The Ashgate Research Companion to Planning Theory: Conceptual Challenges for Spatial Planning by Jean Hillier & Patsy Healey

Author:Jean Hillier & Patsy Healey [Hillier, Jean & Healey, Patsy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781315279220
Goodreads: 32890691
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusions

Conceptual challenges for planning theory link to philosophical questions of ontology and epistemology. As argued in the Overall Introduction to the set of Critical Essays (Hillier and Healey 2008a: xxiii), ‘[t]he planning idea is oriented towards shaping futures in which better conditions for human life and planetary survival can be achieved’. The authors in this Part illustrate the complexity of the relations through which futures actualize or eventualize and the uncertainty and unpredictability attached to any planning intervention with future-shaping intent. There are many potential futures. Which of the potential futures become possible and actual depends on a politics of futures – of theoretical and practical knowledges and their mobilizations; of power-games.

What might be the ambition of future planning theory? O’Neill (2009) argues that theories should be enacted rather than applied. Enacted, theories can provide a basis for practical judgement in spatial planning. Through constructing, supporting or challenging and deconstructing the institutional, cultural, economic and political structures and agencies of planning practice, theories can offer strong foundations on which to base practice decisions in the face of messy actualities.

With regard to conceptual challenges for planning theory, Geoff Bennington, in 1983, suggested several defining elements of theory, including its reflexivity and its paradoxical nature. What I find most appealing, though, is the suggestion that ‘theory thrives by uncovering and working against the doxa, the set of unfounded assumptions that common opinion holds dear’ (cited in Scholar 2006: 41). Whether this is in postcolonial theorization of spatial planning, theories of informality and insurgence, of security-related issues, or of how planning practitioners ‘learn’, long may planning theorists be paradoxical!

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