Conceptualisation: model cities as argumentative resources

My conceptualisation of model cities as argumentative resources, mobilised in discussions about urban policy, owes much to the argumentative turn of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Fischer and Forester, 1993). During this period, a number of authors noted the significance that argumentation had in public policy. In a liberal, democratic society, a range of opinions exist and decisions are usually reached only after debate, with such debate in pursuit of decision-making being described as deliberation. As Fischer (1993) asserts:

“For those seeking to extend their political influence, both the decentralized character of power in the political system and the technical complexity of modern policy issues necessitate attention to policy arguments. Normative arguments and empirical evidence have become unavoidable components of modern policy styles” (Fischer, 1993: 35)

It could be said that the urban policy mobilities literature explored in chapter two has been good at recognising the importance of empirical evidence, but has attached less emphasis to normative arguments. Argumentation permeates the entire political process and is implicated even among professional policy

“analysts” themselves:

“in a system of government by discussion, analysis – even professional analysis – has less to do with formal techniques of problem solving than with the process of argument. The job of analysts consists in large part of producing evidence and arguments to be used in the course of public debate” (Majone, 1989: 7)

Scholars positioning themselves within the argumentative turn sought

variously to analyse the existent process of deliberation or to propose how it might be improved. Those interested in the latter (e.g. more recently Buchstein and Jörke, 2012) were influenced by the ideal situations presented by Jürgen Habermas (1996), who suggested that deliberation would be both more democratic and productive of better outcomes if as many groups as possible were invited to participate. Deliberation would ideally result in unanimous agreement. Habermas was writing in the 1970s and 1908s when the

significance of social movements as actors in various urban campaigns was becoming clear and their continued exclusion from policymaking was seen as compromising the legitimacy of the existent democratic mechanisms (Castells, 1983).

The first concern of the argumentative turn, however, was to observe and explain how decisions actually come to be reached by argumentation. Writers such as Majone (1989) noted that argumentation consists of persuasion in which various argumentative resources may be mobilised in an attempt to persuade. This theorisation of argumentation is useful because it provides a possible positioning of experiences elsewhere, including model cities, as being among the argumentative resources mobilised. Put simply, a claim for action, such as that a particular policy should be adopted, can be justified to an audience with respect to its success elsewhere. Another contribution from Majone (ibid.) is his observation that in deploying an argumentative resource to persuade an audience, a speaker need not have been convinced by that

particular argumentative resource. Their own support for a policy may rather have been more motivated by other concerns, which they have chosen to conceal. This resonates with the suspicion that experiences of cities elsewhere are often used instrumentally within deliberation. For example, taking

McCann’s (2011a) case, a planning official might endorse a regeneration strategy for Dallas as a manifestation of the successful “Vancouver model”, using Vancouver’s experience as an argumentative resource, despite their personal support for the strategy arising out of prior commitments related to their professional training, ideology, interest or something else.

Despite the valuable contributions of Majone and others, argumentation has fallen out of fashion over the past twenty years. Though it is difficult to pronounce on the precise reasons for this, it may be that the argumentative turn’s emphasis on language sat uncomfortably alongside the later turns, both within and outside geography, to practice as a priority for study. It is upon these later turns that the current literature on urban policy mobilities, explored in the previous chapter, has built as McCann (2011a) and Gonzalez (2011) have been drawn to studies of human interactions and the materiality of

microspaces in policy circulation. Given this decline in popularity, it is tempting to dismiss argumentation as another academic “turn” that as a novel idea

animated the social sciences in a flurry of activity before fading away (although

it has recently been revived – see Fischer and Gottweis [2012]). Yet I have adopted the idea for two reasons. First of all, in a historical study such as this one I have only limited access, through secondary sources to the microspaces of policy transfer – and the access I do have is exclusively textual, save for a limited number of graphics and photographs. In this context, the

argumentative turn’s insistence that the advancement of arguments in debate is the basis of deliberation and the substance of politics provides both

reassurance that model cities of the past can be identified through

documentary analysis and a justification for doing so. Secondly, the claims of the argumentative turn have not been refuted by the more recent literature on urban policy mobilities. This literature continues to search for a satisfactory conceptualisation of what is actually transferred or mobilised and for what purpose. As I demonstrated in chapter two, the notion of assemblage is

problematic when model cities are invoked, since the notion of a model implies the imitation of a single city (though undoubtedly with the model being

modified, perhaps considerably, when it is implemented elsewhere) rather than the assembling of disparate experiences from multiple originary cities.

Argumentation would suggest that the circulation of urban models is really a circulation of argumentative resources for the purpose of persuasion.

In adopting the notion of argumentation as central to urban politics and planning, I am therefore not invoking guesswork but drawing upon an established and in fact resurgent literature which I find convincing. Yet the application of argumentative theory to the earlier twentieth century is

potentially problematic, since for some of the proponents of the argumentative turn, the phrase “argumentative turn” implies not merely a new paradigm for the analysis of urban politics, involving attention to argumentation, but also that the phenomenon of argumentation is itself novel, having arisen as a result of some of the trends towards greater stakeholder inclusion and participation identified by Castells (1983) and Habermas (1981). In this context, my own application of argumentation to debates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is suspect. Yet this claim has not been tested and invites the question, “if not argumentation, then what?” That is to say, surely urban politics in democratic societies has always been through deliberation? The deliberation may have involved a smaller set of actors (in Habermas’ terms it might have been profoundly unsatisfactory in excluding particular social

groups), the actors may have mobilised different argumentative resources in pursuit of quite different goals (and identifying which have been mobilised at different times is among the research questions addressed in this thesis), but the total absence of argumentation is difficult to imagine. Not all works from the argumentative turn convey the implication that argumentation was a novelty in the 1970s and 1980s. In opposition to the notion that rhetoric is a style or seductive language which is introduced into certain planning

arguments, Throgmorton (1993: 117) argues that “all planning and analysis is rhetorical”. This is a question to which I return in my consideration of the operationalisation of argumentative theory on page 68.

Given that policy analysis and planning are thus fundamentally deliberative, the ideal archival sources for this historical research will be those in which

argumentation about urban development take place. For Schmidt (2012: 91),

“Ideas, naturally do not “float freely”. They need to be carried by agents. But even where agents are treated as carriers of ideas, the connection between ideas and collective action remains unclear. The missing link is discourse not as representation but as interaction, and the ways in which ideas are conveyed through discursive

argumentation lead to action”

Schmidt indicates that the best sources to use will be those where discourse appears as interaction – i.e. those institutions which exist and have existed for the advancement of claims about urban policy, through discursive

argumentation (with model cities functioning as argumentative resources in support of these claims). Such institutions are preferable to other archives which present urban policy discourse as mere representation, ignoring the interaction inherent in its production.