Shaping urban futures through storytelling
A paper submitted as coursework for Strategic Spatial Planning at UNSW in 2019.
Contemporary planning theorists define the role of strategic spatial planning as the collective and reflective process of imagining or re-imagining a city or urban region (Healey, 2004); the process of designing society (Gleeson, Low, 2000); and rather grandly as “the story of the way we live” (Tewdwr-Jones, 2012). These views champion the potential of strategic spatial planning to shape the future of urban environments through storytelling.
This paper is a response to the question “what has shaped and influenced how strategic spatial planning is conceived, understood and adopted within planning debate?”. It will explore this question using storytelling as the narrative thread. This form has been inspired through a reading of planning literature from Europe, America, and Australia which reveals a tension between two interrelated characteristics of planning: who has the right to shape the story of urban futures, and how the boundaries of the narrative are defined. It finds that despite an overwhelming need to create and shape stories, many planners lack the skills to lead this visioning.
Who has the right to tell the story
Fox-Rogers and Murphy offer an analysis of planners’ ability to affect change as being shaped by four dynamics of state power: pluralism, managerialism, reformism, and neoliberalism (Fox-Rogers, Murphy, 2016). These are indicative of who has the right (perceived or actual) to tell the story of our urban future, and describe a shift from ‘government as expert’ author (managerialism), to the market as exclusive story shaper (neoliberalism), to a capitalist story edited by government (reformist), and finally to the inclusion of multiple authors (pluralism).
From government-led to market-led planning
The combined effects of the Great Depression and World War II brought about large-scale, government-led plans to reconstruct the economy and stitch society back together (Allmendinger, Haughton, 2007; Gleeson, Low, 2000). In the US, many planners were compelled to question the market’s dominance of national development (Throgmorton, 1996), whilst in the UK and Europe, attempts were made to recast relationships between nation states toward economic and political reform (Pinnegar, 2019). In Australia, post-war planning was similarly guided by a reformist agenda of Commonwealth and state governments (Gleeson, Low, 2000). During this period, planners were engaged with the remaking of society and the economy, and sought to position planning as an enabler of social change and unity (Albrechts, 1991; Gleeson, Low, 2000).
The 20th century story of government-led renewal was disrupted by the economic crises of the 1970s, which saw rising levels of unemployment and government debt and the emergence of neoliberal policies and administrations (Boelens, 2010; Throgmorton, 1996). Neoliberalism as an ideology increased in popularity in the 1980s as greater levels of private capital and investment were used in the delivery of government services and in the building of public infrastructure (Gleeson, Low, 2000; Olesen, 1999). The market had begun to tell the story.
The emergence of public-led planning
Whilst the influence of neoliberal policy dominated planning debate in the late 20th century (Gleeson, Low, 2000), in many countries there was some rejection of market-led planning. In Australia, planners were encouraged to become radical provocateurs and reject the support of capitalism in favour of the telling of alternate futures (Gleeson, Low, 2000), and Boelens cites the emergence in mid 1980s Netherlands of a more socially-embedded (as opposed to market-dominated) way of planning that called for wider involvement in the planning process (Boelens, 2010).
An increased interest in strategic spatial planning during the late 1980s and early 1990s partly derived from the recognition that society was more complex, distributed, fragmented, and pluralistic than had previously been acknowledged (Albrechts, 2006; Allmendinger, Haughton, 2007; Healey, 2004; Gleeson, Low, 2000). This in turn created a need for collaborative methods to enable wider participation by people with different needs and motivations (Allmendinger, Tewdwr-Jones, 2002; Healey, 2004; Searle, 2012).
Yet, as an alternative to expert-led planning methods, collaborative planning is often less democratic in practice. In the Australian city of Perth, an estimated 1,100 participants in a collaborative planning exercise reported they felt coerced to choose a particular option because of the methods and language used by the authorities. This is described by Maggin as “cleverly scripted, stage-managed and discursively biased performance” (Maginn, 2007). The public had been given the right to tell a story, yet the story appeared to have been predetermined.
Defining the boundary of the story
Throgmorton charts the history of planning in America, beginning in the 1920s when many in the planning field believed that objective methods could be used to find technical solutions to physical problems of the city, thereby making society and cities more ‘rational’ (Throgmorton, 1996). This demonstrates that planning debate and practice has not been immune to the dualistic argument between rational and subjective thinking (Sandercock, 2003; Throgmorton, 1996).
This binary view has influenced the shape and scope of the planning discipline from one of defining hard edges to the drawing of ‘fuzzy boundaries’ and recognition of flows and relations (Haughton et al, 2013; Healey, 2004). Debate in this sphere has centred around the notion that planners can either be objective and rational spatial technicians, or creative professionals with the potential to exhibit a more expansive and inclusive way of thinking about our future urban environments (Allmendinger, Haughton, 2007; Gleeson, Low, 2000; Sandercock, 2003; Throgmorton, 1996).
From rational to relational
Healey uses the term ‘Euclidean’ to describe the idea that space can be thought of objectively, and that the qualities of a place can be determined by analysis (Healey, 2004). In the late 20th century planners started to reject this hard-edged, top-down ‘blueprinting’ in favour of a practice which sought to highlight the flows and relationships situated within a place (Healey, 2007; Searle, 2012; Tewdwr-Jones et al, 2010). This move to a relational way of planning parallels debate in systems thinking which demonstrated that human-defined boundaries are both fictional and problematic. As Meadows (2008) observes:
Everything, they say, is connected to everything else. There is no single, legitimate boundary to draw around a system. We have to invent boundaries for clarity and sanity… When you draw boundaries too narrowly, the system surprises you. For example, if you try and deal with urban traffic problems without thinking about settlement patterns, you build highways, which attract housing developments along their whole length. Those households, in turn, put more cars on the highways, which then become just as clogged as before.
When planning is reduced to a mapping of the hard edges of capitalist land markets (Gleeson, Low, 2000), a choice is made to reduce the value of human relationships, aspirations, and memories of urban populations (Lynch, 1960). For Forester (1999), effective planning needs to embrace the relationships between people, and reject the notion that planning a city is achieved by drawing neat boundaries around administrative functions (Boelens, 2010; Healey, 2004; Olesen, 2014).
Negotiating borders — the narrowing of planning ambition
The development of strategic spatial planning in Europe and Australia saw the emergence of neoliberal political thought as a driver of a project-based development mode (Albrechts, 2006; Tomlinson, 2018). Haughton et al propose that the subsequent siloing of government departments, risked the creation of an “uneven mosaic” of urban planning (Haughton, Allmendinger & Oosterlynck, 2013). Bunker and Searle describe this as “splintering urbanism” (Bunker, Searle, 2009).
With the separation of departments through a project-based approach, neoliberalism has narrowed the ambition of planners and sought to put them firmly back into the Euclidean box (Tewdr-Jones, 2012). Yet, alongside this reduction in scope, neoliberalism has also embraced the ‘fuzzy boundaries’ in strategic spatial plans as a way to cynically push the regulatory boundaries of traditional land use planning (Gleeson et al, 2004; Haughton et al, 2013; Searle, 2012). As Olesen (2014) describes:
… where there is fluidity, there is always a risk that neoliberal discourses will dominate strategic spatial planning processes.
The rise of neoliberal ideology has proven to be a compelling shaper of urban environments, such that we have been convinced that there is no alternative to a market-led approach to the planning of our cities (Allmendinger, Haughton, 2012; Allmendinger et al, 2013; Olesen, 2014). Moreover, the rise of globalism in western democracies has increased the scale of the stage on which cities play. Globalism has compelled cities to compete and to view planning as an entrepreneurial activity that can attract what is perceived as ‘mobile’ capital and talent (Gleeson, Low, 2000; Olesen, 1999). This idea that cities need to be marketed grants the ownership of city storytelling to the neoliberals.
Helping planners tell better stories
The effectiveness of neoliberal rhetoric has shaped the ambition of planners, reducing them to bit-part roles in implementing capitalist agendas and maintaining the status quo (Gleeson & Low, 2000; Olesen, 2014). Throgmorton sees a greater role for planners, however, as authors of “persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the future” (Throgmorton, 1996). This exploration of radically different futures in spatial planning is essential according to Olesen to reduce the dominance of the neoliberal agenda (Olesen, 2014).
Some have argued, however, that the planning profession has yet to develop skills in the telling of alternate futures (Albrechts, 2006). If planning is about imagination and the “calling up of the city into consciousness” (Healey, 2002), then shaking the dominant neoliberal idea of the city will require a great deal of effort from planners to be more integrative, collaborative, and aspirational.
With the increasing fragmentation of governance of cities, planning has become more difficult because it requires planners to negotiate and coordinate at scale to integrate the visions of multiple stakeholders (Albrechts, 2006; Gleeson et al, 2004; Tewdr-Jones, 2012). Yet, various studies of planning in practice have shown that planners lack the skills required to operate at a whole-of-government level and often see themselves as mere procedural facilitators and administrators (Albrechts, 2006; Fox-Rogers, Murphy, 2016). As Forester notes, planners have found themselves in a role in which they have no training (Forester, 1999).
For Albrechts and Sandercock, the visions created through strategic spatial planning are a powerful force for change (Albrechts, 2006; Sandercock, 2003). Through these stories, the future of the city is enacted. It is therefore important that this story is cocreated with all people who have a stake (Albrechts, 2010). Herein lies a second area in which planners often lack expertise — the practice of enabling meaningful public participation.
Taking an ‘outside-in’ approach that invites a greater diversity of people to tell their story through public participation acknowledges that the story of the future should not be owned by a single group or authority (Boelens, 2010; Healey, 2002; Healey, 2005). Involvement of a larger range of actors creates the opportunity to build shared publicly-owned visions and to grow respect and understanding between stakeholders (Albrechts, 2010; Healey, 2005; Sager, 2009). In expanding the cast of the city planning story, Boelens embraces Actor-network Theory, suggesting that the environment should also be included as a stakeholder (Boelens, 2010).
Yet, the desire of what has been called ‘communicative planning’ to involve greater numbers and types of actors in decision-making about their local areas can, according to Sager, play into the hands of developers who may wish to negotiate projects at a local level and therefore avoid regulations at a higher level of government (Sager, 2009). This situation is illustrative of much of the planning debate researched for this paper. Whilst ambitious in its rhetoric, strategic spatial planning is being held hostage to the skills of neoliberalists in shaping and controlling the story. Without the ability to create compelling, alternate stories, it will be impossible for planners to overcome the neoliberal discourses which currently dominate planning practices.
Conclusion
It is argued here that to shift the role of planners from technocratic land use managers to creators of alternate city futures requires visionary storytelling. Yet stories cannot tell themselves (Throgmorton, 2003). To tell these stories, planners will have to learn to mediate between diverse stakeholders and work across currently fragmented administrative areas. On the whole this will require a more reflective stance from planners in order to recognise and embrace the playing of a greater role in shaping urban futures (Forester, 1999; Fox-Rogers, Murphy, 2016; Olesen, 2014).
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