Theories of Planning

In a relatively short period, ideas about planning ranged from one extreme to another.  We embraced everything from technocratic determinism (in which we believe that we can fully know the future if only we had the right technology) to philosophical indeterminism (in which we believe that, at a fundamental level, we cannot know anything about the future).  In the extreme, “indeterminacy, incommensurability, variance, diversity, complexity and intentionality” pre-occupied so much of planning’s theoretical developments that the “very notion of ‘planning’” was often questioned.^[1]  For some people, the notion of planning is still questioned.

To make sense of planning theory as a whole, Allmendinger (2002) suggests two options: celebrating difference in order to keep debate completely open; and reconciling differences in order to improve understanding among varying perspectives.  Whether celebrating or reconciling differences, the aim is to appreciate differences—not to eliminate them.  Likewise, to reconcile differences is not to search for one answer but to understand the nature of such differences.  Difference is not a basis for rejection; rather, it is, or can be, a basis for discovering and confirming meaning.

The following summary of planning theories uses Allmendinger’s (2002) survey of contemporary schools of planning as the primary point of reference.  Allmendinger’s approach centres on the societal context for understanding the origin, use, and evolution of theory.

Schools of planning thought

Allmendinger identified several schools of thought that have shaped planning over the past fifty years.  These schools include the following:

• Systems and rational theories of planning;
• Marxism and critical theory;
• New right planning;
• Pragmatism;
• Planners as advocates;
• Postmodern planning; and,
• Collaborative planning.

Each school represents not a single theory but “a collection of (mostly) coherent and self-supporting theories/ideas/philosophies.”^[2]

Systems and Rational

This school is perhaps the most easily recognised and most commonly associated with planning.  It is also well entrenched in a positivist worldview with strong beliefs in control and prediction, as well as a faith in technical solutions as the means for societal progress.  While the historical foundations of positivism can be traced to the Enlightenment, society’s confidence in science- and technology-based planning grew in the post-war era of economic growth and urban development.  The primary means of the planner-as-expert are modelling and logical, step-wise processes (e.g., identify problem, evaluate alternatives, select, implement, and evaluate).  Planners in this school manage change by making decisions about human activities and urban systems (e.g., traffic flows, shopping patterns, commuting patterns).  This planner-centric school is focussed on a knowable future, bounded only by available resources and technology, and guided by a desire for efficiency.

New Right

The new right school of planning is highly influenced by the political economics of the 1980s, most commonly known as Thatcherism and Reaganomics.  Interest emerged after, and in relation to, the social liberalism of the 1960s and 70s.  It is articulated as a solution to developing economic and political crises centred on mass unemployment, stagflation, and wage and price controls, not to mention the threat of communism and cold war politics.  Although there is not a single view of planning within the new right school, which makes it difficult to sort through the details, it encompasses a liberal view of a person’s freedom to choose and of relying on the market as the mechanism for societal choices, both of which must be supported by an authoritarian strong state (conservatism).  Philosophically, proponents of the new right hold high respect for private property, rational choice, and maximising utility.  Under the axiom that ‘free’ markets are inherently superior to any other way of organising human societies, a good planner need only play a minimalist role – and let the market function unfettered.

Marxism and Critical Theory

Marxist thinkers present a critique of planning rather than a theory of or in planning.  Primarily, Marxist planners focus on the limitations and problems of using planning as a tool of capitalism.  The interest in Marxist theories can be viewed, at least in part, as a reaction to the consequences of post-war interests in consumerism and market values, such as urban sprawl, alienation, and increasing wealth inequality.  From a Marxist perspective, the planning institution is either partially responsible for creating these conditions or is ineffective in dealing with the problems.  Of greatest concern is the role that planners play in providing the conditions necessary for capitalism to reproduce itself, especially with regard to the allocation of urban spaces for the purposes of capital accumulation and the elimination of barriers to market functioning.  In this capacity, planners are merely puppets of the market and its controlling interests.  A planner’s task is to convince the public that the state is acting on its behalf.  With regard to forethought, planning reacts to market conditions, which inevitably shapes the (future) conditions in which the market will operate.  A shift from Marxist to neo-Marxist planning can be understood in part as a shift from a positivist view of class-based injustices to a post-positivist view of power-based injustices.

Pragmatism

This school is often understood as ‘planning is what planners do.’  It is concerned more with practice than theory; but it is not just about doing things.  Pragmatism is a particular philosophy predicated on a belief that truth is evident not in theories but in the usefulness of what one is doing.  “We decide what to believe not because it corresponds to the reality of the world, but because an idea or belief makes sense to us and helps us act.”^[3]  The emphasis on ‘making sense of the world through practice’ gives Pragmatism a short-term outlook that is best served through incremental rather than comprehensive planning.  Agreement is the test of a policy’s correctness.  There is no great goal or vision as much as a focus on day-to-day issues and problems, and the ability to plan is constrained by time and knowledge, in the practical sense of these terms.

Advocacy

This school is perhaps the least known and least developed.  In contrast with the objective, technical pursuits of systems/rational planning, advocacy planning is deeply personal and highly political.  This view of planning arose from the social disruption of the 1960s that included civil rights movements and marches, the war in Vietnam, and urban renewal projects that included extensive public housing and debilitating expressways through neighbourhoods.  In this context, advocacy planning aims to bridge responsibilities between social justice and urban development.  Rather than focus on what planners do, the driving question is for whom is the planner working.  This question is guided by values, rather than science, thus privileging moral reason over scientific reason.  The role of the planner, as an agent of change, is to represent the interests of unheard voices marginalised by formal planning processes, thereby helping more citizens to engage meaningfully.

Postmodern

Like the general postmodern movement, this school raises more questions than answers, thus falling short of stating clearly what planning is or should be.  Notwithstanding this shortcoming, the questions raised by postmodern planners are critical to the future development of planning in the public domain.  With concern for a more open and pluralist society, postmodern planners seek to expose society’s blind belief in such over-arching ‘meta-narratives’ as common values, value-neutral science, and the promise of progress Consistent with Marxist planners, they also question the relationship between governance, production, and consumption.  Another meta-narrative questioned by postmodern planning is a guiding public interest.  Many forms of postmodern thinking centre on individualism, thus ruling out the idea of a collective concern.  Rather than focus on commonality, the emphasis is on difference.

Collaborative Planning

Via its normative grounding in Habermas’ communicative rationality, collaborative planning, as the name infers, aims to cross many bridges between several aspects of positivist and post-positivist planning: (modern) rationalism and (postmodern) pluralism; celebrating differences and reaching consensus; comprehensive plans and participation/inclusion.  A key element of this school’s philosophy is that its planners accept multiple forms of rationality, including both instrumental and communicative rationality.  In this regard, the role of the planner is to create space for more discourse by questioning the dominance of instrumental rationality, which ‘crowds out’ other ways of knowing, such as communicative rationality.

Cross-cutting themes

Our brief summary of schools of contemporary planning thought drew upon Allmendinger, which in turn, drew upon a wide range of original text.  General areas of concern within the literature provide useful cross-cutting themes to examine the field as a whole.  How each school of planning views these concerns points to critical aspects of its foundations, including worldviews.  For our purpose, these areas of concern can be stated as a set of questions:

What decisions do planners make (i.e., what is their primary area of responsibility)?

What is the role of a planner in the decision-making process?

To what extent is a planner concerned with the future?

What does a planner know about the future?  To what extent is the future predictable? Or is it unknowable?

Is there a (shared) public interest that guides planning? If so, what is it?

Our analysis of the schools of planning involves using the above set of questions as cross-cutting themes to reveal how each school addresses the core concerns of planning.  The results of the analysis are summarised below in Table 1.  Defining elements of each school can be read across each row, while an entire row provides a summary view of each school.  Each column represents a cross-cutting theme, whereby it is possible to identify similarities and differences by each area of core concern.

The following discussion is organised by each of the questions.  The aim of the discussion is to highlight similarities and differences, as well as their implications for planning in the public domain.

What decisions do planners make (i.e., what is their primary area of responsibility)?

Combing through the literature, it is difficult to isolate specific questions that each school of planning addresses.  Notwithstanding this challenge, it is possible to reflect on some differences with regard to general areas of responsibility.  The schools of thought that most clearly articulate its central decisions were the positivist schools of systems/rational and new right.  Marxist, as a critique of these two schools, followed suit.  Several schools of thought are explicitly aligned with land use decisions, including systems/rational, new right, and pragmatism.  New right, via its belief in the market as society’s primary choice mechanism, is explicitly focussed on planning decisions that affect land use, but the directive is to ensure that such decisions are minimal, regarding both influence and scope.  For pragmatists, land use decisions are a significant feature perhaps because these decisions are visible to the public, thereby demonstrating that planners are doing legitimate work.  Advocacy, postmodern, and collaborative schools of thought are more concerned about the decision-making process than about decisions.  They still make decisions, but such decisions relate to who should participate, how multiple interests should be engaged, and what should be up for discussion.

What is the role of a planner in the decision-making process?

With reference to Table 1, a quick glance down the column under roles of planners in decision-making processes demonstrates a range of possibilities.  Many of these roles stand out as defining features of their respective schools.  The planner-centric expert of systems/rational presumes a great deal of responsibility and influence through its decisions.  The Marxist view of planners as “puppets of the market” provides a quick and easy summary of its critique.  The ‘do little and stay out of the way of the market’ is reflected in the new right’s role of the planner as minimal.  The advocacy planner’s role is to advocate on behalf of the marginalised voices.  The postmodern role of narrator is perhaps the most intriguing, for it reflects a fundamentally different conception of planning as a discourse.  The primary role of the collaborative planner is to facilitate collaboration among all stakeholders through educating, providing information, and creating forums for open discussion.

To what extent is a planner concerned with the future?

A shift away from a focus on the future to a focus on the present is evident as one reads down from the top of the column.  These differences reflect the shifts from end-states to process, from positivist to post-positivist worldviews, and corresponding shifts from instrumental to communicative rationality.  Most broadly, they reflect similar changes in society.

What does a planner know about the future? To what extent is the future predictable? Or is it unknowable?

One reason why the future is less of a focus in planning is a growing lack of confidence in our ability to know the future, thus accounting for a shift from technical determinism to philosophical indeterminism.  However, a mediating factor is a focus on the market, especially for the new right planning school.  This school believes that because society is too complex for planning it is best to leave the future to the spontaneous ordering of the market.  The future is ‘visible’ to the extent that market trends can be analysed and crises can be anticipated.  Postmodern and collaborative planning also think that society is too complex; the response is to focus less on comprehensive planning and more on present problems.  Pragmatist planners prefer to rely on their intuition.

Is there a (shared) public interest that guides planning? If so, what is it?

From a professional perspective, debate about the public interest is important for many reasons, including questions about for whom one plans, and also moral questions about social order and good governance.  However, philosophical differences among schools of planning thought provide a range of responses to these questions.  The difference between systems and rational planning reflects an important question of for whom does one plan in the public domain.  For systems planners, the interest of the public is represented by pre-defined goals, and these goals become part of a system model.  The model seeks out the most efficient means to achieve the most desirable ends.  Rational planners keep the means and ends separate, believing that the public interest falls within the realm of politics, not planners.  Thus, systems planners plan for the public; rational planners plan for politicians.  While both schools are positivist, the relation between ends and means serves to place a planner in different positions vis-à-vis the public interest.  Meanwhile, the objective stance of systems and rational planning has been the subject of criticism by other schools of planning thought, which believe that planners cannot be neutral.  This is most evident in the school of advocacy planning.  Further, the shift away from neutral planning corresponds with pluralist worldviews, whose emphasis on difference precludes the possibility of a common good or a public interest.  Marxist planners offer another perspective of the public interest, that the idea of a ‘public interest’ is part of a false consciousness that serves to placate citizens such that they believe that the state is serving their interests.

Table 1. Schools of planning thought: analysis by areas of concern

Discussion and conclusion

The results of the analysis indicate there are differences regarding who makes planning decisions, as evident in the different roles of planners that help distinguish each school of planning thought.  As the role of the planner changes from expert to facilitator the focus changes from planning to managing.  Whereas planning is oriented to the future, managing is oriented to the present, which infers that not all planners focus their attention on planning, in a strict sense of the term.^[4]  Furthermore, knowing the future is not the exclusive domain of positivist planners.  That is, planning theorists are not at odds over a discernable future; they are at odds over the extent to which the future can be known.  What also concerns post-positivist planners is who is doing the predicting, forecasting, and determining.

Changes are also taking place with regard to how planning is organised in the public domain and to how planning is viewed by society.  Instead of arguing whether the professional planner should be either an expert or a mediator, the opportunity is to look beyond the domain of professional planning practice in order to gain insight to planning as a social phenomenon.  The role of the planner and the decisions planners make may reflect changes not wholly within the field of planning but reflect broader changes taking place within the societal organisation of planning.  For example, a local government undertakes planning as a complete process, whereas professional planners working for a local government may only contribute to parts of this process, of which one part is managing the process.  Furthermore, changes in society’s capacity for planning are reflected in elements concerning the future and public interest, as these elements are not restricted to the domains of planners and local governments but reflect broad societal values and beliefs.

From a pluralist perspective of planning theory, the emphasis on difference, relativism, and uncertainty focusses planners’ attention on the present and the many voices of a fragmented society.  In an extreme form of pluralism, one could argue that planners can do without a definition of planning, or that there is no ‘planning.’  Yet the contrasting schools of planning thought should not be dismissed as merely competing theories.  By focussing on differences it is easy to lose sight of common aspects of planning that bind these disparate views.

The insights generated from our analysis affirm that we can learn something about the nature of planning as a social phenomenon, thereby contributing to the theoretical foundation upon which further discussion about differences can take place.  However, not all differences can be reconciled, particularly those that are bound to worldviews or specific societal contexts.  Collaborative planning is moving along a path of reconciliation by trying to accommodate both positivist and post-positivist approaches.

Notwithstanding the inherent challenges, to move beyond the limits of focussing strictly on difference, we must be willing to engage in discussion about the core concerns of planning.  To focus on common concerns we must also be willing to separate theory from practice, the descriptive from the normative, and explanation from ideology.  There is room to celebrate difference, but we cannot do so at the expense of undermining the ‘very notion’ of planning.