The theory of collaborative planning

In this section, I identify some features of collaborative planning theory; this outlook is situated within a broader field of theory that rejects the assumptions of modernism. I then highlight the ways collaborative planners place particular emphasis on the task of shaping culture. In pursuit of this general concern with shaping culture as a means to shape places, I outline the collaborative planners’ interests in interventions that strengthen governance, improve dialogue and facilitate politics. Finally, I draw attention to the analytic tool of institutional analysis, promoted by a leading collaborative planner, Patsy Healey.

Challenges to planning’s claim to scientific objectivity

By the 1960s, town-planning came to be viewed as a science, concerned with the control of processes, complex, dynamic social systems, rather than as an art form concerned with the aesthetic issues of urban design. Since then, the totalising narrative of positivism within planning has been challenged on many grounds, including its failure to respond to social complexity (Jacobs, 1961) and its inability to address questions of political power (Forester, 1989; Flyvbjerg, 1998). Sandercock (2003) criticises the failure of modernist planning, with its claims to scientific objectivity, to address its boundedness and acknowledge its value-laden nature. Matters of political choice and power, the critics assert, are presented in and through planning as though they are technical matters. These critical perspectives together represent a rejection of the core claim that planning is an objective, scientific pursuit. Collaborative planning is arguably the dominant theoretical outlook that emerges in the context of the growing post-positivist intellectual climate of the last decades of the twentieth century (Allmendinger, 2002). That said, it would be wrong to suggest that collaborative planning represents a unified and universally endorsed alternative to scientific rationality. If planning practice is diffuse, with technocratic planning overlaid by other strategies, then planning theory is also fragmented, drawing on diverse currents including theories of postmodernism, neo-pragmatism, and collaborative planning or communicative action (Allmendinger, 2005). Moreover, leading proponents of collaborative planning theory argue that different theoretical positions, including technical-rational planning, can happily coexist. Sandercock (2003) deploys the term ‘Mongrel Cities’ to advocate a hybrid approach to planning, in which participatory planning plays a part in the democratic process, living happily alongside means-ends rationality where appropriate, notably in producing technical engineering solutions. Healey also takes this view, acknowledging the importance in planning of tools based on scientific rationalism, for example in economic evaluation, while arguing for a new approach based on the invention of new forms and practices for planning:

…if its invention is based on an inclusionary ethic, its form should allow both voice and influence to be more evenly distributed among those with a stake in issues than is common in most strategic planning exercises these days (Healey, 2006, p.282).

Planning as a contribution to building culture

Patsy Healey makes the case for planning that is focused on inter-subjective reasoning among diverse discourse communities (Healey, 1992), geared to building consensus around shared meanings and objectives through the course of planning activity. Healey persuasively argues that planning should be concerned with the objective of link making, offering the scope to engage diverse cultures – identifying the various ‘layers’ of social life and the cultures attached to them and drawing them into the process of place shaping. Planning, from this perspective, is concerned with shaping culture and society. Culture, for Healey (2006, p.64) is ‘the continuously re- shaped product of the social processes through which systems of meaning and thought are generated’ and local environmental planning ‘becomes a project in the formation and transmission of cultural layers’.

Healey thus defines culture in a radically different way from the modernists, who saw culture as a social sphere separate from the economic and political realms (Healey 2006, pp.8-30). Linked to this overarching framework, collaborative planners bring certain perspectives to understanding how dialogue proceeds between stakeholders. Propositions, it is suggested, are developed in a non-linear way, through iterations arising from a dialogic process. The process typically includes elements such as working to build trust, securing common understanding among participants, and engaging people in decision making on an equitable basis (Innes & Booher, 2010). Collaborative planning as a tool for strengthening governance capacity

Seen this way, planning provides a tool that can be used to strengthen governance capacity (Innes & Booher, 2003). Patsy Healey distinguishes between those who see planning as a bureaucratic impediment and those who:

…see planning systems and practices as a mechanism through which to engage the complex balancing of economic, social and environmental values in a coordinated and integrated way … part of the institutional infrastructure necessary for economically successful, liveable, environmentally considerate and socially just urban areas(2007, p.6).

Healey’s normative position is explicit: planning processes offer individuals and groups a means to participate and work towards a better society and a better world. If

planning, as Innes and Booher propose, offers tools for ‘strengthening governance’, this need not be read straightforwardly as a means of strengthening the official narratives of public policy. Indeed, some (Forester, 1989; Sandercock, 1998, 2003) argue that planning provides scope for political contestation. John Forester (1989) had argued that planning could reinforce economic domination, by using selective information and the spreading of disinformation (Forester, 1989, p.45). However, Forester suggested that ‘progressive’ planning offered the scope to be ‘at once a democratizing and a practical organizing process’ (Forester, 1989, p.49). Thus, Leonie Sandercock asserts that ‘planning practices have always been deeply interested rather than disinterested, deeply implicated in politics and in communicative acts’ (2003, p.33).

Collaborative planning as a dialogic activity capable of redressing power

Why should the activity of engaging the public be any better at providing solutions to urban problems than what went before? Prime facie, one might consider that engagement would offer fine-grained insights capable of informing plan making, thereby enabling urban design to better respond to public needs and aspirations. However, collaborative planners suggest there is a more profound reason why their methods make good sense. The answer, for them, lies in the distinctive approach to power embodied in the practice. Tore Sager provides an illuminating definition for ‘communicative planning’ thus:

Making planning processes less vulnerable to manipulation and other repressive power strategies by revealing and counteracting communicative distortions. Aiming for broad participation and dialogue in planning processes and broad support for planning recommendations (2005, p.2).

This definition expresses an idea at the core of the case for collaborative planning, namely that the act and quality of communication is critical to building a good society. Planning is understood as a process of dialogue between sections of a community, wherein the quality of the communication can affect the exercise of power and ability to secure desirable outcomes such as justness and equity. Sager (2005), situates the normative practice of communicative planning within the broader framework of planning as a pursuit of democracy. He contends that planning theory is normative in the sense that it is concerned with the promotion of democracy, and that

it develops and changes as a practice develops as democracy is itself becomes more mature.

Institutional analysis

Patsy Healey proposes that a certain analytical approach, institutional analysis (2006, pp. 31 – 71), is appropriate for developing knowledge about places: a methodology that considers the nature and practice of agencies engaged in a social situation, the formal and the informal norms of behaviour and routines of practice embedded in particular histories and geographies. Institutional analysis seeks to provide a framework for analysing the processes central to the activity of successful planning: those that engage diverse communities in making decisions about the future of places, based on the development of consensus through engagement and dialogue with stakeholders. Institutional analysis is an analytic tool; the term is associated with the objective of study (institutions), and the focus for the normative dimension of collaborative planning (improving institutions). Planning, for Healey, should help build the ‘institutional capacity’ of a place, understood as a concern with the recognition and building of place-culture. Planning is thus concerned with relations, or social dynamics associated with places. On the one hand the concern is with the ‘embedded’ culture of traditions, practices and meanings that are given, but also with the issues attached to their interaction as well as the potential to generate culture in the course of place shaping.