Planning Theory

Critical pragmatism provides a line of analysis and imagination that might contribute both to academic planning theory and to engaged planning practices as well. To do so, it must build upon, and develop more politically, Donald Schön’s seminal work on reflective practice. It must help students of planning think critically about outcomes as well as processes, about institutional and process designs, about power and performance. It must resonate experientially with perceptions of change-oriented practitioners facing complex multi-party “problems” characterized by distrust, anger, strategic behavior, poor information, and inequalities of power. Not least of all, a critical pragmatism must—and can—help students of planning reconstruct possibilities where others might initially perceive or presume impossibilities.

There has been a recent growth in interest within planning theory in Actor–Network Theory. This article explores the potential for Actor–Network Theory to deliver a distinctive perspective on planning practice. Using a case study of commercial office development and the discussion of its carbon performance within the regulatory planning process, an Actor–Network Theory–based analysis is provided. The analysis points to the role of planning policy documents as intermediaries, the planning consent process as an obligatory passage point and energy-modelling exercises as potentially black-boxing low-carbon development. It also emphasises how materiality of the development embodies compliance with policy through the construction and warranting of evidence claims. In all these ways, the relationships between actants within networks are shaped. The practice-based conclusions draw attention to the importance of planners devising highly detailed and carefully worded plan policies, and understanding and being able to challenge the knowledge derived from energy-modelling tools as ways of developing agency to influence the outcomes of planning practice. Such agency is revealed by an Actor–Network Theory analysis to be small work in local sites of practice but set against the backdrop of regulatory regimes.

There is growing evidence that the problems, challenges and opportunities that our cities, city-regions and regions are facing cannot be tackled adequately by traditional spatial planning. One of the key challenges for planning in this respect is to analyse critically what type of planning is suited as an approach to deal – in an innovative/emancipatory and transformative way – with the problems and challenges developing and developed societies are facing. An expanding literature and an increasing number of practices all over the world seem to suggest that strategic spatial planning may be looked upon as a possible approach. But at the same time critical comments and reactions are raised on the theory and the practices of strategic spatial planning. This paper uses the theory and practices of coproduction to reframe strategic spatial planning. It first looks for a deeper understanding of the meaning(s) of coproduction as it emerged in different contexts and different intellectual traditions and then introduces coproduction as an immanent characteristic of a more radical type of strategic planning. Coproduction combines the provision of public goods/services needed with the building of a strong, resilient and mutually supportive community that could assure its members their needs would be met. This implies changing the perceptions and the approach of many professionals (public and private) about how plans, policies and public services are conceived and delivered, with the objective of enabling the (structural) change needed in an open and equitable way. The paper relies on a selective review of critical planning literature and the author’s experience in practice.

This paper offers a framework to redress the neglect of children in planning theory. Noting that children are viewed as both human beings and human becomings, attention is drawn to the role of planning in regulating both aspects of children’s lives through a construction of childhood that emerged in conjunction with planning’s modernist roots. A recovered history of childhood challenges adult-centric accounts that render children invisible or assume their dependence and helplessness. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, the constitutive elements of this recovered history are examined and contrasted with the spatial segregation and regulation of childhood that is the profession’s current normative framework. The paper concludes by identifying ways that planning theory can be further enhanced by a focus on children and childhood.

Five years ago Yiftachel (2006) called on planning theorists to focus attention on cities of the global ‘South-East’ where issues differ significantly from northern contexts – which currently inform much planning theory work. This article asks if any such new directions have emerged in this period. It first reviews recent writings on socio-political and material conditions in these cities and suggests a set of assumptions to inform thinking about planning in these regions. It then identifies and assesses new strands of planning thought (some with older roots), and considers the project of taking forward planning theory-building in the global South-East.