Planning an Idea of Value

Planning: An Idea of ValueAuthor(s): Heather CampbellSource: The Town Planning Review, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Jul., 2002), pp. 271-288Published by: Liverpool University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40112514 .

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Planning: an idea of value

TPR, 73 (3) 2002

HEATHER CAMPBELL

The development of the intellectual basis for planning activity has been a slow and problematic process. This paper seeks to build on existing intellectual understanding to argue that future developments in planning thought must take questions of ethical value as their starting point. The paper is essentially divided into three parts. The first makes the important distinction between planning as a narrow set of regulatory practices and planning as an idea, or more particularly a long-enduring societal activity. It is the latter concept of planning that frames the discussion in the remainder of the paper. The second, in which the core of the argument is developed, explores the nature of planning as an activity; an activity that is centrally concerned with making ethical judgements about better and worse, with and for others, in just institutions. It is about an idea of value. The third section examines the implications of this perspective for planning as a subject of academic endeavour. The argument is illustrated throughout with examples drawn from the author's research.

The genre which is 'the inaugural lecture' comes in many shapes and forms. Having inevitably spent some time reflecting on the choices available, perhaps the safest option takes the form of what might be termed 'the empirical'. In this case the lecture concentrates on presenting the findings of 'something' that one has counted, measured or in some other way interacted with. The dangers with this approach lie in the confirmation of society's caricature of the academic as someone who only sees complexity and despite their 'knowledge' could not be drawn into a recommendation as to the most appropriate course of action. Alternatively, inaugurals involve the more or less coherent piecing together of other (learned) people's comments and observations. Some are content to focus on the 'names' within their own field while others roam more widely. The approach to content can of course also vary, some favouring the general rubbishing of all that has gone before in an attempt to scratch out their own territory. Others prefer to focus on one writer, disseminating the works of this individual within their own discipline. Both approaches bring with them the ease of labelling, a trait that is sadly increasingly perceived to be a precursor to a

Heather Campbell is Professor in the Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN. This paper is a revised and edited version of her Town and Gown Inaugural Lecture delivered at the University of Sheffield on 7 March 2002.

271



272 HEATHER CAMPBELL

'successful' academic career. However, labelling often hides as much as it reveals, replacing listening and understanding with academic sound bites.

In writing an inaugural lecture the author is not only confronted by decisions over content but also over structure and presentation. Such issues are by no means trivial in a societal context which prioritises style over substance and in which structures are supported by a network of performance criteria. Hence the metaphorical, 'laws of the structure of a presentation' may seem to dictate the sequence: 'tell your audience what you're going to say, say it, and then tell them what you've said'. Such an approach is excellent in a culture of performance indicators as it lends itself to the generation of assessment criteria. Checklists can be drawn up asking, 'did this presentation have a beginning, middle and an end?' Aggregate statistics can then be produced specifying the percentage of inaugural lectures in a given year that had a beginning, a middle and an end. The higher the overall percentage, clearly the more confidence there can be in the 'fact' that the rights of inaugural audiences have been protected! Moreover, there is a raft of technologies that support such a culture, the rejection of which often appears not to be a choice.

As a planning academic it is hard not to have at least some doubts over the legitimacy of finding oneself in the position of professing your chair. A. J. P. Taylor, reflecting unfavourably on post-war developments in higher education in Britain, savagely observed that, 'Universities nowadays have Professors of almost everything - Brewing at one, Race Relations at another, Town Planning at a third' (Taylor, 1967, 133). While I am sure that in the context of contemporary sensibilities there would be little doubting the legitimacy of chairs in 'race relations', professorships in the likes of town planning continue to provoke the raising of a quizzical eyebrow. So in writing this Inaugural Lecture I am confronted by the need to make choices over content and structure in a context that places doubt on the legitimacy of the act in the first place. In subsequently taking stock of the 'discipline' of which I am a part, I argue that such circumstances are, or at least should be, entirely familiar to the planning community. This is a community that variously combines practitioners, academics and students but one whose responsibilities lie beyond the boundaries of these individual groupings.

My argument in what follows is that planning is about making choices, with and for others, about what makes good places. Judgement is, therefore, at the heart of what planners do, and in making distinctions about good and bad, better and worse, in relation to particular places we are constantly engaged in questions of values. Indeed, John Forester (1999, 31) has said that planning practitioners 'whether they like it or not are practical ethicists', a view that runs counter to the traditional conceptions of professional roles and identities. In the following discussion I attempt to provide a justification for a concept of planning that gives emphasis to values and then goes on to explore the implications, for practice, education and research, of my argument that planning as an idea is about situated judgement, with and for others, in just institutions.

The argument is constructed in three stages: 'Planning as an idea'; 'Planning as an activity'; and 'Planning as a subject of academic endeavour'.



PLANNING: AN IDEA OF VALUE 273

Planning: as an idea When thinking or talking about 'planning', be it town and country, urban and regional, community or whatever, our thoughts are often framed by the system of regulation with which we are most familiar. In Britain, therefore, planning started in 1947, plans are 'structure', 'district' or 'unitary' development plans (at least at the moment; who can say what new categories of 'plans' the Government has in store after the recent Green Paper [DTLR, 2001], and planners are the people responsible for allowing your neighbours to build an unsightly extension - all the high-rise blocks of flats of the 1960s; also, of course, new towns; and, if you are concerned about the environmental impact of road building, the construction of too many motorways, or, alternatively, if you consider road building the precursor to economic regeneration, the imposition of unwarranted limits to construction of the aforementioned roads. But planning was not invented in 1947. Societies have always planned. Concern over rural migration into London and its association with a combination of the spread of plague and social disorder prompted a proclamation in 1580 against the construction of new buildings. Further attempts to control the rapid expansion and physical squalor of London were made through controls on trade and building in the seventeenth century and a Bill against all new housing was issued in 1709 - well, not quite all housing; an exception was made for houses 'fit for inhabitants of the better sort' (Williams, 1973, 145)! These examples demon- strate that the making, remaking and making again of places and environments are an essential part of what human beings do. Whether we call this 'planning' in a formal sense does not matter; it is what we collectively do. It is arguable that, in their multiplicity, places are all that we leave behind and that through our collective struggles in place making we simultaneously make ourselves. Raymond Williams eloquently captures this sense in the following reflection:

H.G. Wells once said, coming out of a political meeting where they had been discussing social change, that this great, towering city was a measure of the obstacle, of how much must be moved if there was to be any change. I have known this feeling, looking up at great buildings that are centres of power, but I find I do not say 'There is your city, your great bourgeois monument, your towering structure of this still precious civilisation' or I do not only say that; I say also 'This is what men have built, so often magnificently, and is not everything then possible?' Indeed this sense of possibility, of meeting and of movement, is a permanent element of my sense of cities: as permanent a feeling as those other feelings, when I look from the mountain at the great coloured patchwork of fields that generations of my own people have cleared and set in hedges; or the known living places, the isolated farms, the cluster of cottages by castle or church, the line of river and wood, and footpath and lane; lines received and lines made. So that while country and city have this profound importance, in their differing ways, my feelings are held, before my argument starts. (Williams, 1973, 5-6)

Consequently, to talk as if the 'idea' of planning is analogous to a 'system' of planning both narrows and diminishes the act of place making. It separates




planning from its creative potential, reducing it to just another regulatory practice. Such an approach is educationally, professionally and intellectually constraining. We must remember that planning would still go on if there were not members of the Royal Town Planning Institute; planning is a societal activity, not a system. The enduring question for the planning community is - 'what role should planners play in this activity?'

To approach this issue from another direction, it is sad to reflect that students often seem to have more of a sense of planning as 'an idea' before they embark on their studies than when they graduate. The response to the inevitable interview question of 'why do you want to study planning?' generally takes the form of a desire to contribute to creating a better world, that is to the evolution of more environmentally sustainable and just places. Yet, seemingly within moments, they become disciples (at least in Britain) of Her Majesty's Government's Use Classes Order, General Development Orders and an array of Planning Policy Guidance Notes (PPGs). These ambiguous and not infrequently contradictory documents are imbued by many within the profession with determinative and restrictive powers, which, alongside the rhetoric of globalisation, both popular and intellectual, makes the achievement of positive change seem impossible. Passivity becomes an active choice. However, global markets, like central government's PPGs, play themselves out in different ways in different places at different times. We make choices, not perhaps in circumstances of our own choosing, but we nevertheless make choices.

It is the fascination with this process of making choices, with and for others, about places, which ties together what may appear at first glance to be my disparate research effort. As a research student I remember the inferiority I felt in comparison with my contemporaries who, armed with their professional planning qualifications, had marched forth to make decisions about the futures of, among others, County Durham, Edinburgh, Lilongwe and Hong Kong. Why inferiority? Well, while I was striving to understand why computer-based information systems were having so little impact on decision-making processes in local government, they were doing planning. To take action as planners (I assumed) they must know why that landfill site should be located over here and, equally, why that house extension was completely unsuitable over there ... Or did they?

It is on the art of situated judgement that I want to concentrate for the remainder of the paper; based on the notion of planning as an idea, not a system, an idea that is fundamentally about making choices, with and for others, about what makes good places.

Planning: as an activity The central thesis of the argument that follows is that in a world where we understand that knowledge can only ever be partial and transitory we must rely on judgement, and that fundamental to the process of judging between better and worse is the question of value. Actions cannot be value-free, so rather than hiding, implying or sidestepping such concerns, explicit consideration needs to be given to the nature of the ethical values that our processes and outcomes are seeking to




promote. In developing (and attempting to justify) this argument, I want to start by reviewing something of what the planning community has learned over the past 50 years and the context in which the planning activity finds itself, and then go on to argue for the importance of an engagement with notions of value.

Time only permits the most sketchy review of the learning that has taken place in planning in the post-war years. I should also acknowledge that intellectual and practice-related developments have during this period shadowed rather than mirrored one another. In the following discussion, I will err on the side of intellectual developments.

The momentum for state-sanctioned planning activity in Britain was born out of the optimism of the post-war years; a sense that if physical master plans of the way neighbourhoods should look were prepared, it would be so. 'Nice' buildings set in 'nice' spaces make for 'nice' places and 'nice' people! However, it soon became clear that Utopias of physical form tend to disintegrate in the face of social, economic and political processes (see, for example, Fainstein, 1999; Harvey, 2000). (This is a lesson that the enthusiasts for the recent wave of New Urbanism might usefully bear in mind.) Consequently, if the results of physical blueprints were disappointing, then, perhaps, the answer was to be found in the social sciences.

The social sciences represented a collection of subjects which, bolstered by the white heat of 1960s computing power, were seen as offering the potential of both explaining and predicting human behaviour and hence the socio-economic processes that seemed so unfairly to be disrupting the plans of planners. It was logical that the 'impartial expert' of the social sciences armed with the weaponry of instrumental rationality, a kitbag of 'scientific' techniques and supported by the welfare state, could ensure progress. However, even as the knitting needles of the new technology were being poked through numerous punch cards, the dark clouds of disappointment were already looming.

Analysis of the planning activity highlighted what seemed, once again, to be a succession of unrealised aspirations. Some pointed to the 'muddled' nature of policy making in practice, of processes characterised by rules of thumb, past precedent and what could be got away with, not comprehensive rationality (Lindblom, 1959). Others saw planners not merely as ineffectual but more sinisterly as servants of a state apparatus dedicated to furthering the interests of capital, most particularly those owning property (Fainstein and Fainstein, 1979; Harvey, 1973). More recently, it has been shown that inequality of outcome and process are not only expressed in economic terms, but also through the way individual and collective identities of race, gender and disability, among others, are constructed (Beauregard, 1991; Sandercock, 1998). The impartial expert is the handmaiden of practices that prioritise 'scientific' over lay knowledge and in so doing create 'discourses', which, in treating everyone the same, prove indifferent to difference (Young, 1990).

It is perhaps surprising, and hugely to the credit of the individuals concerned, that despite this barrage of criticism (the easy part of academic research!) attempts were being made to take on board these arguments, but without descending into fatalism. Enter the 'collaborative' or 'deliberative' practitioner,




sensitive to difference and the need to build institutional arenas in which all perspectives, no matter how expressed, could find respect. The expert bureaucrat is replaced by the community facilitator (after Habermas, Forester, 1989; 1993; 1999; Healey, 1997; Innes, 1995). As one of the most significant developments in planning thought, I will return to these arguments shortly.

For planning as an activity the preoccupations of the academy have, in the immediate past, been of less pressing concern than whether, in the face of a neo- liberal agenda, state-regulated intervention in land and property markets would continue. More generally, the role of planning has looked increasingly precarious as the scope and powers of local government have been hollowed out. Perversely, the implications of developments in intellectual understanding highlighting the nature of difference in society have found resonance with neo- liberalism in stressing the importance of the autonomy of the individual (Campbell and Marshall, 2000; Sayer and Storper, 1997; Storper, 2001). On the one hand, there is criticism of the state's role in constraining the self-realisation of the individual through controlling practices, while on the other there is condemnation for regulations that limit the ability of individuals to express freely their market preferences (Nozick, 1974). Whether in the form of politician or state employee, questions are being asked as to whether government can be trusted (O'Neill, 2002a).

Where then does this leave planning? It has survived (just) as an activity, but one that looks pretty bemused, intellectually and in practice, as to its role and purpose in the current context. You often have that feeling as a planner that while you turned up to the metaphorical party in your most 'wicked gear', everyone else perceives you to be rooted firmly in the dress code of the 1960s - a living and not wholly welcome anachronism. However, has the significance of place and space to our individual and collective lives changed to such an extent that they no longer matter? Have societies 'progressed' such that for the first time in human existence the active creation of places is no longer a matter of collective concern, merely an activity that can be entrusted to individualistic preferences, in much the same way as the media perceive solace to be drawn from 'make-overs'?

Let me start to address these questions by introducing some visual images, not of the exotic, but of the views from my office window (Figs 1-3). These are characteristic of the places where the majority of people (in Britain) live, work and survive; and it is in these places that the work of the planning community should be grounded.

To return to the notion I sketched earlier of planning as an 'idea', that notion needs to be interrogated further in terms of the characteristics of planning problems. It is generally accepted that the problems with which planners have to contend are 'wicked' (Rittel and Webber, 1973); 'wicked' in the sense that they are difficult to define, are multifaceted and are infinitely malleable depending on the perspective of the interests concerned. As such, planners are frequently burdened not with seeking 'win/win' solutions, but the 'least worst' option in the face of the flux and flow of circumstance (Bolan, 1983). 'Both/and' is not an option when either a road, factory, retail 'experience', or wind farm is built or is




Figure 1

not (Harvey, 2000, 235). Planning problems are inherently 'situated'; they do not concern abstract places but unique places, places already inscribed with the struggles of preceding generations. But perhaps most crucially, planning issues are contested. They are contested in their process and they are contested in their outcomes. In making choices about places, different knowledges and lived experiences rub up against one another, raising questions about whose knowledge constitutes proof, and, indeed, what constitutes proof, and when,




where and how such knowledge should be deployed. Also, for that matter, if knowledge is always incomplete, then when could it ever be sufficient? However, to conceptualise the contestation at the heart of planning problems simply in terms of the voices that make themselves heard is wholly inadequate. Critical to the idea of the planning activity is an acknowledgement that many voices are either actively or, less conspiratorially, inadvertently excluded from decision making about place. Moreover, it is also central to the planning activity that private preferences about property have collective implications that should not be left to the whim of the individual. Following this line of argument, planning-related problems are not susceptible to resolution through face-to-face encounters alone in a process similar to a legal contract. Once direct face-to- face contact becomes impractical, such problems must necessarily be handled by an institution (probably under the aegis of the state). In an arena as contested as planning, the crucial demand society makes of the associated institutions is that they be just.

Justice? Philosophers have long grappled with the concept of justice and it is not my purpose to explore in detail these complex and important arguments. However, the inheritance of these debates is deeply embedded in the planning community's attempts to develop duties or procedures - moral norms - on which to ground situated judgement. This can be seen in the evolution of two divergent positions. The first is a conception of justice focused on the actions of rational individuals, which, through a variety of devices, constrains individuals to reason on the basis of 'disinterested interests' concluding with an emphasis on fairness: enter once more the 'impartial expert' (after Kant and Rawls). The second, and perhaps the dominant conception of justice in planning thought at the moment, places stress on uncoerced reasoning and the 'mutual indebtedness' of human beings; justice is therefore achieved through inclusive deliberation which results in consensus - re-enter the collaborative or deliberative practitioner (after Kant, Habermas and the communitarians) (Ricoeur, 1992, 227). The strength of these procedural or deontological approaches to justice lies in the realm of the interpersonal, expressed through rights of constraint and enacted in legal systems.

However, there is a second dimension to justice, which becomes particularly important when dealing with issues that are not resolvable through face-to-face encounters, namely of values and of the good (the teleological) (after Aristotle, not Bentham). My argument, therefore, is that a procedural understanding of justice is not on its own an adequate basis for the situated ethical judgements required of the planning activity. In this I am echoing Paul Ricoeur's conception of ethical intention and, for that matter, practical wisdom, as 'aiming at the "good life" with and for others, in just institutions' [original emphasis] (Ricoeur, 1992, 172). It should be clear that this is not a concern with value in an economic sense. Economics tends to reduce value to self-interest, an approach that is 'intellectually and ethically intolerable' (White, 1990, 58) when judging between good and bad, better and worse, particularly at a collective level (Harvey, 1996, 152). I should also emphasise that my concern is not with establishing a singular notion of the 'good life' but with introducing into the concept of justice




underlying the planning activity the importance of value (Cooke, 1999; Young, 1990).

Procedural justice, particularly in a deliberative or Habermasian sense, becomes problematic when, as often occurs, 'reasonable' people disagree (Ricoeur, 1992; White, 1990). The issue is not, therefore, over the justification underlying deliberation but the actualisation when confronted with the conflicts encountered in particular situations (Ricoeur, 1992; Storper, 2001). In such circumstances justice is dependent on returning to the concept of value embodied in the 'good'. Moral conventions cannot resolve such conflicts and recourse must be had to ethical convictions, to values. As Ricoeur summarises the argument

... a morality of obligation . . . produces conflictual situations where practical wisdom has no recourse . . . other than to return to the initial intuition of ethics, in the framework of moral judgement in situation; that is to the vision or aim of the 'good life' with and for others in just institutions. (Ricoeur, 1992, 240)

This is an argument not for the disavowal of moral norms embedded in procedural forms of justice to the good but rather their 'subordination and complementarity' (Ricoeur 1992, 170-71). Habermas attempted explicitly to rule out values from the just, suggesting that justice is solely dependent on legitimately executed dialogue (Williams, 1999). However, the justification for any procedure or standard must originate further back than the procedure itself (Ricoeur, 1992; Williams, 1999). Consequently, to reject any consideration of values is crucially to leave them hidden from scrutiny (Connor, 1993, 34). Much criticism has been targeted at the imposition of totalising conceptions of the 'good life'. However, to abandon any recourse to questions of value is to remove the opportunity for re-evaluation, not to remove the values themselves (Connor, 1993).

A conceptualisation of justice that embraces value has important implications for the nature of practical judgement in planning. There is not time to develop these arguments fully here, but there are two dimensions I want to comment on briefly: first, the way planning constructs the public (or publics) which it serves; and, second, the relationship between the universal and the particular.

Planning has long betrayed a sense of confusion over its constituency: 'whose interests are planners attempting to serve?' However, this enduring confusion has developed increasingly destabilising, and even anarchic, tendencies in the face of trends encouraging a focus on communities of interest and individualism. This confusion is destabilising because uncertainty over how planning relates to society and its constituent parts makes it hard to judge what form appropriate action might take and, even more fundamentally, what planning 'is'. It is in how planning recognises and relates to 'others' that it betrays its values and in turn represents what it is (Cooke, 1999; Heikkila, 2001; White, 1990). For example, in choosing to consult one group of stakeholders and not another, or, in determining one individual as representative and not another, planners are displaying their priorities, their values (O'Neill, 2001) (even if, as often seems to




Figure 2




be the case, choices are made by accident rather than design). This was evident in focus group research, undertaken with my colleague Robert Marshall. For example, with respect to public involvement in planning, all but one of the planners interviewed regarded participation as 'what you did' - it was 'the "right" thing to do', but with little idea as to 'why', and hence the task was often accompanied with reticence and scepticism. However, one individual stood out due to his profound sense of the underlying values prompting such action. He saw public involvement as compensatory, commenting that '. . . some interests are being bulldozed by groups with money', and as a consequence, '[w]e made a special effort to make contact with people who wouldn't normally comment and help them understand the plan' (Campbell and Marshall, 2002, 101). This example highlights the critical link between the construction of the public and questions of value as well as the urgent task, both practically and intellectually, of clarifying planning's relationship to society.

The absorption into planning of agendas that have concentrated on individualism has been not only destabilising but also paralysing (Storper, 2001). If all that exists is difference, be that in terms of individuals or communities, there can be little scope for judgement (Gray, 1995). Difference behoves indifference. It depoliticises and removes the legitimacy for deciding between better and worse, the ethically acceptable and the unacceptable (Eagleton, 1996; Harvey, 1996). Moreover, if there is no basis for judgement, planning is left 'defenceless' in 'the realm of the arbitrary' (Ricoeur, 1992). More sinisterly, the emphasis on communities of interest encourages exclusion (witness developments in 'gated communities') and the struggle of one community against another, as each seeks to assert its 'rights'. A seemingly open society of this type merely perpetuates a series of closed cultures (Eagleton, 2000). However, are all forms of 'otherness' appropriate? Is, for instance, racism acceptable as a quaint trait, like a predilection to morris dancing? If it is not, we are once again in the realm of the good (Cooke, 1999).

In searching to develop a relationship for planning to society which, while acknowledging difference, does not simultaneously disempower, it is important to recall Durkheim's observation that society is always more than the sum of its members; there is no continuum from the individual to society. It was argued earlier that the contestation at the heart of planning problems is not merely represented through face-to-face encounters. Planning (like politics) is about the collective, the common good (Storper, 2001). As such it is not concerned with 'difference as absolute otherness' (Harvey, 1996), but with starting from a notion of a shared common humanity (Low and Gleeson, 1997), of a 'community of common interests' (Harvey, 2000). This means getting beyond the individualistic notion that whatever I perceive to be best for me is necessarily best for us all and, even in the long term, is best for me. The common good is more than a collection of individual interests. However, re-engagement with the questions of value inherent in the collective good is not an excuse for ignorance or suppression of individual identity, it is about finding an appropriate basis for ethical judgement in planning based on a relational understanding of society




captured in Iris Marion Young's phrase 'togetherness in difference' (Young, 1990, 130).

The second implication I want to consider briefly concerns the appropriate relationship between the universal and the particular, between questions of value and the good and the idiosyncrasies of individual situations. The planning community, and perhaps politics more generally, often seem haunted by the ghosts of the grand plans of the 1960s (Harvey, 2000; Ricoeur, 1999a; 1999b). Certainly the results, for example, of comprehensive redevelopment were not wholly positive. Many to this day confront the challenge of living in places that within the blink of an eye metamorphosed from being sites of optimism and hope to becoming localities of despair and exclusion. The reasons for this are many and complicated, but do they justify ceasing to try to create better places? The past seems not only to haunt us but to have frightened us intellectually and allowed laziness in practice - an attitude reflected in a 'let's follow the rules and not take responsibility beyond that' approach. However, if all that exists are the particularities of place then problems become intractable and their resolution arbitrary (and also, according to Maclntyre [1997], emotivist). Denial of universals quells creativity and limits ambition. Moreover, as highlighted earlier, it is not as though universal claims or values are avoided; they are merely hidden, put beyond scrutiny and left open to distortion and domination.

In retrospect it is possible to see how an outcome might seem inevitable in a particular context, but at the time that decisions are taken many options are available. Planning problems may be without ultimate conclusion but they are not without the need to take decisions (Ricoeur, 1992). Judgement between these options depends on the interplay of universal ways of understanding about better and worse and the particularities of place. It is about practical wisdom. My argument that planning needs to engage with questions of value is not to imply a universality of outcome, rather that in making decisions about the future of particular places recourse should be had to the nature of the underlying values (Connor, 1993). Planning should be about a process of valuation and evaluation, not the imposition of fixed values and singular notions of the good life. That there can be many universals - not one good life - does not deny the importance of value (Ricoeur, 1992).

So my argument is that planning as an idea is about situated judgement with and for others, that is to say collectively, in just institutions. It is about questions of value. At this point I want to acknowledge that there is much I have left unsaid. For example, what does a concept of justice incorporating value imply in operation? If it does not imply 'equality as sameness' in the sense of a quantitative distribution, how is it possible to assess whether actions have been just, ethically appropriate? Second, a move away from individualism to the collective good suggests the prioritising of notions of responsibility over rights, something the environmental movement has long demonstrated (Owens, 1997; Owens and Cowell, 2001), but also raises the question: how do we get away from the current obsession with individual rights and the lowest common denominator? (O'Neill, 2002b). Third, the re-engagement with universal values implies the construction of alternative futures in relation to notions of a




Figure 3




'good place' (Friedmann, 2000; Harvey , 2000; Storper, 2001). But what are 'good places' and how can such change be effected? It seems strange how little the planning community understands about achieving emancipatory change, yet how central it is to the activity.

In drawing this section of my argument to a close, there is one remaining issue I want to confront head on. The mention of values and the collective good tends to bring with it a shudder of disapproval; a perception that what is being recommended is a return to the worst traditions of bureaucratic elitism. Can I make it absolutely clear that this is not the case. I would acknowledge that the ability to act, make places and achieve change involves closure around a set of institutional arrangements and spatial forms, if only temporarily (Harvey, 2000), and that, moreover, without sovereign authority vested in the state through elected representatives there is nothing 'to prevent domination, exploitation and oppression' (Young, 1990, 250; O'Neill, 2001). However, if the intellectual developments of the recent past have taught planning anything it is how little an individual can 'know'. Action in planning must, therefore, be grounded in an understanding of the partial and transitory nature of knowledge and that individuals experience their environments in very different ways. As planners we must not assume that all I 'know' and have experienced is all that I can know and experience. Making places is about engaging in a process that can never be controlled. The discomforting spectre of doubt and endless questioning is therefore central to situated judgement. Doubt can be personally and institutionally corrosive and, if it takes this form, can be paralysing, something as undesirable as the unthinking bureaucrat, but if doubt and uncertainty are reframed into the notion of learning, then they are cast in a more positive light. I would argue that if as planners we have no capacity to learn, we have no capacity to plan effectively.

Planning: as a subject of academic endeavour

To return to the theme of learning within planning, to learn must necessarily imply unsettling what had previously been taken for granted or opening up horizons which had previously been obscured. It is perhaps the destabilising effect of the associated questioning that students find so difficult and consequently leads to the perception, as highlighted earlier, that change is

impossible. We want to feel we 'know' things, hence the beguiling lure of the transitory missives of government over the enduring challenges of the philosophers.

In pursuit of learning it is important to recognise the role of those who explore the 'dark side' of the planning activity (Flyvbjerg, 1998; Huxley, 1994; Huxley and Yiftachel, 2000; Richardson, 1996; Yiftachel, 1998); those who highlight the harm done to the disadvantaged, the taken-for-granted and the unthinking application of rules of thumb, abuses of power and the evolution of dominatory practices. However, the crucial part of such research is not the critique but the

potential opened up for change (Harvey, 2000; Storper, 2001). In this as in other areas of planning research the quest must not merely be (as Niraj Verma




commented in discussion at the ACSP Conference in 2000) to do violence to old ideas, it is about using critical analysis to point the way to alternative futures. Judith Squires (1993, 1-13), in reviewing intellectual developments over the last 20 years, suggests a useful three-pronged agenda for academics. First, there is a need, she argues, to get beyond the identification of the characteristics that constitute difference within and between individuals and communities to focus on the nature of significant difference particularly in terms of injustice. Second, once the nature of significant difference has been established, the next stage is to identify the processes that perpetuate such injustices in places with an eye to change. Third, frameworks need to be developed providing ways of judging between the ethically acceptable and unacceptable. The challenge underlying this agenda is to find ways of linking micro-level and macro-level understanding (Storper, 2001). This is not only an issue for theory building but is also of concern in relation to the rather crude kitbag of methodologies deployed in empirical research. Methodological innovation is long overdue.

I wish to make two final observations concerning planning as a subject of academic endeavour. First, the planning community, at least in Great Britain, is often its own worst enemy. This is exemplified in a comment made to me by a research student (from another well-established university, I hasten to add). He said that his supervisor had told him that 'he didn't need theory in his PhD'! As already highlighted in relation to values, theory is not optional: it is there whether you choose to acknowledge it or not (and I am pleased to say that our research students would not let one another make such a claim). However, the planning community has long seemed to be in denial, claiming that planning is practical not theoretical - with planning theory being undertaken by a few deranged souls. This is a delusion and a potentially dangerous delusion at that. It reflects mindsets narrowed by the baggage of planning as a system not an idea. Second, this myth has more profound consequences for the intellectual development of planning. I can remember discussions long, long ago in my own department in which it was argued strongly that 'mainstream planning' was the last area of research that should be pursued in a research-led department. However, despite the deadweight of this myth, it is precisely in the interaction between theoretical concepts and planning practices that the academic community has the greatest contribution to make both to a vibrant planning activity and to the social sciences. It is planning's interface with action that gives it its edge; for understanding without the implication of action is hollow of meaning, even self-indulgent, while action without understanding is partial. The other social sciences may behave as if planning is inferior, but there is no need to cede to this view. The time is long overdue to lift the horizons and not be scared of ideas. Evasion of the difficult issues inherent to the questions surrounding the action/practice interface ignores the distinctive contribution lessons from planning can make to debates in the social sciences.

Conclusion There are many people - students, academics, practitioners, friends and family - who have taught me, and will I am sure continue to teach me, that




what I think I know is not all I can know. It could be argued that, through the experiences I have shared, all with whom I have come into contact are responsible for what I have written (albeit some more than others!). However, in this as in research I am continually intrigued by the extent to which we listen to some voices and yet are deaf to others, hear some phrases and yet close our ears to others, see some actions yet have blindspots for others. Moreover, what we remember and what we forget, either individually or collectively, influence what is important and what is not. Do we really listen to memories of the past reminding us of 1930s Glasgow streets teeming with life, but where no ships to be built meant no shoes to be worn, or do we merely hear without listening? In the end I must take responsibility for the distortions, misunderstandings and downright ignorance demonstrated in this paper. The choices are mine and mine alone, which returns me to situated judgement, that is to values. As a final summary I want to return to Raymond Williams (1989, 321-22), this time reflecting on his use of the novel:

The crisis which came to me on the death of my father ... I haven't been able to explain this to people properly, perhaps I explained it partly in my novel Border Country - [it] was the sense of a kind of defeat for an idea of value. May be this was an unreasonable response. All right, he died, he died too early, but men and women die. But it was very difficult not to see him as a victim at the end. I suppose it was this kind of experience which sent me back to the historical novel I'm now writing, People of the Black Mountains, about the movements of history over a long period, in and through a particular place in Wales . . . It's the infinite resilience, even deviousness, with which people have managed to persist in profoundly unfavourable conditions, and the striking diversity of beliefs in which they've expressed their autonomy. A sense of value which has won its way through different kinds of oppression of difference forms ... an ingrained and indestructible yet also changing embodiment of the possibilities of common life, [my italics]

In the end I cannot escape from the notion that planning is fundamentally about ethical judgement, with and for others, made through just institutions - it is about an idea of value.

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Planning an Idea of Value