Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

An important but little studied feature of the British town-planning movement in the 1940s was the active participation of social scientists. The quite radical nature of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and associated legislation owed much to the activities of this group, both in the development of specific policies at every scale from house design to regional balance, and in the successful promulgation of the idea of planning itself. In this paper the author discusses how and why social scientists became involved in the area of land-use reform, gives substantive examples of their participation, and concludes by considering why it failed to endure.

In this paper the author discusses the place of rational method as a mode of operation in the procedures and actual practices of British land-use policy in recent years. In the first part she examines rational method and plan-based action in relation to other modes of operation within the context of theoretical debates about planning and public-policy procedures. This is followed by an exploration of the modes of operation evident in the procedures of British land-use policy. Then, drawing on research work on the detailed implementation of land-use policy, the author examines the way the modes of operation allowed by these procedures were used in the allocation of sites for major residential development and in the restraint of development. The author concludes with a comment on when rational method and plan-based action are likely to be adopted in British land-use policy practice.

Since 1950, planning theory and practice have been affected by a series of intellectual revolutions, affecting especially the Anglo-American world. In the 1950s and 1960s, the traditional blueprint or master plan approach was largely supplanted by the systems approach, but this, like its predecessor, was based on the assumption that professional experts could predict and control the outside world in the interests of the whole society. In the late 1960s, as this assumption was questioned, a new style of planning emerged which assumed that planning objectives were inherently contradictory and that the planner should act as advocate for a particular group, within a context where planners and their clients were both engaged in a learning process. In the 1970s a wide spectrum of Marxist approaches came to dominate planning theory, but paradoxically these invariably proved quietist in their prescriptions for action. In the 1980s there is continuing doubt about the ends of planning action and an ignorance about the relevance of work in related fields.

Three alternative approaches to the modelling of urban planning-processes are reviewed in this paper. These focus attention respectively on their sequential properties, their contextual elements, and the nature of the interactions between the actors involved. The findings of the review indicate that the three approaches reflect separate bodies of theorising and experience which sharpens the contrast between them.

In this paper the author reflects on twenty years of experience in the development of a decision-centred approach to planning—the strategic choice approach—which has found application both as an aid to the understanding of observed planning processes and as a means of helping planners tackle difficult problems in practice.

The author first summarises the view of planning as continuous management of uncertainty, which characterises the strategic choice approach. He then looks critically at the question of how far and in what circumstances it is relevant to regard the experience of uncertainty as a meaningful concept at the collective as well as the personal level.

This leads to some modest attempts at reformulation of established concepts, which are offered as examples of the kind of progress that can be achieved through pursuing a rationality-seeking, if not a rational, approach to the complexities of planning practice.

In this paper the author reflects on his experience as both theorist and practitioner in Canadian planning. The lack of any rigorous theoretical underpinning for planning practice is identified. Three reasons for this are advanced: the inhibiting effect of daily practice, the lack of any real discourse between theorists and practitioners and, most importantly, the prevalence of antipolitical planning ideologies. In an attempt to counteract the mystifying and deleterious effects of these ideologies, the author proposes a theoretical framework designed both to bridge the theory-practice chasm and to restore the lost nexus between planning and social justice.

The classical model of rational planning is fundamentally flawed. It assumes widespread consensus on goals, causal theory sufficiently developed as to permit prediction, and effective instrumental knowledge. None of these conditions pertains. As a result, traditional development planning has been proving ineffectual in developed and developing nations alike. That calls for a different style of centralized planning that constrains itself to constituting the rules for deciding and to promoting open debate. In parallel, planning of substantive strategies, designs, and investments should be highly decentralized, thus fostering multiplicities of potential outcomes, compatible with the wants of plural publics.

In this paper the author identifies a widening gulf between theory and practice in planning during the last decade, in Britain at least. The reasons for, and implications of, this gulf are discussed. The author begins by attempting to ‘Identify’ planning and to clarify the meanings of ‘theory’ and ‘prescription’. It is argued that both theory and practice are undermined by their separation and that it is essential for the development of planning that the two come back together. The theory-practice link needs to become a major focus of attention both for academics and for practitioners.