How Planners Might Improvise in the Face of Power: Waking Up Theory for Practice

How we understand the kinds of challenges that planners face on the job remains a central problem for planning ‘theory.’ Writing in a style that non-academics can read remains another problem. Easy labels get in the way: ‘communicative’ or ‘post-colonial’ or ‘insurgent’ (planning) often signal aspirations or righteous intentions, but they tell us precious little about what such planners do in the complex and messy circumstances of their practices. Telling us what planners ‘should do,’ however righteously, should not displace careful analysis of how planners might actually do what they can. For years it seems, discussions of communicative planning led to broader problems of democratic participation; discussions of post-colonial planning led to analyses of trajectories of colonialism; discussions of insurgent planning ushered in further examinations of neo-liberalism or capitalism. Surely, the logic seems to go, to understand any kind of planning, we need to understand its context, the system in which it exists. Yes, but rarely then do we return to what such planners might do and how they might do that in their grounded practices – even as those practices might also teach us about the weaknesses of those encompassing structures. I have collected planners’ stories for years, not as a search for gimmicks or technical fixes, but to mine and analyze what planners have experienced and learned – as they have been variously thrown into complex circumstances and forced to deal with racism and patriarchy, inequality and ideology, authoritarian bosses and corrupt city councils. But to researchers eyeing the bigger systemic pictures, I have been interviewing practitioners who were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Those researchers, privileging their ‘structural analyses,’ have wanted to find the keys to the control room of the ship, the control room that will set white supremacy and patriarchy and diverse forms of capitalism on a new course. I too hope they might find the keys and then figure out (together?) what to do, but I worry they’re looking under the wrong lamppost, no matter how bright the light is there. In the meantime, each day, planners working on transportation and housing, environmental protection and urban design go to work and look for ways to find, engage, and serve broader publics at the same time as they try to confront the looming dangers of going down with the ship. These planners resist those dangers by resisting automobile dominance, experimenting with land trusts and new forms of ownership, mitigating climate change, creating beautiful and vital public spaces now, building coalitions with diverse allies for such change. But planning researchers often ‘describe’ these public-serving efforts without asking still more closely how these planners do better or worse work: how do they strategize? How do they think about value? How do they listen to conflicting claims and respond as they are situated in more or less porous ‘bureaucracies’ or political and administrative ‘structures’ all the time? How do these planners find allies, build coalitions, learn to be more insightful and less presumptuous? How do they develop wise means to their inevitably ambiguous ends – justice, economic development, environmental protection? Too often planning theory seems to ignore these pressing (‘phenomenological’), grounded (‘situated’) problems of actually doing planning.