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May 2008
pnuk ran a roundtable discussion on 'the politics of academic practice in planning' at the planning research conference at Queen's University, Belfast (18-20 March). You can read contributions from Bob Colenutt and Libby Porter below or download them as word files on the right. Any and all comments welcome.
Bob Colenutt
Developing an alternative politics of planning
During the Thatcher years, a coherent critique of demand led, property led planning of that period emerged from political struggles against Government policy on land and planning. This led to a range of alternative planning (and wider social policy) strategies.
The position appears to be quite different now with no sustained critique of current planning politics, and thus no set of alternative visions or policies. The impact of capitalism is invisible in the endless debates about spatial planning processes or sustainable development,
The alternatives of the post Thatcher years were a reaction to property led planning – they emphasised democratic, needs driven, locally sensitive planning within a regional spatial planning framework. Thus, spatial planning, neighbourhood renewal, sustainable development, limits to out of town supermarkets emerged alongside welfare to work, and significant increases in expenditure on education and health.
Though may would have regarded these measures as inadequate to the task, they were for a time compelling and even radical alternatives to market driven development. But the enthusiasm for these policies has waned as they have moved to implementation and a certain cynicism has taken hold as these policies have been captured by a more market led top-down approach to public services, housing, and urban regeneration.
In summary, there has been a gradual slide from social democratic planning to neoliberal pro market agendas. It is crept up on us slowly but became more evident in the last four to five years, marked by widening inequality, commercialisation of urban and rural life, and compromises to accommodate market pressures whether for more runways, nuclear power plants, and commercial sponsorship. The convergence between public planning policy and the land and property market has become more and more marked (See the debate about the Kate Barker report but also the domination of business led strategies in local authority plans and planning decisions).
Strategic decisions for roads and airports and nuclear power stations are now to be taken out of the democratic process and into the hands of appointed experts whose brief is to achieve economic competitiveness not community needs (at the same as relieving the responsibility of politicians to take difficult decisions).
To put the lid on it, the credit crunch and economic slowdown has finally brought to a halt the optimism of those advocating community led planning and true sustainable development.
This trend is not universal, or even inevitable – there are points of light across the country; and the trend may be may be tempered by climate change. Climate change should provoke a rethink of planning, but at the moment this appears to be limited to environmental measures rather than addressing economic and social equalities and opportunities.
A further complication is that the current orthodoxy of planning e.g. spatial planning, incorporates certain elements of progressive planning (concern for balanced communities, liveability etc) wrapped up in a (New Labour) rhethoric of sustainable development. This camouflages the market forces that are manipulating the planning system behind the scenes, making the messages from environmental and community action more complicated.
Outline of an alternative politics of planning
Alternatives to current planning policy and practice spring not only from only from within the planning field itself but from other areas of social and economic policy, and most importantly from economic, environmental and community struggles.
The outlines of alternatives can be seen in the following;
- Penetrating critical analysis of urban development are few in number but they are of great importance e.g. Doreen Masseys recent book on London “World City”; Michael Edwards work on London and Thames Gateway
- Experiences of combining research and community action. The example of INURA (International Network for Urban Research and Action) brings together community activists and action researchers from universities and institutes in European Cities. INURA publications such as “Possible Urban Worlds” are a notebook of examples of local actions that have got results and learned valuable lessons about countering neo liberal urban development.
- Challenging national policy in planning and housing. This is the most invisible and under researched area of alternative analysis. Organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have much to say about the limitations of current planning policy. Planning Network UK has been set up to begin to focus in a more concentrated way on planning policies and alternative ideas - and there is much work to be done!
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Libby Porter
The following represents some tentative and reflective thoughts that stem from two primary wellsprings – first an increasingly troubled sense of my own privileged position as a planning academic (a position which I appreciate keenly having come from the strictures of practice), and the sketchy, early mobilisations of Planners Network UK.
Those of us who undertake our practice in an academic setting are incredibly privileged. This may seem an odd thing to say, especially given the current constraints under which academics operate in the UK and elsewhere. I’ll get to those in a moment, but first I want to start with this as it seems a critical place to start. We are privileged because intellectual freedom (while continually under attack) does still exist and we are free to pursue particular programmes that burn within us. This privilege gives rise to a great responsibility – to ensure our academic practice is steeped in a commitment to contributing to a better world. I would suggest, however, that to be ‘relevant’ and applied means something quite different from what is accepted currency in UK planning schools, which appears to be about how many research contracts you can get with policy makers in either central or local governments. Instead, it requires developing a kind of academic practice that is critically and reflectively oriented. By critical I mean a practice that challenges power and domination rather than serving it; that is informed by a strong nose for justice rather than goals like internationally renowned status; that accepts its very operation as a collective politics rather than a mechanistic pursuit of a dry policy-relevance. By reflective, I mean a practice that examines carefully the structures by which it is bound, the conditions under which it operates, and the motivations that underpin it. This perhaps patchy and rather conceptually incoherent definition will have to serve for now. So, I want to explore how we might develop this kind of academic practice across three frontiers.
Frontier 1: our own backyard.
I came into the planning academy from practice, with idealistic hopes for a pure space of critique and reflection. With the benefit of hindsight and some experience, I can now see how naïve and idealistic this was. I’m now fully cognisant of the fact that neoliberalism rolled through the gateways of Universities and the agenda of individualism and the pursuit of greed structures my workplace and my own work in ways that I’d prefer to avoid. For example, UK universities, I have discovered, are relentlessly caught up in the pursuit of excellence defined in hopelessly narrow and ideologically charged terms. The sector is one driven by individuality, ego, uniqueness or the ‘first’ to be at a particular conclusion, and the desire to be cutting edge. Sometimes this is of a critical nature – work that Andy Inch and Tim Marshall have done has started to explore the extent to which politically-engaged thinking and research is being published by planning academics in the UK. How many of us, though, are happy to cite ‘radical’ commentators and scholars, but our engagement remains locked away in journals? Our actual daily practices remain untouched. Sometimes this desire to be cutting edge is much more cynical. By way of example, a recent discussion I was party to in a UK planning school focused on the impact factor ladder of journals. It was suggested that academics within a department should more regularly cite each other’s work, because this would give individual departments a better ‘hit-rate’ on the impact ladder. This deeply cynical exercise in the pursuit of academic excellence left me cold, but also curious as to how this has come to be so widespread and even acceptable. There is an additional, even rawer element for planning academics, as we have to be ‘policy relevant’ as well, which brings its own dilemmas, some of which I’ll talk about in a moment.
Before I turn to the question of policy-relevance, there is one aspect in the life of a planning school that seems to go remarkably undiscussed – that is of teaching and learning. Within academic planning circles (at least the ones I seem to move in), we seem to rarely talk about teaching and learning. We certainly don’t talk about the politics of teaching, or how critical, reflective, politically-engaged teaching might be part of the curricula in UK planning schools. As Leonie Sandercock asked a few years back in an article in Progressive Planning – where’s the pedagogy in radical planning?
Let me illustrate with a story that is quite personal to me. I had an epiphany in a classroom recently that was deeply uncomfortable and has presented a major challenge. I had been writing around the question of urban regeneration since coming to the UK and had taken a fairly critical stance of particular urban policy initiatives that I’d observed and studied, and their implications for local people who had been disenfranchised from planning processes. Much of what I was researching and writing about concerned the way inner city urban regeneration sites were constructed in policy discourse as degraded, and the people who lived in and used those places, mostly working class folks, seemed to be increasingly easy to ignore. So, I’d been writing away busily one morning, feeling good with myself that I was doing this important critical research work. A week or so later, I fronted up to my spatial planning project class to teach the ins and outs of spatial planning. As I worked through the material that I’d prepared (some of it carried over from the year before when it was taught by somebody else), it dawned on me that I was teaching precisely what I had been criticising in my research and writing activities. My critique concerned the myopia with which urban policy makers seem to approach place, as if urban places are simply a set of utility values cobbled together in an equation that looks like physical environment + land price = regeneration. I had been particularly critical of the construction of knowledge about place from very narrow sources – using census data, for example, to examine a population without actually ever going to meet anybody from the local area, and only attending to the physical characteristics of place without appreciating their location within social, cultural and economic networks. My teaching material covered: using census data to generate knowledge about a place and generate an understanding of ‘need’, and doing physical site analysis based on observation.
My point is that within our own practice we must be looking carefully at the ways we are perpetuating the very characteristics we might rail against within the more comfortable fireside armchairs of academic journals. Whilst neither given nor automatic, and always hard-won, I retain hope that there is something in the academic life that can provide the space to develop a critical, reflective, politically-engaged practice.
None of this, however, has any resonance in the bean-counting that goes on in UK Universities about academic excellence. Becoming engaged with PNUK activities, for example, will hardly win you any RAE gold stars. Nor will engaging in the necessary reflective exercises to generate more meaningful engagement with the pedagogy of progressive planning practice. The ways in which Universities, and their individual departments and staff are measured, (important as it is to measure the quality of academic education and research) has instilled an ethos into Universities of individualism, competition and ‘impact factor’ status. Planning schools are of course not immune.
Frontier 2: policy relevance
The second frontier is this quest for being ‘relevant’ and applied, the age-old problem that academics face, and academics in planning face perhaps in even rawer ways. There is a lot of ‘policy-relevant’ activity going on in planning schools today. A quick glance at the DCLG website, or that of the Scottish Government, or the Welsh Assembly will show that burgeoning industry of the academic sector – the government contract to do the evidence bit of ‘evidence-based policy’. That planning as a place-making activity is constantly held up as the baddie in much of the work that comes out of the more well-known of these research contracts suggests to me that a very narrow view of what we might consider planning to be is being propounded. This kind of policy-relevance has no place in the type of practice I’m wanting to flesh out here.
Our academic practice must surely be steeped in a commitment to contributing in positive and progressive ways I might add, to the material world. But I wonder if this is a much more complex thing than being ‘policy-relevant’ and contributing to ‘evidence-based policy’, both of which seem to currently dominate thinking on this question. There seems to be a great rush to be policy-relevant in UK planning schools. Be assured, I by no means am suggesting that the work of planning schools should not be relevant, grounded and applicable. Quite the opposite. What concerns me is what ‘applied’ means in this context. If we think of being applied as being ethically situated, contextualised, grounded, then we have to think differently about how we undertake the quest for relevance. Being applied is to undertake one’s work with integrity – conceptual, methodological, and moral – and humility. This surely requires not an abstract generalisation of the world, but a morally thick sensitivity to how the world feels, and the ambiguous place of our own work within it. In those senses, it becomes relevant and applied. This is very different from being policy-relevant, which suggests some kind of game where you try and predict what will be the policy buzzwords next year and pitch your research agenda in that direction.
So, it isn’t then, that there’s a yawning chasm between the worlds of practitioners and academics, though surely it remains a challenge to us all to translate our work back and forth to each other to engender mutual understanding. But there is most certainly a diminishing space for engaging more critically (academics and practitioners together) with questions of justice and power, of the question of just who we are planning for. This is not, then, a question of whether academics understand the vagaries of practice, or whether practitioners read journals. As Patsy Healey has suggested, there is a thoroughly complex and non-linear relationship between knowledge and action. We do not become ‘policy relevant’ by producing a report for whichever government on whichever issue and expecting it to be ‘implemented’. To expect such seems to fly in the face of the rather obvious fact that planning is political and that ‘action’ and implementation in planning is almost never evidence-based but generally more pragmatic and politically-motivated.
The policy frontier, then, cannot be approached only as an exercise in communication and marketing-speak. Instead, I’d like to suggest here that the problem lies in the primary problem of a diminishing attention and commitment to questions of justice and power. Our energies, then, might be better put into ongoing conversations about what different problems actually mean in both conceptual and practical terms, and how they might be resolved. From here, we are much better placed to pursue strategic research agenda that are relevant, applied, and critical. This requires entirely different kinds of forums than we currently have, and would probably significantly contradict the current relationship between practitioners and academics which is either one of clientilism when the practitioner community hold the purse strings, or else bemused indifference.
Frontier 3: activism
Then there is the further question of our responsibility in the academy to a much wider polity than the practitioner community. Universities as producers of knowledge have a responsibility to their immediate communities, whether defined spatially or by the impact of their knowledge-producing work. But what does this actually mean? To what extent can academics be activists also? Are we stuck with serving the current dogmas of being RAE-driven, or ‘business-facing’, or concerned with ‘knowledge-transfer’, or can our work serve broader interests and in doing so be a force for justice, equity and social transformation? The latter is possible, but not in the abstract. It is empty to pontificate in journal articles while remaining aloof to the lived reality all around us. Critical bases of thinking and writing must surely give rise to action. There is so much scope particularly at local levels, for very different types of action, so many grassroots organisations organising their own utopias, working hard at the margins to bring about change. Many many people are already engaged in activities outside the confines and structures of the ‘day-job’. It is here that we can do some of our best work, and we shouldn’t shy away from it as it is a true application of our skills in critical analysis.
PNUK is increasingly being asked to assist all sorts of different people in different circumstances with planning-related issues. This suggests to me there is a role for those of us in privileged positions of knowledge, expertise and power in university settings to not only see that privilege for what it is, but make it more accessible to others. There are other roles for networks like PNUK – a space for critical reflection and writing outside the confines of journals for example. We have the opportunity with PNUK to draw the three frontiers I’ve mapped out here together in much more fruitful and engaged ways. There are other networks that can do this too. INURA and PN in North America (which PNUK has drawn some of its inspiration from) are two excellent examples of what might be described as families of colleagues making time and paying attention to political engagement.
One of the problems we face in PNUK is mobilisation. If we were to do a survey of all the people at this conference about their sense of the purpose and contribution of their work, we feel sure we would get results that showed a generally progressive-leaning and socially aware constituency. And yet it remains such a latent, sleepy political engagement. Aware, but not engaged. If we are to find ways of reinvigorating a more progressive role for planning, we have to awaken ourselves to the requirements for our own daily practice. We’d like to open this to an active discussion about how as a community we might now act
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