Explorations in Planning Theory by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Architecture, Urban & Land Use Planning, Political Science, Public Policy, City Planning & Urban Development, Regional Planning
ISBN: 9780882851549
Google: 4atPAAAAMAAJ
Amazon: B0761WZRX3
Barnesnoble: B0761WZRX3
Goodreads: 36678418
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 1996-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

PATSY HEALEY

13

The Communicative Work of Development Plans

INTRODUCTION

Development plans have a long history as tools of spatial planning. In the United Kingdom (and in many other places) they often represented directives within a model of planning that assumed that public authorities, informed by scientific knowledge and guided by consensual goals, controlled the course of urban growth. That model has been generally rejected in recent years. Planning authorities have had neither the power nor the inclination to ensure that cities develop “according to plan.” Both scientific knowledge and a consensual “public interest” are now seen as highly contestable.

The directive model has been replaced—in the minds of theorists if not practitioners—by an interactional, “post-positivist” image of the relations between planning authorities, developers, community groups, and all those concerned with the spatial organization and design of places. In this more pluralist model, plans are seen to perform multiple roles, sending quite different messages to different “audiences.” The plan, in turn, may mean different things to different groups.

How, then, are we to “interpret” the development plans we come across? What assumptions do they express; what messages are conveyed? What implications do plans have for the power relations that surround the management of environmental change? How do plans and planning change these relations?

THEORETICAL EXCURSION

The “command-and-control” model was sustained by concepts from architecture, engineering, regional science, and scientific rationalism. These directed attention to the internal logic and analytical coherence of a plan’s design. As Mazza (1986) has argued, such internal consistency is an unlikely property of plans produced through interaction rather than the intelligence of a single mind. He proposed that plans should be seen as sets of technical and political claims, to be understood in the context of relations external to the text. Specifically, Mazza argues, that we have to attend to the evaluation of political and not merely technical claims. Fischer (1990) argues similarly that policy analysis involves both rational-technical and normative claims: the first may be validated through a “scientific” method, but the second brings us into the domain of moral philosophy.

Evaluation and validation do not, however, exhaust the concerns of theorists with development plans. Who, we should wonder, makes the claims embedded in a plan? To whom are they made? How are they understood, and how should they be interpreted? Critical political economists have traditionally argued that all plans should be understood as political mystifications, protecting property interests in the guise of expressing “the public interest”:

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