‘Care-full’ planning: Towards an ethics and politics of care in planning

Introduction

Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

The notion of ‘caring’ found renewed traction in our everyday lexicons since the COVID-19 pandemic which not only laid bare the care crisis (Dowling, 2021), but also foregrounded the centrality of care in how we imagine a ‘good city’ and a ‘good life’. Yet in planning, whilst care is implicit in its normative aspirations - such as serving the public interest, creating better places and protecting the environment - debate about the ethics of care has attracted little attention. The terms ‘care’ and ‘caring’ are often used or implied, but care as a concept is either not fully unpacked (Healey, 2023; Metzger, 2014; Sandercock, 2023) or implicitly synonymised with other concepts such as: kindness (Forester, 2021), compassion (Lyles et al., 2018) and love (Porter et al., 2012).

This is intriguing because planning systems in western countries were founded as an integral part of the welfare state which sought to “institutionalise an ethic of care within market societies” and create “caring enclaves” (Smith, 2005: 10) in which the inability to pay would not jeopardize access to public spaces, local amenities, decent homes, and environmental assets. For welfare idealists, within “these care-full locations, co-operation would be valued over competition, burden sharing would be rewarded over self-interest, and a range of social values incompatible with market individualism would be promoted” (Smith, 2005: 10). Despite this origin, while concepts such as ‘just city’ (Feinstein, 2010) and ‘just planning’ (Campbell, 2006) have been widely debated by planning scholars and professionals, there has been limited explicit engagement with concepts such as ‘caring city’ and ‘care-full planning’. Furthermore, the relationship between justice and care has remained elusive in planning theories. Forester (2021: 63) is similarly intrigued about “little mention, and even less analysis, of kindness or compassion” in “the literature on the politics of planning” which focuses primarily on “persistent appeals to equity and justice”. This is a missed opportunity for recognising “care as a transformative ethic that can guide our thinking on what constitutes the just city” (Williams, 2017: 821), and for exploring how “a place-based ethics of care offers possibilities to create and plan for more socially just cities” (Till, 2012: 8).

In contrast to planning, other cognate disciplines (such as human geography, architecture, and urban studies) have drawn on feminist thinking to explore the expanding “landscape of care” that encompasses “the institutional, the domestic, the familial, the community, the public, the voluntary and the private, as well as the transitions within and between them” (Milligan and Wiles, 2010: 738). The multifaceted vistas of this landscape have been examined by a growing body of work on: micro-spaces of care (Conradson, 2003a; England, 2000), uneven geographies of care and responsibilities (Conradson, 2003b; Massey, 2004), unpaid labour of care (Clayton et al., 2015; Jupp, 2016) and its class, ethnic, race and gender dimensions (McDowell, 2004), the symbolic, material, emotional and power relations in care giving and receiving practices (Power, 2020), the post-colonial care across time and space (Raghuram et al., 2009), caring for non-humans (de la Bellacasa, 2017), the ethical architecture (Fitz and Krasny, 2019), and the politics and ethics of caring for places (Cox, 2010; Gabauer et al., 2022; Staeheli and Brown, 2003; Valentine, 2008; Till, 2012).

We argue that the limited attention to the ethics of care in planning literature is not simply an oversight, but rather an intellectual blind-spot which stems from a legacy of positivist views of planning as a technical, rational activity predicated on objectively formulated goals and performed by value-neutral professionals. Despite their widespread criticisms, these persistent conceptions of planning continue to be conveniently aligned with rationalist moral theories which prioritise justice over care in ethical judgements. The perceived universality, objectivity and rationality of the former have rendered it superior to the particularity, subjectivity and relationality of the latter. The “rational lexicons” have undermined the “relational lexicons” in planning and in public policy more widely (Unwin, 2018: 10). Thus, in the prevailing Kantian and Utilitarian inspired moral theories, care is relegated to the private-domestic spheres and conceived as ‘feminine’ emotions, while justice is elevated to the public-political sphere and framed in ‘masculine’ reason (Staeheli and Brown, 2003; Williams, 2017). These binary and hierarchical views of morality are then mapped onto a dualistic spatial division between proximate and local relations of responsibility and care, and distant and global relations of obligation and justice (Barnett, 2005). Furthermore, given the anthropocentric nature of much of rationalist morality, another duality is invoked between humans and non-humans whereby the former are ascribed with rights and justice while the latter remain subservient to humans’ needs and demands (Davoudi, 2012; Whatmore, 2002).

Planning scholars, among others, have provided compelling critiques of the universalist conceptions of justice, their prescribed rules and principles, and their disregard for history and context (Feinstein, 2010; Campbell and Marshall, 1999), and called for “a situated ethical judgment” (Campbell, 2006: 92). However, the primary focus of these critiques is on conceptualisation of justice itself, rather than on care or on the relationship between them. Reflecting on this gap, Crisp and Waite (2022: 2274) argue that “micro-level and relational understanding of interconnectedness of human life remain undeveloped in the concept of Just City” and just planning. Although the critiques of universalist conceptions of justice have highlighted the importance of socio-spatial contexts, they have seldom questioned the primacy of reason (cognitive) over emotion (affective) in ethical judgments. As a result, the prevailing western philosophical traditions of subordinating ethics to epistemic reasoning has remained largely unchallenged in much of these critiques. There are, of course, noteworthy exceptions whereby the importance of emotions in planning decisions and their entanglement with reason are explicitly highlighted (Baum, 2015; Ferreira, 2013; Forester, 2021; Healey, 2023; Lyles et al., 2018; Porter et al., 2012; Sandercock, 2023).

Building on these and taking a lead from Williams' (2017) call for developing an integrated view of care and justice, our aim in this paper is to trouble the prioritisation of justice over care and show how a deeper theoretical understanding of the ethics and politics of care can open new ways of connecting care and justice together and “negotiating a path between the universal and the particular” which has long been the subject of planning debates about ethical judgments (Campbell, 2006: 102). In doing so, we conceptualise care not “simply as a social relation with moral or ethical dimensions” (Popke, 2006: 505) – a view prevalent in much of the writings on care - but rather as a moral and ethical position in and of itself with the potential to foster new ways of our being together and “chase out neoliberal individualism” (Jon, 2020: 339). We also put forward a conceptual framework consisting of two interrelated, yet analytically separated, categories that we call care-full planners and care-full planning. We use the former to discuss the ethics of care at the individual level, and the latter to discuss the practice of caring at the collective / institutional level. Here, we argue for the need to cultivate a moral vision in planning which is founded on an integrated view of justice and care. The framework is meant to be an opening which will hopefully evolve into longer and richer dialogues about care and planning.

The paper is organised under five sections. After this introduction, section two provides a brief overview of rationalist moral theories and their related liberal theories of justice to set the scene for the discussion on how the ethics of care has been developed vis-a-vis these theories and how it differs from them. In section three, we outline the feminist origin of care and its positioning in contextual moral theories to make it a full-fledged ethical standing. In section four, we present our conceptual framework and unpack the relationship between being caring (care-full planner) and practicing care (care-full planning). Section five concludes the paper by calling for the grounding of planning policies, practices and educations in the ethics of care. We suggest that this will not only enrich planning’s field of inquiry, but also enhance planners’ capacity to make ethical judgments in uncertain and contested situations.

Rationalist moral theories and the primacy of reason over emotion

“For many who have never heard of philosophy, let alone of Kant, morality is roughly what Kant said it was.” (MacIntyre, 1998:122)

This provocation indicates the profound influence of Kantian theories and their roots in Plato’s philosophy and the Enlightenment on our understanding of morality. According to these, morality consists of a set of abstract and universally applicable principles against which judgments about right and wrong and good and bad are made by free, autonomous, and rational subjects. Their objectivity lies in maintaining a clear distance between the self and the ‘other’ by way of appealing to the supreme principle of ethical judgement which, following Kant, is the ‘categorical moral imperative’ ¹ or, following Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the ‘utility’ of outcome calculated on the basis of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. As MacIntyre puts it, “Kant made morality a cold and unsympathetic exercise in reason and the Utilitarians reduced it to a set of pseudo-scientific calculations that don’t work” (cited in Robinson and Garratt, 2004: 129).

Premised on these conceptions of morality, much of liberal theories of justice since John Rawls have focused on establishing universal principles and addressing questions such as: should resources (economic and environmental) be redistributed according to principles of equality, equity or welfare; should the currency of this redistribution be limited to resources (as per Rawls) or extended to capabilities (as per Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum ² ); and should cities be “evaluated” against “broadly applicable norms” of democracy, diversity and equity (Feinstein, 2010: 36). Despite their differences, such interventions share a privileging of rationality and reason over feelings and emotions in moral judgement. In this reason-based ‘moral point of view’, there is little room for empathy, compassion, and attentiveness.

Questioning the homogenised, idealised, and universalised principles of liberal justice, feminist scholars, notably Nancy Fraser, Iris Marion Young and Seyla Benhabib, have criticised them for: being “difference blind and unable to address cultural oppression”, and prioritising “the social politics of equality” over “the cultural politics of difference” (Davoudi and Brooks, 2014: 2688). Such understandings position the beneficiary as the ‘general other’, rather than the ‘concrete other’, i.e., “an individual with concrete history, identity and affective-emotional constitution” (Benhabib, 1992: 159). Affective registers that are central to the ethics of care play little parts in the good judgments, as do the “widely shared intuitions of injustice” (Barnett, 2011: 248, emphasis added), or people’s feeling and relational experiences of injustices in their daily lives (Barnett, 2017). As mentioned earlier, the influence of universalist conception of justice on planning has been documented and critiqued by many planning scholars, some of whom have directed their criticisms on how in planning emotions are treated as “a source of biases and distortions” that ought to be eliminated (Hoch, 2006: 367). Adding to their voice, we argue that a disregard for emotions risks dismissing the broader conception of care as a moral position because, if “reasoning and justice are inescapably linked” (Campbell, 2006: 102), so are emphatic emotions and care. This is not to underplay the importance of situated justice in planning, but to call for cultivating a moral vision in planning that combines justice and care, as we elaborate later in section four.

The enduring hold of ‘reason’ on what constitutes ethical judgement is a legacy of Kant’s separation of reason from what he calls ‘inclinations’ of which emotion is the most obvious category. This division is not only “insidious” (Solomon, 1995: 128), but also gender biased because it consigns emotion to ‘feminine’ traits and weaknesses. Indeed, Kant saw women as “incapable of being fully moral because of their reliance on emotions rather than reasons” (cited in Held, 2006: 11). Sigmund Freud (1961 [1925]: 258) went further to claim that “for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men […] they show less of justice than men (because) […] they are more often influenced in their judgment by feeling of affections or hostility”. Puwar (2004: 26) highlights a paradox by showing that, “while women [symbolically] represent justice – for example, the Old Bailey in London and the Statue of Liberty in New York– they are not seen as being capable of actually administering justice”.

While overtly misogynistic views of morality are no longer tenable, emotions continue to be gender biased and bracketed-out from the discussion of ethical judgments even by some critics of liberal theories of justice. These risks perpetuating the claim that, “the infusion of feelings into” our judgment keeps us “from developing a more independent, abstract ethical conceptions in which concerns for others derives from principles of justice rather than from compassion and care” (Gilligan, 1997: 484). Many accounts of public participation in planning have shown how people’s care for places is often dismissed as emotive utterance, subjective and not worthy of consideration in planning decisions (Devine-Wright, 2009). This perpetuates John Locke’s claim that, “move the passions and thereby mislead the judgment” (quoted in Nussbaum, 1999a: 263 original emphasis); a claim that is powerfully challenged by Nussbaum’s “alternative view of knowledge of love” (Nussbaum, 1999a: 262). Dismissing emotions risks confining care to the private, domestic and familial spaces, and partitioning it from the public, political spheres in which justice reigns as superior morality. In the following section we show how these views have been challenged by feminists and post-structural political theorists in their attempt to ground the ethics of care as a moral position in and of itself.

The ethics of care and its feminist origin

“We need an ethics of care, not just care itself” (Held, 2006:11)

The ethics of care has grown out of feminist theories that flourished in the late 1960s (Held, 2006). Although Sarah Ruddick’s essay, Maternal Thinking (1980), was among the pioneering contributions, what turned care into a prominent feature of moral philosophy was the work of a developmental psychologist, Carol Gilligan (1982). She devised her ethics of care when questioning the validity of her colleague Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential cognitive-developmental model. Grounded in Kantian moral theories, Kohlberg (1984) argued that moral maturity proceeded through hierarchical stages that corresponded to moral reasoning. Applying his model to empirical research, Kohlberg claimed that boys achieved higher levels of mature (meaning reason-based) moral judgments than girls. Suspicious of Kohlberg’s standards against which women’s alleged ‘inferior’ morality was measured, Gilligan conducted her own study showing that women and men simply followed different paths to moral development. While women’s “different voice” represents “an ethic of care”, men express “an ethic of justice” without one being superior to the other. In her ethic of care,

“the moral problem arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights and requires for its resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rules.” (Gilligan, 1982: 19, emphasis added).

In this passage, Gilligan proposes three fundamental features which distinguish her ethic of care from Kohlberg’s ethic of justice. Firstly, the moral concepts of care ethics are responsibility and relationships, rather than rights and rules. Secondly, its morality is particular and situated rather than universal and abstract, and, thirdly, it is manifested as a practice rather than a set of principles. These features have remained prominent in much of the subsequent definitions of care ethics notably by its key proponent, Joan Tronto who sums them up by stating that, “In Gilligan’s ‘different voice’ morality is not grounded in universal, abstract principles but in the daily experiences and moral problems of real people in their everyday lives” (Tronto, 1987: 648). They have also informed the development of our proposed conceptual framework that we discuss in section four.

While Gilligan’s work raised “caring, nurturing, and the maintenance of interpersonal relationships to the status of foundational moral importance” (Friedman, 1993: 147), her focus on ‘female morality’ inadvertently deepened the gendered separation of care and justice. As such, it has been criticised by feminist scholars for treating women as a homogenous group with a feminine focus on care and, hence, pushing them further into (un)paid caregiving roles. Despite Gilligan’s rejection of a gendered division of morality, her work is still interpreted by some as a female model of moral development (Okin, 1989). To redress this and prevent the “voice of care” (Nussbaum, 1999b: 13) from being “dismissed as a parochial concern of some misguided women” (Tronto, 1987: 656), political theorists have engaged with it not as an exclusive domain of female morality, but as the basis for an alternative ethics which can “enlighten our entire way of collective and individual being” (Milligan and Wiles, 2010: 743). Much of this work is inspired by Tronto's (1987: 658) conceptualisation of care as a form of contextual moral theory that puts the emphasis on the complexity of a given situation to which our “moral imagination, character, and actions must respond”.

Here, prescribing ‘categorical moral imperatives’ (as per Kant) and establishing universal principles of justice (as per liberal theorists) are seen as illusory tasks. Morality is seen not as “the recitation of abstract principles”, but as being “situated concretely […] for particular actors in a particular society” and particular time and space (Tronto, 1987:658). A prominent example of contextual moral theories is Aristotle’s virtue ethic which some consider to be a predecessor to the ethics of care (Held, 2006). The emphasis on context resonates with the abovementioned critiques of liberal theories of justice and is clearly reflected in Young’s (1990: 104) suggestion that, “it is impossible to reason about substantive moral issues without understanding their substance, which always presupposes some particular social and historical context”. Similarly, Campbell (2006) advocates a situated understanding of justice in planning which takes account of the “messy and contingent ways in which justice is practised” (Williams, 2017: 824).

However, the ethics of care goes beyond contextual sensitivities and attends to the crucial role of feelings and emotions in ethical judgments. Foregrounding emotions is not without precedence. It can be found in Adam Smith’s appeal to sympathy - “our ability and desire to put ourselves in others’ shoes” - in moral judgement (Ure 214: 230), and David Hume’s suggestion that “morality is more properly felt than judged of” and “moral judgments […] cannot be judgments of reason because reason can never move us to action, while the whole point and purpose of the use of moral judgments is to guide our actions” (cited in MacIntyre, 1998: 123).

As we mentioned earlier, a key motivation for feminist scholars to position care in moral theories has been to trouble the feminisation and domestication of care and to articulate that caring is not merely a feminine sensibility or belongs exclusively to women’s morality but is the essence of what makes us all human. Building on these insights and motivations, we propose a conceptual framework for the ethics and practice of care in planning. We hope this might serve as an opening for further debates.

Conceptualising care in planning

The questions of what moves us to act and what happens in the passage from being caring to actually giving care have generated a rich and diverse debate often with a reference to the distinction made by Noddings (1984) between caring about and caring for to which Fisher and Tronto (1990) added two other dimensions: care giving and care receiving. In developing our framework (shown in Figure 1), we have consolidated these four dimensions into two interrelated, yet analytically separated, categories of being caring (the ethics of care) and practicing care (the politics of care). The former refers to the ethical, affective and inter-subjective relations of caring about and caring for. The latter refers to the political, social and institutional relations of care giving and care receiving. Translated into planning, the former can be called care-full planners (as individuals) and the latter care-full planning (as a set of institutions and structures). In the following two sub-sections we unpack these in turn and show how their interplay provides a new way of conceptualising the relationship between care and justice not as dualistic, but as complementary ethics with potential to enrich planning thoughts and expand planners’ moral capacity for making decisions in increasingly challenging and uncertain contexts.OPEN IN VIEWER

Conclusions

“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 […]. 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: 40)

Tronto’s call to see ourselves not merely as homo economicus but as caring people resonates with our motivation for this paper and its emphasis on the vital role played by empathic emotions, care and responsibility in the way we plan and make planning decisions. The paper is meant to serve as an opening and invitation to “reimagine the soul of planning” (Sandercock, 2024, n.p.) and its aspiration to care about and care for other people, places, and planet. By situating care not simply as a social relation with moral dimensions but as a moral position in and of itself, we troubled the persisting prioritisation of justice over care in ethical judgments and challenged its paternalistic foundations in rationalist moral theories. We showed how care has been relegated to the private and domestic realm of feminine emotions while justice has been elevated to the public, political realm of ‘masculine’ reason, and discussed how this separation can be challenged by drawing on a relational ontology advocated in the feminist and poststructuralist ethics of care and responsibility.

In our attempt to reinscribe an ethics of care into planning, we proposed a conceptual framework made of two interrelated categories: being caring (the ethics of caring about and caring for) and practicing care (the politics of care giving and care receiving). We used the former to conceptualise what it means to be a care-full planner (as an individual) and used the latter to conceptualise what it takes to develop care-full planning (as a set of institutions), with attentiveness being an essential feature of both being caring and practicing care. We used the framework to provide a new avenue for developing a moral vision that brings together care and justice on both pragmatic and ethical grounds, showing how one without the other can lead us to moral blindness.

Attending to the ethics of care is particularly important for planning given that planners intervene in social and spatial processes whose uncertainty and complexity always exceed predetermined formulations. The more uncertain the context in and upon which they operate, the more pressing their ethical responsibility is towards others across time, space, and species. We acknowledge that moving towards a more care-full planning is becoming increasingly challenging in the contemporary neoliberal conditions whereby carelessness has become prevalent. However, as Tronto suggests in the opening quote of this section, we cannot give-up being caring and practicing care, not least because the future of planet and our survival depend on it, and that is what many planners try to do daily despite facing significant institutional challenges, as our above examples show. Indeed, our call for planning to engage more centrally with care ethics is a call to resist the expanding neoliberalisation of planning and re-politicise it by inscribing an irrecusable responsibility into our planning decisions, one that cannot be wished away by abstract principles, formulaic policies, and bureaucratic procedures. The call for care-full planning also involves decentring patriarchal forms of power in planning, seeking to move past continuing dominant western worldviews, and embrace the deep sense of being-in-common-in-the-word that already exists in many non-western cultures that are often rendered ‘elsewhere’.