Planning in the Face of Power by John Forester

Author:John Forester
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: Urban, Sociology, Social Science, General, Political Science, Public Policy
ISBN: 9780520064133
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1988-12-20T21:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

I have tried to show in this chapter that designers design with others as much as they do with their heads or hands and that, furthermore, wherever the creative impulse originates, the development, refinement, and realization of design is a deeply social process. In order to capture the practical, interpretive, and institutional dimensions of that process, this chapter has proposed an alternative conception of designing as the interactive work of making sense together in practical conversation.

Toward that end, we first explored a fragment from an actual community planning meeting to illuminate a variety of organizational, cultural, political, and rhetorical dimensions of even the most simple urban design problems. We also observed that the notion of design as a formal search process leaves much to be desired. Indeed, the notion of search seems ill suited to account for the generation of the solution space, the resolution of ambiguity (in design criteria, for example), and the fluidity of the preferences of clients, beneficiaries, and others.

Second, we considered seven aspects of design practices seen as the work of making sense together. This formulation allows us to understand design practice as action in the face of ambiguity, action that recreates the lived worlds of inhabitants, action that is fundamentally communicative in character. Potentially integrating "contra-dictions" with learning processes, designing is always acting in a practical context.

Furthermore, because it is a form of communicative action, designing is both instrumentally productive and socially reproductive-accomplishing ends and reproducing social and political relations of status, power, and culture at the same time. Finally, such a situated, conversational account of design practices raises historical and normative questions about the possible biases (ad hoc and systematic, necessary and unnecessary) that design processes and practices might manifest-biases that sensitive and critical designers can work to counteract.

These aspects of the sense-making conception of design practice need further elaboration and criticism. With such elaboration, design practice will be recognizable as more than a cognitive search process and rather as a fully embodied, institutionally located, practically constrained, politically contingent, ambiguity-resolving process-as a social process of making sense together, in which giving form and making sense are profoundly coterminous.

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