Time, Temporality, and Planning – Comments on the State of Art in Strategic Spatial Planning Research

Abstract

Since past and present inevitably form the basis for the future distribution of activities in space, the time dimension is as essential for spatial planning as it is for any other type of planning. This also applies to strategic spatial planning, which is commonly understood as “transformative governance work” (Healey, 2009, p. 440, with reference to Albrechts 2004). Both time and temporality are important to understand and theorize with regards to the practice of strategic spatial planning (Sandberg & Tsoukas, 2011, p. 341). The former may be obvious; just think of time as a dimension to schedule a planning meeting. The latter is less obvious, because temporality concerns deliberation about issues of sequencing, tempo, and timing of planning activities (to name only a few). For instance, sequencing of informal planning communication and formal (statutory) planning procedures matters. Before formal procedures, practitioners may search for creative solutions to the pressing problems of strategic planning in cities and regions. After formal plans have been approved, they may be more concerned in ensuring the diffusion of and compliance with planning statements amongst target audiences (Mastop & Faludi, 1997). It would seem self-evident that planning theorists would devote as much attention to time and temporality as to the spatial dimensions of planning. However, this is not the case (Das, 1991). So far, there are only a few contributions to planning theory that take up ongoing debates in other scientific disciplines and that make suggestions about how to rethink planning’s relationship to time and temporality (Hutter et al., 2014; Laurian & Inch, 2019). Surprisingly little has changed since Ewing declared nearly half a century ago: “The utterly essential dimension of planning is time. . . . Yet time is the one dimension of planning that never gets discussed. It is treated as if it were a constant that everyone understands” (Ewing, 1972, p. 439). Fine-grained process analyses with complex descriptions of temporality using categories such as duration, tempo, sequence, and timing, as well as in-depth analyses of change processes based on these categories, are not common in planning research. This is to some extent understandable for, at least, two reasons. On the one hand, researchers and practitioners alike framed planning for a long time as an engineering task‚ ‘trapped’ into a modernist instrumental rationalism (Wiechmann, 2008, p. 10), which left little room for complex time considerations beyond the straightforward clock-time view of temporal variation (linear time, objective