Planning Theory recent issues

Hezbollah as Urban Planner? Questions To and From Planning Theory

Fawaz, M. — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:28:16 PDT

A Critique of the Prevailing Comprehensive Urban Planning Paradigm in Iran: the Need for Strategic Planning

Farhoodi, R., Gharakhlou-N, M., Ghadami, M., Musa Panahandeh Khah, — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:28:16 PDT

The comprehensive urban planning model has been used in Iran for 50 years. It was developed in Europe and North America and has been subject to much criticism and subsequently replaced by new more efficient models such as strategic planning. However, in Third World countries generally, and in Iran in particular, it has remained the hegemonic discourse in urban development. This article assesses comprehensive urban planning in Iranian cities from both theoretical and practical viewpoints. The study concludes that the Comprehensive Planning paradigm has failed to resolve urban development dilemmas in Iranian cities and emphasizes the need for strategic planning.

Prolonging the Global Age of Gentrification: Johannesburg's Regeneration Policies

Winkler, T. — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:28:16 PDT

New Urban Policy and New Conventional Wisdom are not restricted to cities of the global North, but are being imported by municipalities of the global South as ‘world class’ enabling precedents. Johannesburg may be added to the growing number of cities that are adopting economic competitiveness, responsive governance, social cohesion, and social mix strategies to facilitate urban regeneration, so that free-market economic strategies rather than social policies may act as catalysts for change. However, such strategies may lead to the social and spatial exclusion of poor inner city residents and not to a Just City conceptualization for urban planning.

Book Review: Barrie Needham, Dutch Land Use Planning: Planning and Managing Land Use in the Netherlands, the Principles and the Practice. The Hague: SDU Publishers, 2007, 299 pp., ISBN 9789012120685, 40.00 Euros (pbk)

Alexander, E.R. — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:28:16 PDT

Planning Craft: How Planners Compose Plans

Hoch, C. — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:02:11 PDT

Conceiving urban plan making as practical judgment shifts theoretical attention from questions of belief to questions of meaning. How do we make urban plans that combine intelligent coordination with savvy communication to anticipate and cope with urban complexity? Consider adopting a pragmatic approach that relies on coherence to inform the appraisal, comparison and selection that accompany practical judgment. Plans compose the meaning and consequence of future actions. Pragmatic composition combines representation and interpretation to frame problems of urban complexity. Four orientations are described using plan examples: protocol, precedent, prototype and policy.

Crowdsourcing the Public Participation Process for Planning Projects

Brabham, D. C. — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:02:11 PDT

Public involvement is a central concern for urban planners, but the challenge for planners is how best to implement such programs, given many difficulties inherent in the typical public involvement process. The medium of the Web enables us to harness collective intellect among a population in ways face-to-face planning meetings cannot. This article argues that the crowdsourcing model, a successful, Web-based, distributed problem solving and production model for business, is an appropriate model for enabling the citizen participation process in public planning projects. This article begins with an exploration of the challenges of public participation in urban planning projects, particularly in the harnessing of creative solutions. An explanation of the theories of collective intelligence and crowd wisdom follows, arguing for the medium of the Web as an appropriate technology for harnessing far-flung genius. An exploration of crowdsourcing in a hypothetical neighborhood planning example, along with a consideration of the challenges of implementing crowdsourcing, concludes the article.

Relational Rewards and Communicative Planning: Understanding Actor Motivation

Olsson, A. R. — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:02:11 PDT

This article uses a collective action approach to analyse the risk of social dilemmas in communicative planning processes. If actors are self-interested and lack a predisposition to co-operation and communication, they may choose to free ride or under-contribute to the non-excludable outputs of voluntary communicative planning processes that lack reprisals for defection or under-contribution. To motivate their participation, actors must expect some exclusive additional reward. This analysis leads to a suggestion that communicative planning may create social capital networks that offer valuable relational rewards, in varying amounts, to some or all interdependent stakeholders. The value of relational rewards is their potential to reduce transaction costs in future collective actions. The expectation of relational rewards may be a selective incentive powerful enough to counteract the social dilemmas inherent in communicative planning processes in pursuit of normative goals such as inclusive-ness and diversity. However, the existence of relational rewards may facilitate strategic action as much as communicative action.

Democratic Anchorage of Infrastructural Governance Networks: the Case of the Femern Belt Forum

Torfing, J., Sorensen, E., Fotel, T. — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:02:11 PDT

Governance networks are often praised for their contribution to making public governance and spatial planning more effective. However, the democratic performance of governance networks is heavily disputed. In order to make a more precise assessment of the democratic quality of governance networks, we need to develop normative criteria that permit us to measure the democratic quality of governance networks on different dimensions. Such criteria are developed and brought together in our model for the democratic anchorage of governance networks. This article aims to improve the democratic anchorage model in two different ways: by offering operational definitions of the basic dimensions of the model and by demonstrating how the assessment criteria can be applied in an empirical case study of a long-lasting, multilevel governance network involved in the recent decision to build a bridge between Denmark and Germany. The democratic anchorage model helps to assess the democratic performance of specific governance networks and to gain knowledge about the critical factors determining their degree of democratic anchorage. Such knowledge is crucial for developing pro-active strategies for enhancing the democratic performance of specific governance networks.

Book Review: Patsy Healey, Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies: Towards a Relational Planning for Our Times. London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 352 pp., ISBN 978 0415380348, {pound}79.00/US$140.00 (hbk); ISBN 978 0415380355, {pound}27.99/US$49.95 (pbk)

Neuman, M. — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:02:11 PDT

Erratum

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:02:11 PDT

Realizing Planning's Emancipatory Promise: Learning From Regime Theory To Strengthen Communicative Action

Irazabal, C. — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:28:10 PDT

This article informs communicative action theory with insights from urban regime theory. The synthesis proposes a model of planning that is more comprehensive in its treatment of the linkages between planning and governance and helps advance the creation of network power, emancipatory knowledge, empowering subjectivities, and spaces of solidarity. The article then discusses the merits of these insights in the context of a categorization of planning into traditional, democratic, advocacy, and incremental approaches.

Resisting Neoliberalization: Communicative Planning or Counter-Hegemonic Movements?

Purcell, M. — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:28:10 PDT

This article argues that existing critiques of communicative planning become more salient when we consider the challenges posed by neoliberalization, which is understood here to mean the ongoing project to install market logics and competitive discipline as hegemonic assumptions in urban politics and policy-making. I develop how neoliberalization, by its normal operation, produces important legitimacy problems that must be managed. Overcoming these legitimacy problems necessitates decision-making practices that do not fundamentally challenge existing power relations but still confer a high degree of political legitimacy. The article presents existing critiques of Habermasian ideals to argue that communicative and collaborative planning, insofar as they follow these ideals, provide an extremely attractive way for neoliberals to maintain hegemony while ensuring political stability. The article argues therefore that communicative and collaborative approaches are not well-suited to confronting neoliberalization. More promising instead are radical counter-hegemonic mobilizations whose goal is not to neutralize power relations, but to transform them.

Theoryless Planning

Talvitie, A. — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:28:10 PDT

The article begins unconventionally and experientially — with memories that became the wellspring for the author's doubts about the scientific basis of (transport) planning. These memories form an essential substrate for the formal presentation which offers a scientific approach to (transport) planning that is experiential rather than positivist. The transition from the informal to the formal presentation is via a short history of planning. The article proposes a planning process and technique, which is `beyond postmodernism'. This theoryless planning model takes the almost incomprehensible web of associations in the human unconscious as its starting point, and patterns it as a modern psychoanalytic process and technique for individuals and groups. A glossary of key terms is included.

Desiring Docklands: Deleuze and Urban Planning Discourse

Wood, S. — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:28:10 PDT

This article examines fundamental changes in the form and content of Melbourne Docklands planning discourse, between 1989 and 2003, which would seem to represent a radical departure from planning's `normal paradigm'. It draws on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari to provide an account of these changes, showing how the planning process moved from a grounding in site, history and community, through an unbounded, ungrounded and dream-like phase of `deterritorialization', to a phase of `reterritorialization' with the production of new identities and desires. It concludes by considering what this analysis entails for understandings of urban planning practice; planning's relationship to capital and desire; the exercise of power in planning; the `discursive turn' in urban studies; and the relevance to planning of Deleuze and Guattari's privileging of `immanence' over `transcendence'.

Editorial Note

Hillier, J. — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:26:08 PST

Strangely Familiar: Planning and the Worlds of Insurgence and Informality

Roy, A. — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:26:08 PST

Dangerous Spaces of Citizenship: Gang Talk, Rights Talk and Rule of Law in Brazil

Holston, J. — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:26:08 PST

This article considers an apparently perplexing aspect of democratization in Brazil: the use by notorious criminal gangs (comandos) from the poor urban peripheries and prisons of the discourses of democratic citizenship, justice, and rule of law to represent their own organizations and intentions. I situate this use within an unsettling development in Latin America generally during the last 30 years: the coincidence of increasing political democracy and increasing everyday violence and injustice against citizens. My discussion considers these new territorializations of power and violence and their consequences for citizenship, democracy, and urbanization. To bring them to light, I focus on public pronouncements by Brazilian criminal gangs that typically combine rationalities of crime with those of democracy, citizen rights, rule of law, and revolution. I also compare them with public declarations made by the police. I analyze both in relation to the historically dominant paradigm of Brazilian citizenship that democratization destabilizes. I then evaluate this destabilization with regard to the new kinds of violence and paradigms of insurgent citizenship that have emerged as characteristics of urbanization and democratization worldwide.

Insurgent Planning: Situating Radical Planning in the Global South

Miraftab, F. — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:26:08 PST

This article revisits the notion of radical planning from the standpoint of the global South. Emerging struggles for citizenship in the global South, seasoned by the complexities of state—citizen relations within colonial and post-colonial regimes, offer an historicized view indispensable to counter-hegemonic planning practices. The article articulates the notion of insurgent planning as radical planning practices that respond to neoliberal specifics of dominance through inclusion — that is, inclusive governance. It characterizes the guiding principles for insurgent planning practices as counter-hegemonic, transgressive and imaginative. The article contributes to two current conversations within planning scholarship: on the implication of grassroots insurgent citizenship for planning, and on (de)colonization of planning theory.

People's Spaces: Familiarization, Subject Formation and Emergent Spaces in Colombo

Perera, N. — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:26:08 PST

In between and besides official plan-making, ordinary people produce more quantity and variety of spaces than the authorities and professionals. They both adapt to and adjust extant spaces for their daily activities and cultural practices, thus producing lived spaces out of abstract space. Yet we know very little about these basic space-making processes. This article aims to acknowledge and `understand' the processes of familiarizing space employed by ordinary people to create milieus that can support their everyday activities and cultural practices. Relying on subjects' vantage points of critique, it examines the space-making processes of four social actors in late 19th-century Colombo, then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.

Why India Cannot Plan Its Cities: Informality, Insurgence and the Idiom of Urbanization

Roy, A. — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:26:08 PST

The fast-paced growth of the Indian economy and particularly its cities has produced an urban crisis, one that is marked by the lack of adequate infrastructure and growth management as well as by sharp social divisions that are starkly etched in a landscape of bourgeois enclaves and slums. In this context, there are numerous calls for a more decisive and vigorous type of planning that can `future-proof' Indian cities. Yet, such efforts are often unsuccessful and many are fiercely challenged by social movements and forms of insurgence. This article explains this urban crisis by analyzing the structure of urban informality in India. While informality is often seen to be synonymous with poverty, this article makes the case that India's planning regime is itself an informalized entity, one that is a state of deregulation, ambiguity, and exception. This idiom of urbanization makes possible new frontiers of development but also creates the territorial impossibility of governance, justice, and development.

Theoretical Notes On `Gray Cities': the Coming of Urban Apartheid?

Yiftachel, O. — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:26:08 PST

The author analyzes the political geography of globally expanding urban informalities. These are conceptualized as `gray spaces', positioned between the `whiteness' of legality/approval/safety, and the `blackness' of eviction/destruction/death. The vast expansion of gray spaces in contemporary cities reflects the emergence of new types of colonial relations, which are managed by urban regimes facilitating a process of `creeping apartheid'. Planning is a lynchpin of this urban order, providing tools and technologies to classify, contain and manage deeply unequal urban societies. The author uses a `South-Eastern' perspective to suggest the concept of `planning citizenship' as a possible corrective horizon for analytical, normative and insurgent theories.

Cities and Citizens: Situating the Planning Process

Liggett, H. — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 07:26:08 PST