Читать книгу The Urban Planning Imagination - Nicholas A. Phelps - Страница 13

Urban planning emerges as an activity that has adapted to changing societal needs and desires, retaining an element of imagination while acting to bind a variety of actors and their interests in efforts to address the substantive challenges associated with human settlement around the globe.

The urban planning imagination’s geohistorical sensibilities make it a particularly powerful and integrative means for solving the complex problems of city building, since these reveal themselves as ones of (spatial) interdependence and indivisibility and (historical) uncertainty and irreversibility (Hopkins, 2001). The urban planning imagination – as something distributed across citizens, clubs and states – emerges as pervasive but more suitably modest (Hoch, 2019: 48) than it has at times been presented as being in statutory practice and university training issuing from the global north.

My celebration of urban planning is not one that rests on the thought that urban planning is somehow an unconstrained act of imagination; it is not. Rather, as I note in chapter 6, urban planning systems and cultures are nested within broader institutional and cultural frames while being an indispensable part of, or foil to, them. As Magnusson (2011: 132) observes, ‘Planning has always been a way of rationalizing politics by rendering it governable.’ Indeed, urban planning has had ‘greatness thrust upon it’ at various junctures. These include, for example, the aftermath of war in the United Kingdom (UK), when urban planning was briefly the means by which the modernization of society was to be achieved (Hall and Tewdwr-Jones, 2020), and the present, with urban planning emerging as the most suitable arena in which to address the effects of climate change and search for sustainable development (Davoudi et al., 2009). At its best, urban planning continues to manifest something of society’s collective conscience in connection with what Rittel and Webber (1973) explain are ‘wicked’ problems.

It has been said that urban planning is a dialectical process (Gleeson and Low, 2000) whose tensions are reconciled in moments in time and place. Often a particular visual (map, diagram, sketch), technique (forecasting, overlays), method (scenario building, collaborative or communicative processes) or principle (sustainability) captures the imagination. At these moments the incredible global mobility of urban planning thought and practice becomes visible. It is conceivable in a world now considerably sped up that those moments in which urban planning gains purchase will be too fleeting to be meaningful. Yet, in other respects, the speed of change makes urban planning an even more important enterprise in the present age, though one in need of rethinking as a joint exercise drawing sustenance from the distributed and pervasive nature of urban planning itself: drawing strength and imagination from the substantive concerns, wisdom and methods found across a range of actors.