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Planning as ethnographic object – a note from Eeva Berglund, former academic, possibly wannabe planner
Anthropologists Simone Abram (Leeds Met), Gisa Weszkalnys (Oxford) and Åsa Boholm (CEFOS/Center for Public Sector Research, University of Gothenburg) convened a workshop for anthropologists doing research on planning. It took place in Gothenburg earlier this month, kindly hosted by CEFOS. I am an anthropologist by training and a planner by, well, by virtue of an MSc and a tiny amount of practical professional experience, so I was happy to contribute. I was also intrigued to hear what an unlikely subject like anthropology, usually identified with subcultures and marginal social phenomena, had to say about planning, such a strikingly modern institution.
The focus was on ideas of participatory government and, if I can put it like that, on what planning does or achieves in the world, in terms of things like reproducing society and organising political power, as well as shaping material and social infrastructure. Drawing on overseas development experiences, some recent anthropology has been very critical of planning. It’s had plenty of unintended consequences and often hasn’t achieved what it’s promised to achieve. But rather than stopping at those unhelpful observations, in sympathy with the task of the planner, the workshop looked at planning as an important human endeavour, but one whose contents we can’t just assume.
We felt it important to blast some unhelpful persistent myths about planning, participation and even democracy and to investigate analytical terms like governance. As anthropologists do, we approach our task through detailed accounts of behaviours, beliefs and routines. (OK, anthropology is largely about telling stories, but at their best they are illuminating stories and push the bounds of what it’s possible to think.) Some of what came out might well dovetail with critical planning studies (e.g. the ‘What’s left of planning’ issue of International Planning Studies, 2008 Vol. 13(2)) but is really more concerned with delving beneath buzzwords and theoretical concepts and seeing what they achieve in the real world, than in creating its own specialist lexicon.
Of course anthropology does have professionally significant key concepts of its own, like cultural specificity. The import of work on planning is that cultural variation (or ‘diversity’) isn’t an issue just when it comes to the people planners seek to draw into processes of participation. Planning institutions, governments and legal frameworks have historical and cultural specifics too. Given the internationalization of everything, including planning education and planning fashions, we wondered about how appropriate and effective practices can remain as they travel the globe. And we noted the shocking gulfs that exist between the rhetoric of policy (it sometimes promises the earth and a bit more) and the difficult and unsustainable realities that are promoted or created under the guise of participatory planning.
The examples were drawn from both rich and poor countries. There was a paper on housing which argued that policy and political discourse (mostly UK) have inexplicably – until very recently – ignored some fundamental facts of life and geared policies towards ‘families’ that seem to exist in stasis (2 young, fit parents, and 2 cute kids). It argued that planning for housing needs more sophisticated concepts of time, history and phasing. By implication it also consigned ‘sustainable communities’ and ‘flexible housing’ to a dustbin of utopian self-delusion. Two papers discussed Nordic countries, Norway and Sweden. There planning has been central to the welfare state and its success, but things are changing. It’s unclear what it is that planners and policy makers are doing when they ‘plan’, and what role does politics (and the politician!) have at the level of a local/municipal authority. It seems there’s magic in planning, even in the most ‘modern’ of European societies. These papers also gave rise to heated discussion about what constitutes propriety, success, failure, corruption and so on. So we began to appreciate just how significant a small cultural difference can be! From a UK perspective official channels of influence in the Nordic world, although changing, still look enviably lively and operational, even if by their standards they are ‘unable to deliver’ what the public expects.
The other papers looked at how participation in planning is imagined and experienced: what skills people are required to bring to the task? what capacities and relationships are operationalised in planning as it really unfolds? what roles are recognised by the local state? what is the importance of a planner’s rubber stamp? how do non-planners plan? Those of us speaking about the UK found ourselves describing a world of opacity and frustration muddled further by axiomatic beliefs about the desirability of participation not to mention questionable assumptions about economics.
We opened up lots of questions which I hope will get discussed further in forthcoming publications, conferences and workshops. It would be worth thinking about what scope there might be for planners and planning academics and anthropologists to talk face to face. I’m thinking.
If you are interested in finding out more about the project as it develops, or in responding to Eeva then email her.
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