john friedmann - planning theory

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Scott - Seeing Like a State</U></A></div> <div> <B><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="Symb075c00b700c899330000.gif" HEIGHT="13" WIDTH="24" ALIGN="bottom" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0">john friedmann - planning theory</B></div> <div> <A HREF="id192.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Klosterman Arguments for and against pl"><U>Klosterman - Arguments for and against planning</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id193.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="El dilema del prisionero"><U>El dilema del prisionero</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id199.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Glosario de Planificación Social"><U>Glosario de Planificación Social</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id206.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Primer Examen"><U>Primer Examen</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id212.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Aclaracion de J.C. Scott"><U>Aclaracion de J.C. Scott</U></A></div> </td> <td valign="top" height=390 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <I>john friedmann - planning theory</I></div> <div> Planning theory revisited<FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Albertus Medium" > </FONT></div> <div> <I>European Planning Studies</I>; Abingdon; Jun 1998; John Friedmann; </div> <div> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="1" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="296" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="VOID" RULES="NONE" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 WIDTH="98"><div> Volume: </div> </tD> <tD VALIGN=CENTER WIDTH="191"><div> 6</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 WIDTH="98"><div> Issue: </div> </tD> <tD VALIGN=CENTER WIDTH="191"><div> 3</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 ><NOBR><div> Start Page: </div> </NOBR></tD> <tD VALIGN=CENTER WIDTH="191"><div> 245-253</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 19 WIDTH="98"><div> ISSN: </div> </tD> <tD VALIGN=CENTER WIDTH="191"><div> 09654313</div> </tD> </tR> <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 54 ><NOBR><div> Subject Terms: </div> </NOBR></tD> <tD VALIGN=CENTER><NOBR><div> Theory</div> <div> Area planning & development</div> <div> Urban areas</div> </NOBR></tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> <div> <I>ABSTRACT After brief personal recollections of the origins of planning theory, the author poses the question of why, after five decades of active theorizing it is still impossible for people engaged in writing planning theory to agree on a formal definition of their subject. Four possible answers are explored: the problem of defining planning as an object to be theorized; the impossibility of talking about planning disconnected from actual institutional and political contexts; the several modes of doing planning theory and the dilemma of choosing among them; and the diffculty of incorporating power relations into planning discourse. The paper concludes with a brief comment on three themes that should be made central to theorizing' the production of the urban habitat, the rise of civil society, and the question of power.</I><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Albertus Medium" > </FONT></div> <div> I believe that I may have been among the small number of postgraduate students to sit in on the first ever seminar in planning theory. It was at the University of Chicago, and the year was 1948. Our instructor was Edward Banfield, later a professor of urban politics at Harvard, but at that time he was still working on his Ph.D. Banfield was a protege of Rexford Tugwell, who chaired the Interdisciplinary Program of Education and Research in Planning where I was studying. Tugwell was a believer in the collective wisdom of planners, and a sworn enemy of corporate power. He was also the first in my country to raise planning thought to the level of theory. Although his essays on the subject were published, they were not widely read (except by his students), and when Banfield put together his syllabus, Tugwell's writings did not figure importantly. The prominent names, as I recall them now, were Karl Mannheim, particularly his recently translated book, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, and Herbert Simon's Administrative Behaviour, which was destined to turn Public Administration into a policy science. Other names, familiar now from the post-war debates about the role of government in the economy this was still, after all, the Age of Keynes-included Friedrich von Hayek and Barbara Wooton. We also pondered John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems. </div> <bR> <div> From the beginning, then, planning theory was being conceptualized as a bi-continental, Euro-American enterprise. And as such it has remained. But what I would like to stress is that this new subject, planning theory, really had to be cobbled together from elements which were originally intended for altogether different uses. Tugwell and Mannheim both shared a concern with the place of planning in society (where planning meant, for the first, a directive role for the state and, for the second, a democratic via media between fascism and communism). Neither was specifically writing with city planning in mind. Tugwell had come from a chair in institutional economics at Columbia University, via some years as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, during his first term, counted him as a member of his `brain trust', later as Chairman of the New York City Planning Commission (under Mayor La Guardia), and finally as Governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Mannheim, who wrote his first version of -,lan and Society in Holland as an emigre from Nazi Germany in 1935, was best known for his earlier work on the Sociology of Knowledge. Herbert Simon, who would eventually move on to other endeavours in organization theory and artificial intelligence, had come out of Public Administration. Both Hayek and Wooton were economists. And John Dewey was a philosopher and a major figure in American pragmatism, one of whose central ideas learning by doing was widely adopted by educators in the post-World War II era. </div> <bR> <div> I myself was very excited by all of these ideas and how they might be brought together to serve the enterprise of 'planning'. Banfield who, as some of you may know, eventually abandoned planning for the academic discipline of political science, having formed a rather bleak view of its practitioners and of humanity in general, decided that the most promising theory for planning would have to be based on Herbert Simon's synoptic model of rational decision-making. For better or worse, this identification of planning with rationality served as planning theory's template for years to come and continues to inform the writings, most prominently, of Andreas Faludi and Ernest Alexander. </div> <bR> <div> We have travelled quite some distance since those tentative beginnings. In our day, planning theory has achieved a certain kind of legitimacy. My good friend Luigi Mazza, of the Milano Polytechnic, has started the first journal with the explicit title of Planning Theory, and -virtually all American planning schools now offer one or more core subjects on the theme. There are also several collections of readings, such as the recently published Explorations in Planning Theory by Mandelbaum, Mazza and Burchell, and two eagerly awaited new publications from Leonie Sandercock, Making the Invisible Visible: Multicultural Planning Histories and Toward Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities and Regions, as well as Bent Flyvbjerg's Rationality and Power, a story (finally told in English) of redevelopment planning in Aalborg. One might be justified to conclude from this evidence that planning theory has finally arrived and is likely to stay around indefinitely as a defining field of academic endeavour. </div> <bR> <div> But things are never so simple. A couple of years ago I wrote a short article for the Journal of Planning Education and Research one of our house journals back in the United States-on `Teaching Planning Theory'. My hope was to codify and constrain what, to me, appeared to be the virtually boundless field of planning theory as it had evolved. I identified five today I would say six discourses that seemed to me to cover perhaps 90% of the relevant writings: applied rationality; societal guidance; behavioural (positivist) approaches; communicative practice; social learning; and radical planning or emancipatory practice. The journal editors invited comments from a number of distinguished academics, only to discover that no two of us could agree on the nature of the beast we wanted to theorize. None of those who wrote comments wanted to be `fenced in' by any definition of planning discourse, however loose and encompassing. Definitions were somehow perceived as limiting their freedom to call theory whatever they wished it to mean. We did minimally agree that planning theory could serve as a code word among us, but the consensus stopped there. We were riding off on different horses, each galloping into the sunset in a different direction. I do not want to overstate the unwillingness of our theory tribe to arrive at agreements. </div> <bR> <div> In particular, I want to acknowledge one currently very popular model in planning theory that is based on John Forester's work, which he has drawn, in turn, from Jurgen Habermas' high-flying theoretical writings on communicative action another distinguished EuroAmerican collaboration. But this unhappy experience-my inability to get even a handful of my colleagues to acknowledge that we are engaged on a common project with a tradition and history of its own- -led me to think about some of the reasons for this failure. And as I mused on this 50-year-old hobby of mine, which I call thinking about planning, I confess that I discovered a number of difficulties inherent in this undertaking. Let me mention four of them: the problem of defining planning as an object to be theorized; the impossibility of talking about planning disconnected from actual institutional and political contexts; the several modes of doing planning theory normative, positive, critical, and paradigm-shifting and the dilemma of choosing among them; and last but not least, the difficulty of incorporating power relations into planning discourse. </div> <bR> <div> Before going into more detail on each of these, let me just say that it is never going to be easy to do theory inside a profession that prides itself on being grounded in practice. In the so-called disciplines, discourse is of course mostly about theory, and sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, psychologists and all those other '-ists' risk being ostracized from their respective clans should they be bold enough to seriously venture into policy applications. Social scientists live for theory! Ability to theorize establishes the pecking order in their disciplines. But it is not the case in practical professions such as planning, where theorists are generally looked upon askance and tend to write mainly for each other. What use are they and all that jargon-laden scribbling they do? I shall return to this question. For now, let me just say that the life of a planning theorist had best be dissembled, should she/he seek her/his practicing colleagues' admiration. </div> <bR> <div> But back to the four 'difficulties' that, I claim, we encounter whenever we engage in planning discourse. To start with, what exactly do we talk about when we talk about planning? We use words like `to plan' `the planner', `the planning process', but, quite apart from whether their definitions would be helpful in answering my question, these terms are actually confusing. What planners are engaged in planning (and, for the sake of argument, I shall suppose here that we are limiting ourselves to so-called city planners, or urbanists, itself already a choice with baneful consequences for theory)? Professionals with a tertiary degree in the field? Architects specializing in urban design? The city engineer? Housing experts? Public officials who occupy positions in municipal planning offices? And should we distinguish city planners proper from, say, transportation or environmental planners? Are social planners in or out? What about planners who are not engaged in drawing up any sort of plan (strategic or otherwise) but are engaged in the resolution of conflicts about urban issues of one kind or another? Do certain lawyers qualify, even though they have no planning degree? And what of city managers? There is no end to this sort of questioning, but whatever our answers are, they will make a significant difference to what and how we 'theorize'. </div> <bR> <div> We also lose ourselves in another part of the labyrinth, whenever we ask a question about the `planning process'. Some of our schools actually teach subjects by that name. They teach what, in Australia, would be called `statutory planning', that is, the formal procedures required by law for obtaining, for example, a zoning variance, and the legal appeals that are open to the petitioner in the case of a denial. But statutory planning is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to large planning decisions on freeway routing, docklands redevelopment schemes, major facility locations and similar 'mega'-projects that will have major impacts on the form and functioning of cities. Decisions on these larger matters are the life of politics; they may involve the national government and even international financial institutions; at best, they bear only a formal resemblance to what is ordinarily called the planning process. They involve more than the public bureaucracy and their 'petitioners'. The real process is rather a tug of war that may extend over several decades and involve all sorts of people, not least from the concerned sectors of civil society. </div> <bR> <div> Planning theorists have tried desperately to escape this labyrinth by abstracting from real-life situations. When I left the University of Chicago in 1955, the prevailing notion was that our profession was all about making `rational decisions' in the mode of Herbert Simon, as interpreted and further reduced to a set of explicit rules by Edward Banfield. One either accepted this formulation or despaired of it. Banfield and his colleague, Martin Meyerson, later President of the University of Pennsylvania, despaired of rationality in human affairs and turned their back on planning. Others, like Andreas Faludi, continued to work within this framework, while modifying it to turn it into something other than the Weberian `iron cage' that the original formulation had suggested. Outside of the planning field, decision-making remained the focus, but 'rationality' now acquired new meanings, such as 'incrementalism' (Charles Lindblom) or `mixed scanning' (Amitai Etzioni). My own 'eureka' came one day in the late 1960s when I woke up one morning with the inspiration that planning could be modelled as the relationship between knowledge and action. That seemed to open up new avenues for research, much of which I summarized in two books, Retracking America: A Theory of Transactive Planning (1973) and Planning in the Public Domain (1987). </div> <bR> <div> But, of course, no theoretical object remains forever unchallenged. Paradigms shift, as we know, either because their potentials are exhausted (they no longer pose interesting questions) or because other topics are in the ascendancy. John Forester, to whose continuing work I have already referred, focuses on dialogue and communicative processes. His particular interest is in mediation, and how a structured process of talking through conflicting positions can help the interested parties to move, step by step, to an agreement. Most recently, Leonie Sandercock has been promoting the idea of alternative planning histories, those told by oppressed and marginalized social groups engaged in city-building processes. Her work clearly de-professionalizes planning and shifts attention to political conflict. Her primary interest is not Forester's `getting to yes' but social justice for those whose voices have been silenced. Her work opens up a vast field for research into planning that has barely been scratched. </div> <bR> <div> The theoretical object of planning thus remains open and necessarily contested. This is the first of my four difficulties, which continue to make any agreement in planning theory nearly impossible. We are too busy disagreeing to build up and refine a single theory of planning. The second difficulty is the illusion that planning theory is some sort of Platonic universal, inhabiting the realm of pure ideas that float across the earth, shining their benevolent light upon humanity. In this post-modern age I do apologize for using this overexposed epithetwe are used to consigning all universal theories to the Inferno. But I mean something quite tangible and specific. Planning theories are not only embedded in Euro-American planning traditions, they also suggest a way of thinking that is quite alien, to cite but one example, to Asian academic life. For instance, it would be virtually impossible for me to give this lecture to a knowing, appreciative audience in China or Japan. Asian audiences would perhaps expect to be informed about American (or Australian) planning practices, our own real-life experiences with planning, and about what works for us, and why. They would be shy on abstract musings about rationality, dialogue, the alternative histories of oppressed minorities and women, and the anguish we sometimes display about `getting our values right'. They would rather learn about technical aspects of transportation planning, or how to organize land markets in countries that are still nominally socialist. </div> <bR> <div> I have no wish to single out Asian planners, of whom there are now large numbers, from Delhi to Beijing and beyond. Admittedly, some ideas do travel even if they are changed in the process. I would nevertheless maintain that my proposition generally holds true. Even the Euro-American collaboration on theory is, to some extent, an illusion. Take, for example, the role of the local state in the USA and in the Netherlands. Different political cultures produce very different kinds of planning. In my country, the Dutch planning system is much admired because it seems to have teeth in it and to be effective in controlling land uses and moving forward to a truly sustainable development. I rather suspect that I would hear far more critical voices about Dutch planning from Dutch planners here in Nijmegen. One is always more critical at home. Speaking as an American, I would say that official planning in my own country is largely a farce. What counts with us more is the politics of city-building, and that is not quite the same thing. I am not in a position to come to a judicious conclusion about the actual practices of either Dutch or American planning, but I can say this much: theorizing that will help to improve the practice of planning in Holland would have to be tailored to the traditions of that country, just as American planning theory reflects conditions on the other side of the Atlantic. Pace post-modernism, Euro-Americans still enjoy, or pretend to enjoy, abstract theorizing; it is a sort of intellectual game with us. But the pay-off comes only when we can limit our assertions to the contexts of particular socio-cultural and political traditions. The call is out for many planning theories, not one. </div> <bR> <div> The third difficulty arises from the fact that we have very different expectations about the role of planning theory and considerable trouble in choosing among them. Some of us think of theory as primarily normative: how to improve the practice of planning. That was my intent when I wrote about a theory of transactive planning in the early 1970s; it is also John Forester's explicit purpose. For others, theory has primarily explanatory, even predictive value. Case studies of planning one might think here of Peter Hall's provocatively titled Great Planning Disasters tend to fall into this category. They may not be high-powered theory, but they are grist for the mill. A more recent example is a case study by Rebecca Abers of participatory municipal budgeting in the southern Brazilian capital of Porto Alegre. When her dissertation is published, it will be a contribution to the theory of popular participation in planning. Still another set of planning theorists, most of whom write from a political economy perspective, devote their time to deconstructing mainstream planning. Some of David Harvey's and Manuel Castells' earlier work, which was in a Marxist mode, or Christine Boyer's Foucauldian Dreaming the Rational City, belong to this category. Finally, there are scholarly efforts aimed at changing our thinking about planning altogether, which is how I would describe Leonie Sandercock's recent attempt to bring social planning into a broader accord with conditions prevailing in the contemporary city. The problem that arises is the difficulty we have in choosing among these several modes. To begin with, the categories I mentioned do not neatly delimit different modes of theorizing. What starts out as a descriptive account of planning, for example, soon turns into a critique, and every critique already implies a preferred normative theory. Or theoretical writings that propose a shift in how we should look at planning frequently range across the entire spectrum of theory modes. To our colleagues in the social and human sciences, this seems a very odd approach to what they would describe as theory-building, and as a result, they pay little attention to what we do in our own backyard. On the other hand, wanting to confine ourselves abstemiously to only one mode of theorizing, keeping our distance from other possible modes, has a devastating effect on the significance of what we manage to say. Theoretical austerity is clearly not the way to go. But writing in the plentitude of passion, across the entire gamut of modes of theory, runs the danger of saying too much too soon. </div> <bR> <div> Perhaps the biggest problem we face in theorizing planning is our ambivalence about power. The rational planning paradigm studiously avoided talking about any form of power other than the power of mind. This was also Aaron Wildavsky's position in his well-known text, Speaking Truth to Power. The belief was that reason would prevail, and even when it failed, planners could always take the moral high ground. After all, were they not rational, and rationality was good? The knowledge/action paradigm did little better. It not only failed to acknowledge the knowledge/power relation that has come to be associated with the writings of Michel Foucault, it also had little to say on how new visions might be implemented, because implementation requires an acknowledgment of power as a central issue. Or consider the communicative action paradigm with its Panglossian view of the power of dialogue to bridge the gap between those who command substantial power and those who do not. Whenever planners have written about power it has been mostly in the sense of enabling the powerless to do things for themselves. Thus also Forester. The main literatures on power whether of the state, money, or civil society-have thus been imported from outside our field. This situation has led to a great deal of conflict within the profession. Our more practical-minded colleagues have tended to dismiss planning theory precisely for its failure to countenance power. The quickest way to dismiss someone's earnest efforts is to label them idealistic or utopian. A recent example is an essay by Bent Flyvbjerg, provocatively entitled `Empowering Civil Society: Habermas, Foucault, and the Question of Conflict', in which he launches a fierce attack on Habermasian idealists, such as John Forester. It is nevertheless to Flysbjerg's credit that he has ventured forth on the long trek towards integrating discourses on power, from Machiavelli to Gramsci and Foucault, with the still-sanitized multiple discourses of planning theory The recent work of Orin Yiftachel (Ben Gurion University) should also be acknowledged in this context. </div> <bR> <div> So this is my long answer to the question of why we experience such difficulty in getting anyone to listen seriously to us when we talk planning theory. All the same, we X ill go on doing what we do. Is this a contradiction? Allow me to suggest why I believe that we'll probably continue to engage in this Quixotian enterprise. First, we will keep on writing planning theory, because it's fun ... at least, for some of us. Vladimir Nabokov loved to collect butterflies. We, who are not Nabokov, go hunting for exotic species of ideas, more specifically, ideas about the practice of what still goes by the name of planning. More importantly, as a practical activity in the world, planning is in constant need of rethinking, and I take it to be one of our tasks to assist in this enterprise. Third, the many skeptics notwithstanding, theory does help to improve practice. One of the extant myths among self-styled practical folk is that they have no need for theory. But, in fact, as Donald Schon has shown, practitioners constantly work with theoretical assumptions and it is the theorist's job to make these assumptions visible and thus to help practitioners reflect on them. Fourth, planning does not exist in an intellectual vacuum. There is a lively play of ideas `out there', which needs to be translated in ways that are meaningful to planners both academic and practical. The Mannheims, von Hayeks, Poppers, Deweys, Simons, Gramscis, Habermases, and Foucaults do not simply reveal themselves to planners; they require trustworthy and capable interpreters. At the same time, we would all be the losers, if all we ever did was talk to our kith and kin about the boring empirical details of our daily grind. Fifth, planning as practice needs to continuously reinvent itself, and this requires a knowledge of its history and a certain conceptual agility. Sixth, one of the ways to introduce students to what sve do, and to socialize them into the mysteries of our field, is to give them a strong dose of theory and history along the way. Planning is indeed less and less about technical matters. One can always get a statistician to make yet another population forecast or an architect to design street furniture, and there are plenty of economists and engineers to run feasibility studies. But the critical appreciation and appropriation of ideas is a rare talent that is becoming increasingly important in a world hungry for chaos theory because chaos is what our senses perceive. </div> <bR> <div> In the time remaining to me, I want to talk about some of the things I would do differently today than when I worked on the manuscript for Planning in the Public Domain in the early 1980s. Or to put it another way: in what ways have I moved beyond this text? I shall talk about three recently resurrected themes: the production of the urban habitat; the rise of civil society; and the inevitable question of power. </div> <bR> <div> Trying to get an historical overview of how we in Europe and America have thought about the relation between knowledge and action, I deliberately abstracted from any specific applications of planning. Critics were quick to point this out to me as one of the book's more significant failures. More recently, in an article on planning education which appeared last year in the ,ournal of Planning Education and Research, I took a very different turn. In view of what many of my colleagues, as they looked on market triumphalism, regarded as a crisis for planning, I was searching for a substantive domain that would secure professionals holding a planning degree a legitimate place among the more established professions, from architecture to law and engineering. What, I asked, was our unique competence as planners, the body of knowledge which no one else could legitimately claim as their own? If we were unable to identify such a domain, then, indeed, planning, as a field of professional study, was perhaps not worth saving. My provisional answer was that planners have or should have a grounding in knowledge about the socio-spatial processes that, in interaction with each other, produce the urban habitat. </div> <bR> <div> Now, that the urban habitat is somehow produced is not an especially novel idea. Henri Lefebvre was the first to formulate a productivist view of the city, in language that, because of its Marxist tinge, made his writings popular with some geographers and urban sociologists, most notably Manuel Castells and Edward Soja. The concept itself is simple enough: along with other animals, we humans build the nests in which we live and work, and where we reproduce ourselves. However, and this is the key that opens the question to debate, we do not make our habitat as we would wish. The human, and more specifically, the urban habitat, takes form as multiple forces interact with each other in ways that are not fully predictable. In the article to which I referred, I mention six of them, calling them socio-spatial processes: briefly, urbanization, regional economic growth and change, city-building, cultural differentiation and change, the transformation of nature, and urban politics and empowerment. This is not the occasion to go into detail. Suffice it to say that, in their complex and dynamic inter-relationships, these six processes produce the multi-dimensional habitats we inhabit. </div> <bR> <div> In this context, one meaning of planning refers to the conscious intervention of collective actors roughly speaking, state, capital and organized civil society in the production of urban space, so that outcomes may be turned to one or the other's favour. It is, therefore, obvious that planners need to have a good understanding of how these city-forming processes work before we impose on them a normative structure or, what is currently more likely, mediate among the interests affected. Thisformulation posits the city-forming process first, before there can bc any serious talk of`strategic intervention. Please note my use of the military term of strategy each collective actor will seek to influence outcomes in desired ways by pursuing different strategies against their real or imagined opponents. 'But what is desired may actually change in the process, so that 'goals' are never completely given in advance, as used to be required hy the decision model of the early 1950s). </div> <bR> <div> Theorizing planning by incorporating city-forming processes into the planning paradigm, rather than talking about planning outside of any historical and spatial context, is thus one of the ways by which I would want to amend Planning in the Public Domain. And there are two additional ways, both of which I have already touched upon in this description of how the urban habitat is formed. </div> <bR> <div> The inclusion of civil society as one of three collective actors shaping our cities would not have been possible a mere generation ago. Although we often used terms like 'community' when we talked of local planning, the term was typically used in a passive, general sense. But over the last decade, spurred by civil protests in Latin America and Eastern Europe, there has been a revival of interest in the 18 th century concept of a civil society. I cannot rehearse the rather extensive literature here. Suffice it to say, that civil society carries a heavy freight of political meaning in a world that seems to be moving, however slowly, towards a more inclusive, participatory model of democracy. </div> <bR> <div> Civil society refers to that part of social, as distinct from corporate, life that lies beyond the immediate control of the state. It is the society of households, family networks, civic and religious organizations and communities that are bound to each other by shared histories, collective memories and culturally specific forms of reciprocity. As a political concept, however, democratic theory posits civil society as a counterpole to the state, the ultimate source of a people's sovereignty. In this sense, civil society is composed of citizens, that is, of the members of a political community who claim not only the right to hold the state accountable but also the right to claim new rights for themselves. Among these are the right to voice, the right to difference, and the right to human flourishing. </div> <bR> <div> These three rights are at the source of civil society's deep involvement with the production of the urban habitat. Market and state do not explain it all; we must also reckon with civil action which is sometimes pro-active, at other times filled with anger, protest, and defiance. </div> <bR> <div> This new perception of the role of civil society, along with the partial retreat of the state from its traditional responsibilities, has dramatically changed what planners do. In this new scenario, they are no longer exclusively concerned with the central guidance of market forces or regulation. The new, emerging form of planning is more entrepreneurial, more daring and less codified. Typically, it is collaborative, as Patsy Healey has reminded us, concerned with large-scale projects more than with the entire system of spatial relations in the city, it seeks to forge a limited consensus through negotiated settlements among contesting parties; it is a provider of strategic information to all participants in the planning process. In these terms, planning moves ever closer to the surface of politics as a mediating hand within society as a whole. Its expertise is increasingly being sought not only by the state, where planning powers formally reside, but also by the corporate sector and even by organized groups within civil society itself. </div> <bR> <div> I have taken these thoughts from the editors' introduction of a new collection of essays, entitled Cities for Citizens: Planning and the Rise of Civil Society in a Global Age, which Mike Douglass of the University of Hawaii and I have put together for publication by Wiley early next year. These essays represent a collective effort to talk about the second major new theme in the discourse on planning theory. </div> <bR> <div> The third theme is power. I have already talked about how reluctant planning theorists generally are to incorporate dimensions of power into their work. We have consequently had little to say on the implementation strategies of specific actors, being more concerned with the extent of their formal adherence to particular planning-theoretic models. </div> <bR> <div> I think it is important, when we talk about power, to distinguish between power that is used to coerce, constrain and control the actions of others and that which is enabling people to do the things they would like to do individually and collectively. Michel Foucault's name is associated with the first view of power, and his popular writings are filled with emancipatory passion. My own recent work, considerably more modest in influence and scope, reflects an enabling view of power. In The Politics of Alternative Development, I speak of the individual, social and political empowerment of the oppressed sectors of society. Mine is the obverse of Foucault's preoccupation with the micro-politics of dominance and coercion. It is rather a planner's affirmation of how marginalized groups can begin to assert themselves in everyday life. </div> <bR> <div> Others, and I have already mentioned the Danish scholar Bent Flyvbjerg, are more concerned with unveiling the real relations of power in the interplay of city-building processes. That, too, is an important and necessary task. All told, I would like to urge those of us who are committed to the further development of planning theory to build relations of power and especially enabling power into our conceptual framework. This will be done more readily once we ground our theorizing in the actual politics of city-building, acknowledging that the production of urban space involves the interaction of conflicting interests and forces, not least the growing force of organized civil society itself. </div> <bR> <div> I must refrain from a summing up of my quick return to the past. There can be no conclusions. We are, after all, engaged in a continuing search to improve the practice of planning through the power of theory. And that is an ongoing effort that must remain open to the future. </div> <bR> <div> *Delivered as the Nijmegen Academic Lecture in the Faculty of Policy Sciences, University of Nijmegen, 29 May 1997. </div> <div> <B>Author note: </B></div> <div> John Friedmann is Professor Emeritus, School of Public Policy and Social Research, UCLA, Adjunct Professor, Department of Landscape, Environment, and Planning, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Correspondence address: 18A Loch St., St. Kilda, Victoria 3182, Australia. E-mail: 106244.116@compuserve.com </div> <bR> <div> <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLPADDING="1" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="5" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#C0C0C0" BORDERCOLORDARK="#808080" FRAME="VOID" RULES="NONE" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=CENTER HEIGHT= 19 WIDTH="1"><IMG BORDER="0" SRC="1x1.gif" HEIGHT="19" ALIGN="bottom" WIDTH="1" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>