Читать книгу The Urban Planning Imagination - Nicholas A. Phelps - Страница 10

In this book I argue that if urban planning is part of ‘a refined division of labour’ (Friedmann, 1987) then it has become a more complex and distributed set of practices as the division of labour in society continues to evolve. The innumerable acts, the substantive concerns, wisdom and methods, and the most inspiring and powerful historical and geographical references for urban planning are apparent across a diversity of actors that I simplify here as citizens (individuals and individual households), clubs (corporations, civic associations, environmental groups etc.) and states (new, old, unitary, federal, liberal market, developmental etc.). The interest, influence and power to shape urban development outcomes are distributed very unevenly across these actors, with states and their planning pervasive but less powerful in certain respects than is often appreciated (McGlynn, 1993). The urban planning imagination speaks to and operates in and through ‘a patchwork of private, club, and public realms that both cohere and fragment the city’ (Webster, 2002: 409).

It may be particularly important to recognize the diversity of urban planners and urban planning practices found in and across citizens, clubs and states in the modern era, when it is all too easy to reduce urban planning – its imagination, its substantive concerns, wisdom and methods – to the institutionalized statutory urban planning of the global north in the past 150 years or so. To be sure, the institutions of statutory planning provide a store of wisdom: ‘precedent does offer access to a rich archive of prior human experience and creativity’ (Hoch, 2019: 99). However, much of the emotional intelligence that Hoch (2019) directs us to and which can provide new, practical, urban planning wisdom may rest with citizen and club actors to be mobilized in productive mixes between state, citizen and club, as I emphasize at points throughout the book.

Instead, then, the strengths and imagination of urban planning are to be sought in the increasingly dispersed nature of innumerable, more or less reflexive, acts by citizens, and in the name of clubs and states across sweeps of time and space that collectively describe the making of cities. If learning itself remains the most valuable resource people possess to prepare for the future (Hoch, 2019: 3), the future of the urban planning imagination will need to be open to the complex possible mixes or combinations of, or experiments among, citizens, clubs and states found in different parts of the world at different times. The positive contributions to city making of some of these mixes may seem unlikely, but we should suspend any prejudices we may harbour here regarding the essential properties or rationalities of citizen, club or state planning actors if we are to continue to offer broadly popular and tractable, if temporary, solutions to the unending stream of challenges that attend city making.