An Archive of Political Possibilities?

IF 3.4 2区 经济学 Q1 REGIONAL & URBAN PLANNING Planning Theory & Practice Pub Date : 2023-05-27 DOI:10.1080/14649357.2023.2246303
A. Inch
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Abstract

I’ve been spending some time in municipal archives and local studies libraries of late, trying to track down details of radical planning initiatives from the 1970s and 1980s. Although they are often under-resourced, it’s reassuring that these important public services have survived the ravages of austerity and remain freely available. I take a quiet pleasure from watching the committed and knowledgeable staff go about their work. Whether helping members of the public uncover family histories or assisting obscure academic research projects, it’s clear they care about connecting people with the past. Despite the dedication of local archivists, however, I’ve also been struck by how elusive a lot of planning history seems to be. While the routine administration of things has regularly been catalogued in triplicate, it quickly becomes apparent that a significant amount of detail on even quite recent events is missing, presumed lost. Key sources remain frustratingly out of reach, leaving you wondering whether they’ve been misfiled or just weren’t kept at all. And, of course, there is always much more that was never printed on paper in the first place. The patchiness of archival records is inevitable, but should it also be a source of concern? More experienced and skilful historians than me are well used to navigating ‘present absences’ and ‘absent presences’ in archives, interpreting surviving sources whilst remaining attentive to all that remains unsaid. I certainly can’t claim any real expertise in this, but recent experiences have left me considering what it means to value the past in the neoliberal present. There are always going to be practical issues to consider when deciding what historical material we choose to preserve. Archiving is both highly skilled and labour intensive. The sheer physical quantity of information generated by organisations over time poses very real challenges. These have been exacerbated by technological change which has brought its own headaches, not least the rapid redundancy of so many digital formats (anyone who thinks the internet will make us immortal clearly hasn’t tried to track down documents posted online in the early 2000s). All of which leads to choices being made, both deliberately and inadvertently, that will have lasting effects on what we remember and what we forget. Various stories have been shared with me recently that suggest organisations often consider the costs of preserving the past to outweigh the benefits, from local authority officers who have faced disciplinary hearings for retrieving material discarded in skips, to the records of entire agencies being binned following restructuring. We in universities are far from immune to such pressures either. Most planning schools in the UK used to maintain subject libraries that were, amongst other things, rich repositories of local planning history. Few, if any, now remain and much of the material they held has probably not survived. The records of more informal planning activities are often at even greater risk. Leonie Sandercock’s (1998, 34) call to develop “insurgent planning histories” remains salutary for its emphasis on extending the planning project to encompass “alternative traditions of planning, existing outside the state and sometimes in opposition to it.” However, the histories of many, often shortlived initiatives and campaign groups are particularly precarious and therefore amongst the most endangered of planning’s patchy archives. Surviving material is often sitting in “personal collections,”
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政治可能性档案?
最近,我花了一些时间在市政档案馆和地方研究图书馆,试图追踪20世纪70年代和80年代激进规划举措的细节。虽然这些重要的公共服务往往资源不足,但令人放心的是,这些重要的公共服务在紧缩的破坏中幸存下来,仍然免费提供。看着那些忠诚而知识渊博的员工从事他们的工作,我感到一种安静的快乐。无论是帮助公众揭开家族历史,还是协助晦涩的学术研究项目,很明显,他们关心的是将人们与过去联系起来。然而,尽管当地的档案保管员很敬业,但我也被许多规划历史似乎是多么难以捉摸所震惊。虽然日常事务的管理通常是一式三份,但很快就会发现,即使是最近发生的事件,也有大量细节缺失,可能已经丢失。令人沮丧的是,关键的资料来源仍然遥不可及,让你怀疑它们是否被错误地归档了,或者根本就没有保存。当然,总是有更多的东西一开始就没有印在纸上。档案记录的不完整是不可避免的,但这也应该引起人们的关注吗?比我更有经验、更有技巧的历史学家很习惯在档案中导航“现在的缺失”和“不存在的存在”,解释幸存的资料,同时关注所有未被提及的内容。我当然不能声称自己在这方面有什么真正的专业知识,但最近的经历让我思考,在新自由主义的今天,珍惜过去意味着什么。在决定我们选择保存哪些历史材料时,总会有一些实际问题需要考虑。归档是一项高技能和劳动密集型的工作。随着时间的推移,组织所产生的信息量带来了非常现实的挑战。技术变革也带来了令人头疼的问题,尤其是大量数字格式的快速冗余(那些认为互联网会让我们永生的人显然没有试图追踪21世纪初在网上发布的文件)。所有这些都会导致我们有意或无意地做出选择,这些选择将对我们记住的和忘记的东西产生持久的影响。最近,我听到了各种各样的故事,这些故事表明,组织往往认为保存过去的成本大于收益,从地方当局官员因回收被丢弃的材料而面临纪律听证会,到整个机构的记录在重组后被丢弃。我们大学里的人也远不能幸免于这样的压力。英国的大多数规划学校过去都有学科图书馆,其中包括丰富的当地规划历史资料库。即使有,现在也所剩无几,他们持有的大部分材料可能都没有幸存下来。非正式规划活动的记录往往面临更大的风险。Leonie Sandercock(1998,34)对发展“反叛规划史”的呼吁仍然是有益的,因为它强调将规划项目扩展到包含“存在于国家之外,有时与之相反的规划的替代传统”。然而,许多往往短命的倡议和活动团体的历史尤其不稳定,因此在规划的零星档案中处于最危险的地位。幸存下来的材料通常是“个人收藏”,
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来源期刊
CiteScore
5.40
自引率
5.10%
发文量
35
期刊介绍: Planning Theory & Practice provides an international focus for the development of theory and practice in spatial planning and a forum to promote the policy dimensions of space and place. Published four times a year in conjunction with the Royal Town Planning Institute, London, it publishes original articles and review papers from both academics and practitioners with the aim of encouraging more effective, two-way communication between theory and practice. The Editors invite robustly researched papers which raise issues at the leading edge of planning theory and practice, and welcome papers on controversial subjects. Contributors in the early stages of their academic careers are encouraged, as are rejoinders to items previously published.
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