Sustainable Development Goals and Indian Cities by Ashok Kumar D.S. Meshram

Author:Ashok Kumar, D.S. Meshram [Ashok Kumar, D.S. Meshram]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781032193557
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

Critiques and challenges for cities of the future

Certainly, theorists have made major advances in recognising and calling for the accommodation of the complex issues of culture, race, gender, and social diversity within planning. Like Mäntysalo, we believe that “the goal of planning is the ability to cope with complex social problem” (our emphasis).87 However, both positivist theories and more recent collaborative or communicative theories may prove too for coping with issues of identity, diversity, and difference in the current rapidly changing social context of the early 21st century.

We are supportive of communicative rationality’s aims of discursive democratic decision-making in planning. Yet we remain concerned about planning’s ability to maintain its communicative approach to upholding diversity in a context of increasing migration, a marked geopolitical swing to right-wing ideals and a backlash against multiculturalism. In an environment of fear, such as is developing across some parts of Europe in the wake of recent terrorist attacks, race and multiculturalism are beginning to take on a new meaning. How can planners, or the public, accommodate a multiplicity of values within a community when they fear those with whom they are being asked to collaborate and debate?

In this context, Bollens’s notion of a “fractured public interest” has become an increasing stark reality, and we should learn from cities with longer experience of such struggles.88 Given the place-based nature of poverty, which breeds social disenfranchisement and fundamentalism within all impoverished groups, we are also concerned, like Dirlik, that the specifics of place have become distanced from the planning discourse on class, gender, and race.89 We would also question communicative planning’s ability to function in contexts outside of established democracies, where the very idea of equitable debate with “authorities” may be unthinkable.

Current planning theories have largely failed to bring about more ethical or pluralistic planning in contexts outside of the western world. Healey discusses migration of planning ideas and their role in perpetuating the modernisation myth.90 However, planning ideas are adopted selectively and then translated and adapted. The best of planning theory, as it relates to gender, racial, ethnic, and social diversity, remains lost to much of the developing world.

A review of literature for this chapter has raised a concern that, in recent years and with notable exceptions, much planning theory has effectively undone much of the earlier work on race and gender. By repeatedly referring to race and gender collectively, within expressions such as “planners should take account of diversity of”, theorist are in danger of “homogenising difference”.

Finally, despite the dominance of pluralism within planning, we reiterate the early concerns of a number of scholars who argue that, in working to achieve equitable access to an existing urban orthodoxy for all, planning theory has failed to fundamentally establish a new urban paradigm (see, for example, Marcuse, 2009; Speak and Kumar, 2016). The metaphor “square pegs and round holes” emphasises the continued uneasy fit of diversity into contemporary cities around the world, where planning is increasingly working to establish a new urban orthodoxy premised on narrowly defined, largely western, market-oriented, White, male norms.

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