collective affairs - through some form of governance. More specifically, if, as members of a political community, we make a claim to acting democratically, then in our governance practices, we need to pay attention to what to care about and seek to see collectively pursued, and how such work is done. This includes care for governance arrangements and supportive infrastructures, of which ‘planning systems’ are an example. Since, in large and complex political communities such as states, this work of paying attention has to be contracted by a political community to leaders, officials and experts acting on our behalf, then the relations between these ‘governors’ and the rest of us need to be underpinned by some sense of mutuality and some trust. Such governors, if they wish to sustain the confidence of those they ‘govern’, need to act carefully, and with care for their relation to the political community of which they are a part. Even more specifically, the mobilisation of caring attention is not just a matter for those elected to lead a government and those at higher levels of the administrations which carry out governing tasks. People doing frontline government work such as social workers, community development workers, and local planners all contribute to generating or undermining the trust and sense of mutuality between governed and governors, and also face the hostility and critique when such trust breaks down. The emphasis from those developing a care perspective, involving our whole selves – body and heart/soul as well as mind - has significant implications for how professionals such as planners, social workers, health workers and community development workers understand the situations of those they offer their services to and how they themselves perform. But building such mutuality in the relations between professional and ‘clients’ is no easy challenge. Bringing heart and soul into such interactions without becoming overwhelmed by compassion or unable to see where ‘expertise’ may be useful requires very skilful self-management, between ‘person’ and ‘position’, as many a health, care and social worker well know.

More specifically for the planning field, its origins are grounded in ‘care about’ how the future will evolve and how what actions taken now can affect this. There would be no sense in ‘planning ahead’ if those designing and practising planning systems did not care about the future in some way. The common critique of past and often present planning policies and practices is not that they showed no care about future outcomes. Caring about housing and health conditions, and about landscape and natural beauty, inspired the formation of many of today’s planning systems. The problem lay in the imaginaries of social organisation and evolution, of state bureaucracy and the privileging of the hierarchical position of professionals deployed in their design and practice. The imaginations mobilised were too narrowly focused on material outputs of benefit to elites and established classes, especially land and property owners and developers, and the practices evolved to pursue these concerns reinforced such biases. This critique should remind planning scholars and practitioners of the need to keep in the forefront of our thinking the power dynamics and struggles over values which infuse ideas and practices of shaping place futures and therefore continually probe what is being cared about, and who and what is being cared for. A care perspective aware of such dynamics and struggles should enhance the capacity of scholars and practitioners to grasp the many ways in which people care for and feel attached to place qualities, and how such care mobilises actions which bring people together, often outside any formal government process or established institutions, in a collective struggle to improve and enhance future well-being in place. ¹⁴

So, recasting my inquiry into the potential of a ‘care perspective’, I do not want to add yet another call for a different ‘planning theory’. We have accumulated more than enough already. Instead, it is perhaps more helpful to position the contribution of a ‘care lens’ as part of a much more general intellectual shift in how social organisation and evolution are imagined. We call this shift by many names, each referring to a particular trajectory of evolution and with specific emphases – relational, post-positivist, assemblage thinking, complexity, interpretive policy analysis, socio-technical studies/actor-network methodologies, etc. As with these other strands, the emerging care perspective is deeply relational, positioning humans as embedded in social and ecological relations at multiple scales, and always oriented to ‘others’ with whom we live, work, play and just exist. It encourages making a relation between individuals and the wider worlds in which we each exist. It fosters learning from the experiences of others to see how and why there are so many ways of seeing the world, which in turn enhances recognition of the multiple perspectives, identities and values that may be in play in any situation. It highlights a holistic focus on ecosystem relations and on individual selves, moving beyond just the material and economic. Translated into the planning field, it expands the attentiveness mobilised when focusing on places and their qualities. It helps in thinking about the various socio-ecological relations which intersect and interact in what become recognised as ‘places’ – regions, cities, towns, neighbourhoods, villages, projects, sites, challenging the sectoral focus of much public policy. It emphasises that providing any kind of support to others, whether through a service, or a grant, or a regulation, needs to involve an empathetic relation to all those who may be impacted by a change, not just the immediate recipient, rather than an act of philanthropic benevolence, an ethic of mutuality in action. It replaces an ‘ordering’ perspective with a ‘nurturing’ one. Rather than managing futures through specific types of plans and regulations, or just promoting innovation and experimentation, such a perspective encourages an imagination of possibilities grounded in social empathy as well as whatever other knowledge is available. And for some, such a shift in perspective will have more radical potential. As Joan Tronto argues in her recent call to action:

“it is time for us to give up organising the world in neoliberal terms and trying to find ways to squeeze care into that worldview. A world organised around care would be organised very differently. When people are reminded that they are not just economic actors, but homines curans as well, there is a greater frame within which the hard work of explaining that ‘there is an alternative’ can begin. We need now to stop being dazzled by neoliberal forms of resilience and, instead, have the courage ourselves to return to a forestalled alternative future, one in which care truly matters”. (Tronto 2017, p.40).

Yet as scholars of planning ideas and practices, we should beware of being dazzled by such hopes, and be aware of the potential neglects and downsides of a care perspective. A focus on how we relate to others could fail to notice structural forces shaping what is cared about and how care is performed. Learning the art of empathetic relating could also be turned into a tool for better manipulating others. Outsourcing state-supported care for others to family, friends and neighbours could yet further increase the heavy burden of care work which falls on so many people, especially women. And some people just don’t want to be ‘cared about’, turning away from anything which evokes benevolent philanthropy.

I conclude therefore that a care perspective provides an additional strand of critical inquiry to weave into the understandings which make up the planning field, as planning scholars and practitioners search for ways of re-imagining how to think about the challenges of shaping place futures and supportive spatial dynamics. So I recommend the work produced by Angelika Gabauer and colleagues, along with earlier attempts by Jonathan Metzger, Ihnji Jon , Juliet Davis and others whose work I have so far missed, as they delve into the dimensions of a care perspective. Along with so many other probing contributions of recent years, they all contribute to the intellectual and practical task of breaking out of the shackles of the still influential rationalist tradition in science and the humanities which dominated science, medicine and social science until the late twentieth century in the western world, and which morphed into ‘neo-liberal’ ideology and public administration practice into the early twenty-first century. There is still a long way to go to develop the implications of a relational perspective, infused with a recognition of multiple dimensions and webs of relations as these materialise in spatial connectivities and place qualities. Perhaps the contribution of a ‘care perspective’ is that it offers a way of bringing back some ‘humanity’ into how we humans manage our collective affairs? ¹⁵ . For while it may be necessary to strip away some of the assumptions which underlay the ‘humanist’ thinking inherited from the eighteenth century, particularly in relation to notions of linear progress and of how we humans relate to other non-human ecosystems, planning scholars should surely promote the quality of being ‘humane’ in our relations to others, using all the sensibilities available to us as humans. It is this quality which perhaps lies at the core of a care perspective. The challenge is now to develop such an expanded ontological and normative shift into practical implications for the formation of professional selves, place-making practices and planning systems.