PLAN 502: WEEK 5

Theories of Planning

Housekeeping items

• The outlines for the final projects are due today.• Today we will cover the Introduction to Section III,

Fainstein, Lindblom, Davidoff, and Hudson (for

which I’ve provided a link).• The Introduction notes that Fainstein is critical of the way the study of planning and the study of cities are often separated in academia. She argues that one cannot understand planning or motivate social movements without consideration for the proper object of planning, which is the city and, more specifically, the good city.

Planning Theory

• For her, it’s mainly the good city is one that achieves much greater justice and equality, but it could be the sustainable city, or one that achieves both objectives simultaneously, as with Bogotá, Columbia, under Enrique Peňalosa.

See http://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/do-our-cities-still-work-our-canada-1.2935734

Planning Theory

• As we will see Lindblom (1959) challenges the dominant model of rational-comprehensive (or synoptic) planning, and argues for muddling through or incremental planning.

• This has some affinities to Buzz Holling’s approach of “adaptive management” in resource management, where instead of trying to ‘pre-ordain’ the perfect plan, one experiments and sees what kind of feedback one gets from the environment, and making course corrections on this basis.

Planning Theory• Davidoff (1965) argues against the notion of a single

public interest, and suggests that planners should work for the most vulnerable in society. He also argues that traditional planning too much separates physical planning from social planning, thereby exacerbating social conflict and injustice.

• We will deal with Forester and Healey next week and, in their place, we will deal with Barclay Hudson’s SITAR model, which includes the synoptic, incremental, transactive, advocacy, and radical approaches.

• We won’t talk about them much, but strategic planning aims to identify an organization’s vision, mission, values, with a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats); and communicative action focuses more on dialogue than on plan-making itself.

Fainstein• Planning theory should focus less on what planners do, and more on the socio-spatial constraints they face and what they hope to achieve. Let’s say planners want to move away from an automobile-dependent city. They have to deal with this, unless their forefathers and foremothers showed greater wisdom:

Fainstein• Citing Robert Beauregard, she argues that “Few

planning theorists concern themselves with the physical city” (p. 160).

• There have been exceptions, and she mentions a number of them.

• Initially, planning was all about easing and solving the problems of the industrial city, recreating them on the basis of enlightened design principles. When and why did that get lost?

• She is critical of Haussman, Howard, and Burnham who had a vision of the ‘good city,’ but who never questioned it, or whether it was truly in the public interest. Instead, experts were largely in control.

Fainstein• She talks about something I’ve mentioned before –

politicians were to set the goals and “disinterested appointed officials” (planners) were to figure how best to achieve them.

• She traces the roots of the rational-comprehensive model to the transformation of urban planning at the Universities of Chicago and Pennsylvania. The sociologist, Karl Mannheim, was an early critic of this approach in that he suggested that what was ‘true’ or what worked in the past may not be true/work in the future. There are no universal sets of rules. (He also anticipated post-modernism.)

• People also criticized the fact that planners did not consult the people most affected by their decisions, even though they worked for elected officials who were put there by voters.

Fainstein• The model of electing politicians, and then leaving the

decisions to planners and others has not worked very well. Planners are not immune to influences, be they from developers, their politician bosses, or from specific fragments of the public. The result is often confrontation.

Fainstein• Some practitioners – Krumholz and Davidoff – have been willing to put less emphasis on deliberative democracy to achieve a more equitable distribution of benefits.

• Their work “facilitated interaction between groups, provided low-income people with improved housing and access to jobs and amenities, and did not privilege investment to benefit downtown business interests,” as has so often been the case.

• She goes on to discuss John Forester’s theory of communicative action, which assumes that more open dialogue which even out power differences.

Fainstein• She disagrees: “…if the powerful lose their advantages as a consequence of open communication, they are likely to either suppress unpleasant truths or to marginalize the tellers of them” by controlling and channeling communication. (p. 165). Is this true?

• She cites examples of where authors, instead of just assuming that an open dialogue process resulted in a better plan/ product, actually see whether this is so or if the plan failed to achieve its objectives and why.

• She cites Chantal Mouffe as arguing that conflict is essential to achieving good outcomes and to groups in the population forming their identities. Do you agree? How does this apply to First Nations, women, the poor, or other groups challenging inequality?

Fainstein• Is it the case that much of what we accept as rational amounts to rationalizations repeated over and over again, as with the argument that the world will come to an end without economic growth, or that Canada will commit economic suicide if it doesn’t continue to favour the exploitation of fossil fuels?

• There are a lot of tricky issues in the realm of communication – the problem of demagoguery (think Donald Trump), the domination of minorities by majorities, the tyranny of the most outspoken, and so on.

• Despite Fainstein’s critical comments, I know from personal experience that “Engagement processes shapes participants’ sense of themselves” (Patsy Healey, p. 167).

Fainstein• Fainstein is sort of a modernist in that she believes that

justice and fairness don’t just exist to be ‘discovered’ or to emerge ad hoc according to the situation; “the ideal of justice or fairness transcends particularity.”

• John Rawls, the American philosopher, believed that justice and fairness is whatever people would agreed to without first knowing what their privileges and status would be in their future lives.

• For Fainstein, justice is linked to Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the “right to the city” – to whom does it belong? And how far do the rights of groups extend, be they homeless people, people who can’t afford a million dollar house, young people wanting to live in the city where they work, and access to cultural amenities.

Fainstein• She argues that sometimes desirable outcomes have to

take precedence over process, and cites the triumph of the German social security system and the British national health service. These were brought in in a top-down way.

• She also notes that judicial decisions, which are not democratic per se, are often drivers of positive change. One can think in this context of decisions favouring First Nations’ land and treaty rights.

• Like John Friedmann, she’s a strong believer in the notion of the ‘good city’ as a force to mobilize people, and cites the example of New Urbanism which despite its flaws, has rallied a whole new constituency to the challenge of transforming – or trying to transform – our cities.

Fainstein• Some cities – Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Bogotá,

Curitiba – can serve as at least partial models for how we can transcend the status quo.

Lindblom and the Science of ‘Muddling Through’

• Charles Lindblom was one of the first articulate critics of rational-comprehensive planning (1959).

• He pointed that, to be fully rational and comprehensive is beyond the intellectual capacity of humans, and would demand more resources for a given policy or planning issue that is ever available.

• Moreover, stakeholders and decision-makers will always disagree on goals and means of achieving them. He gives a number of examples.

• On p. 179, he offers a table comparing rational-comprehensive and what calls the “successive-limited comparison” approach or what has been called elsewhere the incremental approach.

LINDBLOM

• Rational-comprehensive (or synoptic) separates clarification of values from analysis of alternative policies, whereas they are interwoven in the incremental approach.

• Synoptic involves separation of ends and means; incremental doesn’t separate but considers them together.

• For synoptic planning a ‘good policy’ is one that theoretically seems most appropriate to the goal. For incrementalists, it’s what various analysts agree on.

• For synoptics, every relevant factor is considered before making a plan or policy. For incrementalists, one cannot help but neglect possible outcomes, possible alternative policies, and important affected values.

• Synoptic relies heavily on theory; incremental relies on a succession of limited comparisons.

LINDBLOM

• How to adjudicate between considerations and concerns even if the planner or policy chooses to keep only their own counsel. Let’s say one wants to relocate tenants scheduled for demolition. One wants to empty the buildings, one wants to find suitable accommodation for the displaced people, and wants to not alienate living in other areas with true great or sudden and influx. How to balance these concerns?

• The right course of action may vary with the circumstances. Can you think of examples??

• His arguments are a little hard to follow, but he seems to be saying that one cannot making an abstract ranking of preferences that is good for all situations; one can only see the marginal benefits that exist between different sets of policies.

LINDBLOM

• Notes how in the 50s, conservatives and liberals in Congress agreed on extending old age insurance, despite their difference in ideologies. Do we see that kind of thing much today in Canada or the U.S.? This causes me to question his statement, “Agreement thus becomes the only practicable test of the policy’s correctness” (p. 182). This may be true in the European Union, but even there are major divisive issues.

• Lindblom’s incrementalism posits that that one looks at status quo policies and plans and hypothesize how alternative ones might be a marginal improvement. Thus, change becomes a strictly evolutionary business. He argues that any more radical departures are “politically impossible” (p. 184), though there have been such changes, as Fainstein notes. How have they been made possible?

LINDBLOM

• In his incremental model, he suggest that different agencies and stakeholders serve as watchdogs and balance each other out, but is this the way policy and democracy in Canada work today?

• He also suggests that by developing in an incremental/ evolutionary fashion society avoids making major errors, and can remedy mistakes more readily. One merely makes successive comparisons between what is and what might be a better alternative on a modest scale.

• He does note, however, that his proposed method has its imperfections. With it, policymakers may overlook potentially excellent policies because of the limited scope of the method of comparison itself.

Paul Davidoff and Advocacy Planning• “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning” (1965) was

written in the midst of the turmoil of the ‘60s in the U.S. when the demand for justice was manifesting itself in the Civil Rights movement, when Congress was adopting new welfare measures, and the Supreme Court was upholding equal protection measures under the law.

• It was an era of great hope and great restlessness, particularly on the part of African-Americans, the poor, and students.

• Davidoff predicts a predominantly urban future and soundly rejects the notion that planners are merely, or mainly, technicians.

March on Washington 1963

Paul Davidoff and Advocacy Planning• Davidoff argues that planners need to assume an active role

to “improve the urban condition” (p. 192).• He accuses theorists like Lindblom of a failure to address or

tackle the ‘big issues’: “Solutions to questions about the share of wealth and other social commodities that should go to different classes cannot be technically be derived; they must arise from social attitudes” (p. 192).

• Davidoff wants the planner to elaborate on “the values underlying his prescriptions for action” (p. 192); he wants he or she to affirm their values and openly advocating for them.

• In a way he doesn’t fully explain, he suggests that planners have to advocate for both government and individuals and groups seeking to better their communities.

Paul Davidoff and Advocacy Planning• The right course of action will never emerge from facts

per se, but only from conscious choices. There are lots of facts, for instance, that indicate that climate change is the single biggest threat to the planet, but our leaders are not making the necessary choices to address it.

• Davidoff seeks a balance between the need for a certain amount of centralized control and attention to localized, specialized interests.

• He sees that there is always something of a polarity between the “welfare of all and the welfare of minorities…” (p. 193), and this has to be negotiated. Can you think of examples?

Paul Davidoff and Advocacy Planning• Davidoff goes beyond suggesting that people have a right

“to be heard.” “It also means allowing them to become well informed about the underlying reasons for planning proposals, and to understand these in the technical language of professional planners” (p. 193). The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) of Great Britain provides individuals and communities with just this kind of service.

• The Canadian Institute of Planners (CIP) and its affiliates do nothing of the kind. They’re too busy trying to make CIP an exclusive professional club. [editorial comment]

Paul Davidoff and Advocacy Planning• Davidoff is an advocate of plural plans, of having more

than one for the same site, so that there’s a healthy competition of ideas.

• In the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood in Vancouver, the Residents Association of Mount Pleasant (RAMP) prepared, with the assistance an architect, an alternative plan to the Rize highrise that was eventually approved by the City. I haven’t been able to find anything about it, but here’s an article if you want to read more: http://themainlander.com/2015/04/22/rize-above-the-crowd-a-corporate-developers-version-of-mount-pleasant/.

• The architect who chose to work with RAMP would be an example of an advocacy planner.

Paul Davidoff and Advocacy Planning• Davidoff thinks it normal that people should be in opposition

to planners and their agencies. As he puts it, “The agency…may be serving undesired ends” (p. 194).

• He wants planners to have to fight for political support, rather than taking it for granted. Enlightened opposition would keep them on their toes.

• He also says that alternative plans would force “anti” people to actually articulate an alternative vision.

• An advocacy planner would provide information, analyze current trends, stimulate future conditions, but most importantly they “would be a proponent of specific substantive solutions” (p. 195).

• The advocate would represent his or her client’s views, while also seeking to influence them, where appropriate.

Paul Davidoff and Advocacy Planning• In theory, he seems to feel that the opportunity would exist

for planners to find employment with organizations whose values are in harmony with their own. How realistic is that? Most planners work for municipalities, regional districts, and provincial agencies where the politicians are the ultimate bosses.

• To some degree, the role of the advocacy planner is like that of a lawyer advocating for the interests of his or her client, but they would also educate planners and the wider community about the needs, conditions, and problems of their client group, as well as letting their client group know their rights in the face of development and helping them formulate their plans.

Paul Davidoff and Advocacy Planning• Davidoff was an advocate for local anti-poverty councils to

assist community groups in paying for the services they need.• Something like it occurred for a while under President Lyndon

Johnson with his “War On Poverty” and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.

• One of its provisions was to provide “financial and technical assistance to public and private nonprofit agencies for community action programs developed with ‘maximum feasible participation’ of the poor and giving ‘promise of progress toward elimination of poverty.’”

• These were very different times. Johnson’s Secretary of Labor declared: "It has become clear that America is not going to put up with poverty amidst prosperity. We realize that by itself prosperity is not going to get rid of poverty."

Paul Davidoff and Advocacy Planning• Davidoff thinks ‘citizen participation’ should not have to be

organized; it should be the norm.• While citywide planning by organizing makes sense, he

feels the neighbourhood is the natural focal point. Such efforts could seek support from government and/or foundations.

• Davidoff is impatient with planners who see their role as being one of managing the physical environment: “High density, low density, greenbelts, mixed uses, cluster developments, centralized or decentralized business centers are per se neither good nor bad. They describe physical relations or conditions, but only take on value when seen in terms of their social, economic, psycho-logical, or aesthetic effects upon different users” (p. 211).

Paul Davidoff and Advocacy Planning• For him the key issues with every land use issue is “Who

gets what, when, where, why, and how.” (p. 201).• He is quite stern in his assessment of the role of planners:

“As members of a profession charged with making urban life more beautiful, exciting, creative, and just, we have had little to say.”

Is this the best we can do??

Barclay Hudson and SITAR• He complains that each of the five models are internally

coherent, but don’t learn from one another; they shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. As he notes, “Each of the five traditions to be considered has an internally consistent, self-reinforcing network of methods, data requirements, professional skills, and working styles. Each has its own epistemology for validating information and its own institutional setting for putting ideas into practice, Each perceives the ‘public interest’ in its own way, reflecting its particular assessment of human nature and its own sense of the legitimate range of interventions in social, economic, and political processes” (p. 388).

SYNOPTIC AND INCREMENTAL PLANNING

• Synoptic or rational-comprehensive – the dominant model after World War II in North America – and the one attacked by both Lindblom and Davidoff, though on different grounds.

• Hudson is not so quick to dismiss it, arguing that any planning exercise necessarily makes use of some of its elements, with its focus on ends and means, trade-offs, and formulating action.

• He discusses incremental planning as de-emphasizing the God-like nature of planners and any centralizing tendencies. He mentions that Yugoslavia under Tito had some elements of incrementalism. One official declared that their most important planning tool was “the telephone” – i.e. they experimented and negotiated a lot.

TRANSACTIVE PLANNING

• His third model is transactive planning, which we haven’t heard about before. This involves face-to-face interactions between planners between planners and those who will be affected by planners’ decisions.

• Transactive planning seek to decentralize planning and embed it into broader social action, while encouraging social learning and empowerment.

• Social learning= learning by doing and also in interaction with other groups; empowerment= groups and individuals gain increasing confidence in their own abilities and a willingness to assert themselves.

ADVOCACY PLANNING• “The advocacy planning movement grew up in the sixties,

rooted in adversary procedures modelled upon the legal profession, and usually applied to defending the interests of weak against strong – community groups, environ-mental causes, the poor, and the disenfranchised against the established powers of business and government” (pp. 389-390).

• Advocacy planners have resorted to the courts, and their work can still be seen amongst First Nations and urban non-profit groups representing tenants, residents of the Downtown Eastside, drug users, poor people, and many more. They helped defeat the proposed freeway in Vancouver in the ‘60s and the extension of urban renewal in Strathcona.

RADICAL PLANNING• Hudson sees two distinct strains in the radical planning

movement. One is quite pragmatic and realistic, and seeks to promote self-reliance and mutual aid. It deals with issues on an ad hoc basis largely.

• The orientation of this group is similar to what can be found in certain educational philosophies, such as those of John Dewey, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, and others who seek to create an educational system that empowers students and is relevant to their communities rather than imposing an external curriculum on them.

• The second strain seeks to identify the structural roots of what it sees as an oppressive social and economic system, arguing that progress will only be achieved when that system is fundamentally transformed. Examples?

Hudson

Hudson

Do you agree with his evaluation of the traditions?

Hudson• The rest of the article elaborates further on his criteria, and

how and why he has evaluated the different approaches the way he has. It’s a rich description. Please read it on your own.

• He argues that all approaches have elements that can be useful to planners at different times and, in some cases, one can imagine hybrids, such as “mixed scanning,” where one alternates between the ‘big picture’ outlook and the more concrete and specific. How might that look?

• What kind of planner do you envision yourself as?• If you found yourself disagreeing with city council and/or the

city manager over policies and plans, would you quit and try to find a job for less money more in tune with your values? The choice of “burrowing from within” vs. “challenging from without.”