Читать книгу The Urban Planning Imagination - Nicholas A. Phelps - Страница 14

The sketch of the urban planning imagination presented here is one of variations on reasonably common themes: one in which there are not only contrasts between cities and nations but also common pressures upon them, much exchanging of ideas and no small measure of similar – though by no means identical – policies and practices developed and deployed. These contrasts and commonalities are visible across places – cities and nations – and across time in the same place. Geographical and historical perspectives are essential to the study and appreciation of urban planning. To the extent that any individual, white, global-north-rooted male can obtain the knowledge and muster the powers of expression required for a critical international introduction, my short discussion of the urban planning imagination cannot be anything other than partial.

In the following chapter, I begin by offering a partial answer to the question ‘who plans?’. I define urban planning actors in terms of citizens, clubs and states before going on to note the ever more mixed properties of the urban planning imagination apparent within and across these sets of actors. I then depict the close links that planning as a discipline has with the study of history and geography. The urban planning imagination is something which unites historical and geographical sensibilities and animates them with a sense of normative purpose towards the shaping of better/good places. It is a body of thought and practice that is uniquely and purposively integrative and synoptic in its aspirations. In this it has rarely been completely successful, for the shaping of better/good places is a task and work necessarily never quite finished. As one of the most criticized and insecure of disciplines, planning can hardly escape a sense of its own fallibility. If this is one lesson painfully learned, it is one that other disciplines might do well to incorporate a little of.

Chapter 3 sets out some of the substantive concerns – shelter, health, mobility, sustainability and economy – that urban planning has had to address. These appear as enduring issues for urban planning thought and practice to deal with. Nevertheless, the precise nature and severity of individual issues and their pecking order continue to alter over time, shaped by circumstance.

Chapter 4 reminds us why urban planning has a value. It has a continuing value as a stock of inter-generational knowledge dating back even to humankind’s first settled relationships to nature. There is more than a sense of lessons not learned, things forgotten, wheels being reinvented and history repeating itself here. However, the stock of urban planning’s wisdom continues to grow in ways that will help us with the challenges of place making that lie ahead.

Chapter 5 discusses some of the methods associated with urban planning. Something of the enormous imagination of urban planning is again showcased here, from the details of techniques used in particular instances, to the long-term ‘informed speculation’ associated with ‘what-if’ scenarios, to the ways in which we can seek to mobilize the intimate local knowledge and intensely felt needs and desires of citizens. This multiplicity of methods is further evidence of the integrative and synoptic potential of urban planning thought and practice.

Chapter 6 seeks to illustrate one aspect of urban planning’s geographical sensibility by drawing attention to the variety of different systems and cultures that exist. Urban planning thought and practice reside within and take their cues from the broader culture and institutional arrangements of societies. The variety of urban planning systems and cultures is itself a stock of accumulated knowledge and expertise, the surface of which has barely begun to be scratched in the extant academic and practice literature. Its full significance is exposed when one realizes that it is the driver of the sorts of international exchanges that I discuss in chapter 7.

Urban planning thought and practice have long been exchanged. City plans have been copied, ideas for unrealized cities have provided inspiration, and particular policies or techniques of planning have been adopted widely. To add to this, apparently similar urban forms and principles of urban planning have developed in synchrony in different parts of the world. What are we to make of this? To me, this signals the power of the urban planning imagination. Urban planning has appeal because it is needed. It has seduced and continues to seduce. How we reflect on and mobilize this power will be important to urban planning in an urban age.

I conclude in chapter 8 by considering the future of urban planning in the present age. This is a future of the mixing of actors, the knowledge and wisdom they bring to substantive challenges, and the methods they make use of when drawing from historical and geographical vantage points. It will need to be a progressive mix with purpose rather than one that produces lowest-common-denominator outcomes, an incompatible pick and mix, or partial and exclusive combinations of citizen, club and state urban planning imaginaries.