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THE NETWORK SOCIETY Edited by Louis Albrechts and Seymour J.Mandelbaum
CHECKLIST (must be completed before press) (Please cross through any items that are not applicable) Front board: Spine: ❑ Title ❑ Title ❑ Subtitle ❑ Subtitle ❑ Author/edited by ❑ Author/edited by ❑ Series title ❑ Extra logo if required ❑ Extra logo if required General: ❑ Book size ❑ Type fit on spine
The Network Society A New Context for Planning?
Edited by Louis Albrechts and Seymour J.Mandelbaum
ISBN 978-0-415-70150-1
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The Networked Cities Series www.routledge.com ï an informa business
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The Network Society
The papers in this book, based on conference proceedings of the 2003 joined conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Association of European Schools of Planning, investigate the challenges that Urban and Regional Planning is faced with today. The contributors deal with the questions of contemporary organization of social, economic, cultural, political, and physical spaces and center their arguments on the notion that social and physical networks are transforming the way in which we see planned cities and regions. The book’s five sections focus on models of network society, the impact of physical networks, the challenges faced by planners in a society heavily reliant on new technology, local networks, such as community networks, and a comparison between spatial and policy networks. The Network Society is essential reading for everyone interested in urban studies, city and regional planning and urban design. Louis Albrechts is Professor of Planning in the Department of Architecture, Urban and Regional Planning, University of Leuven, Belgium. Seymour J. Mandelbaum is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, US.
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The Networked Cities Series Series Editors: Richard E. Hanley New York City College of Technology, City University of New York, US
Steve Graham Department of Geography, Durham University, UK
Simon Marvin SURF, Salford University, UK
From the earliest times, people settling in cities devised clever ways of moving things: the materials they needed to build shelters, the water and food they needed to survive, the tools they needed for their work, the armaments they needed for their protection – and ultimately, themselves. Twenty-first century urbanites are still moving things about, but now they employ networks to facilitate that movement – and the things they now move include electricity, capital, sounds, and images. The Networked Cities Series has as its focus these local, global, physical, and virtual urban networks of movement. It is designed to offer scholars, practitioners, and decision-makers studies on the ways cities, technologies, and multiple forms of urban movement intersect and create the contemporary urban environment. Moving People, Goods and Information in the 21st Century The Cutting-Edge Infrastructures of Networked Cities Edited by Richard E. Hanley Digital Infrastructures Enabling Civil and Environmental Systems Through Information Technology Edited by Rae Zimmerman and Thomas Horan Sustaining Urban Networks The Social Diffusion of Large Technical Systems Edited by Olivier Coutard, Richard E. Hanley, and Rae Zimmerman The Network Society A New Context for Planning? Edited by Louis Albrechts and Seymour J. Mandelbaum
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The Network Society A New Context for Planning? Edited by Louis Albrechts and Seymour J. Mandelbaum
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First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2005 Edited by Louis Albrechts and Seymour J. Mandelbaum Typeset in Times New Roman by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon Printed and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The network society : a new context for planning/ Edited by Louis Albrechts and Seymour J. Mandelbaum p. cm. – (The networked cities series) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. City planning. 2. Regional planning. 3. Policy networks. 4. Sociology, Urban. 5. Globalization – Social aspects. I. Albrechts, L. II. Mandelbaum, Seymour J. III. Title. IV. Series. HT166.N425 2006 307.1′216–dc22 2005015390 ISBN10: 0–415–70150–3 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–70151–1 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–79933–X (eb) ISBN13: 9–78–0–415–70150–1 (hbk) ISBN13: 9–78–0–415–70151–8 (pbk) ISBN13: 9–78–0–203–79933–8 (eb)
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CONTENTS
LIST
OF ILLUSTRATIONS
NOTES
ON
CONTRIBUTORS
PREFACE INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
COMMENTARY
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A New Context for Planning? Louis Albrechts and Seymour J. Mandelbaum
PART I The Network Society: A New Paradigm? CHAPTER ONE
ix
Communicative Action and the Network Society: A Pragmatic Marriage? Niraj Verma and HaeRan Shin Planning and the Network City: Discursive Correspondences Robert A. Beauregard Escaping the Prison of “the Present Place”: Can We Plan the Future of Localities in the Context of a Network Society? Dowell Myers The Discourse Network: A Way of Understanding Policy Formation, Stability, and Change in the Networked Polity Nicholas Low Networks and Planning Thought Judith E. Innes
1
7 9
24
34
45 57
Contents
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PART II Organization of Space and Time
63
IMPACT
65
OF
PHYSICAL NETWORKS
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
Cities and Transport: Exploring the Need for New Planning Approaches Luca Bertolini Networking for Trans-national “Missing Links”: Tracing the Political Success of European High-speed Rail in the 1990s Deike Peters
67
81
CHAPTER SEVEN
Strategies for Networked Cities Stephen Graham
CHAPTER EIGHT
The “Network City”: A New Old Way of Thinking Cities in the ICT Age Paul Drewe
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Challenging the “Old” Urban Planning Paradigm: The Network Approach Gabriel Dupuy
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COMMENTARY
ORGANIZATION OF SPACE AND TIME: CHALLENGES FOR PLANNING AND PLANNERS CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
COMMENTARY
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Planning as Persuasive Storytelling in the Context of “the Network Society” James A. Throgmorton
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Network Complexity and the Imaginative Power of Strategic Spatial Planning Patsy Healey
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Imagining Urban Transformation Leonie Sandercock
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PART III Policy Networks and Governance
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LOCAL NETWORKS AND CAPITAL BUILDING
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
COMMENTARY
Why Liberal Planning Cannot Manage the Network Society: Lessons from Community Action Howell S. Baum ICT-enforced Community Networks for Sustainable Development and Social Inclusion Klaus Frey
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
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Recovery from Disasters: Challenges for Low-income Communities in the Americas William J. Siembieda
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The Multicultural City in the Age of Networks Xavier de Souza Briggs
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Local Networks and Capital Building Susan S. Fainstein
GOVERNANCE CAPACITY, POLICY NETWORKS, AND TERRITORIAL SPECIFICITIES CHAPTER FIFTEEN
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The Global Emergence of Private Planning and Governance Chris Webster and Shin Lee
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Inter-agency Transport Planning: Cooperation in a Loose Policy Network Tore Sager and Inger-Anne Ravlum
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Collaborative Planning, Commitment, and Trust: Dealing with Uncertainty in Networks Ronald G.H. van Ark and Jurian Edelenbos Reconnecting Space, Place, and Institutions: Inquiring into “Local” Governance Capacity in Urban and Regional Research Enrico Gualini
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284
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COMMENTARY
Governance Capacity, Policy Networks, and Territorial Specificities Patsy Healey
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
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INDEX
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ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures 3.1 3.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 8.1 8.2 9.1 9.2
Planning’s “Present Place” Prison Relative to the Network Society Breaking Spatial and Temporal Confines of the “Present Place” Prison Amsterdam, the Metropolitan Area, with Main Transport Infrastructure and (Sub)Centers The Node-place Model Application of the Node-place Model to Station Areas in the Amsterdam Urban Region Three Levels of Network Operators that (Re)Structure the Urban Space The Internet Interrelations between Supply, Demand, and Performance Five Dimensions of Place-connectedness Place-connectedness in a Global-scale Web of Relationships
37 44 69 75 77 112 114 135 137
Tables 1.1 6.1 13.1 13.2 15.1 16.1 16.2 16.3
Comparing Habermas and Castells Key Decisions and Stakeholders for the EU High-speed Rail Initiatives in the 1990s Community Sample Organizational and Institutional Involvement Interpretations of Private Neighborhoods Properties of the Cooperating Transport Administrations Factors Influencing the Administrations’ Interest in the Common National Transport Planning Process The Administrations’ Potential Outcomes and Cooperation Strategies
16 86 200 201 234 254 257 265
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Louis Albrechts is Professor of Planning in the Department of Architecture, Urban and Regional Planning, University of Leuven, Belgium. He has qualifications in social sciences and planning. His research interests currently focus on the practice and nature of strategic spatial planning and on diversity in planning. He is the editor of European Planning Studies. Howell S. Baum is Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has studied and participated in community planning, community development, and community action. Two recent books are The Organization of Hope: Communities Planning Themselves and Community Action for School Reform, both published by SUNY Press. With support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is doing research on Baltimore school desegregation and American liberalism’s struggles to deal with race. Robert A. Beauregard is Professor of Urban Policy in the Milano Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy, New School University. He writes on urban theory and postwar urbanization (mainly regarding the US) and has also written on planning theory. His most recent books are Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (Routledge 2003) and the coedited Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Post-Apartheid City (Routledge 2003). Luca Bertolini received a Master’s degree in architecture and a Doctoral degree in urban planning and real estate development from the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. After completing his doctoral dissertation – a pioneering crossnational, cross-disciplinary study on the redevelopment of railway station areas – he has researched and taught on the interface of urban and transport development. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the Geography and Planning Department, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Xavier de Souza Briggs is Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former member
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of the public policy faculty at Harvard University. His interests are in racial and ethnic diversity, inequality, and democracy in cities. He is the author of The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America (Brookings Institution Press 2005). Paul Drewe is Professor of Spatial Planning at the Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He is director of the design studio “Network City.” He also works as a consultant both in the Netherlands and abroad. Gabriel Dupuy received a civil engineering degree from École Centrale de Paris and a Ph.D. in social sciences from La Sorbonne. He headed the Institut d’Urbanisme de Paris and was Dean of Curriculum at the École Nationale des Pont et Chaussées in Paris. He was appointed director of the Interdisciplinary Research Program “Cities” of the CNRS (French National Science Institution). He taught in Universities Paris XII and Paris X and he is currently Professor of Urban Planning at the University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and director of a research unit in this University (CRIA – Center for Research on Networks, Industry and Spatial Planning). Jurian Edelenbos graduated in Public Administration at Leiden University and Erasmus University Rotterdam in 1994. In 2000 he finished his Ph.D. at the Faculty of Technology, Policy, and Management, Delft University of Technology. From 1999 to 2001 he also worked as a consultant at TNO Strategy, Technology, and Policy. There he mainly gave advice in the field of process management, sustainable development, and interactive governance. From 2001 to 2003 he worked as a research fellow in the field of multiple land use and complex decision-making at the Center of Public Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He continued working at the same university as Assistant Professor in 2004. His fields of research and teaching areas are interactive governance, public–private partnership, urban planning and infrastructure, process management, dilemma management, trust in inter-organizational cooperation, and democratic renewal. Susan S. Fainstein is Professor of Urban Planning in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation of Columbia University. She has written extensively on planning theory and comparative urban policy. She is co-editor of Readings in Planning Theory and Readings in Urban Theory and author of The City Builders: Property Redevelopment in New York and London, 1980–2000. Klaus Frey received a Ph.D. in social sciences from the University of Konstanz, Germany (1997). He is director of the Master’s program in urban management and Professor of the Department of Environmental Engineering at the Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR) in Curitiba, Brazil. Between 1998
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and 2000 he was Professor of Political Sociology at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. From 2001 to 2002 he conducted a project concerning the use of ICT for sustaining civic networks, at the Paraná Institute of Technology (TECPAR). He is the author of several articles in the field of urban governance, urban sustainable development, environmental policy, ICT, and civic networks. Stephen Graham is Professor of Human Geography at Durham University, UK. He has a background in urbanism, planning, and the sociology of technology. His research addresses the intersections of urban places, mobilities, technology, war, surveillance, and geopolitics. His books include Telecommunications and the City, Splintering Urbanism, and The Cybercities Reader. His latest book, Cities, War and Terrorism was published in November 2004 (Blackwell). Enrico Gualini received a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from Politecnico di Milano. He has since worked at the University of Dortmund and at the University of Amsterdam, where he is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Planning and a member of AMIDSt – Amsterdam Institute for Metropolitan and International Development Studies. His research interests focus on urban and regional governance, regionalization and Europeanization processes, European spatial policy, and planning theory. He has published on the role of interactive planning approaches in fostering institutional change, on the Europeanization of regional policy, and on urban and regional governance in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. Patsy Healey is Professor Emeritus in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She has qualifications in geography and planning and is a specialist in planning theory and the practice of planning and urban regeneration policies. She has undertaken research on how planning strategies work out in practice and on partnership forms of neighborhood regeneration experiences. In recent years, she has been developing approaches to collaborative planning practices, linked to an institutionalist analysis of urban socio-spatial dynamics and urban governance. She has undertaken empirical work in the UK and in other European countries. Recent books include Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies (1997) and Urban Governance, Institutional Capacity and Social Milieux (2002). She is currently working on a book on Strategic Complexity and Territorial Governance, which includes cases from Milan, Amsterdam and Cambridge. She is Senior Editor of Planning Theory and Practice. Judith E. Innes is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where she recently retired as a director of the
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Institute of Urban and Regional Development. For the last ten years she has been studying in depth a variety of collaborative and consensus-building processes, both to understand how these can work and to build theory about them. Recent topics include water policy, growth management, and transportation planning. Her writings on planning theory have dealt with comprehensive planning, information in communicative planning, network power, collaborative dialogue and governance, evaluation of collaboration, and participation. Her articles can be found in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Planning Theory and Practice, Planning Theory, and Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. She teaches collaborative methods, communicative planning theory, research design, and urban sociology. Shin Lee is a lecturer in spatial analysis at the School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University. Her research and teaching interests include analysis of urban spatial patterns, application of economic principles in urban management, travel behavior, and the interface between transport and environment. Nicholas Low is Associate Professor in Environmental Planning in the planning program of the Faculty of Architecture, Building, and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author or editor of eight books. His book (with Brendan Gleeson) Justice, Society and Nature won the Harold and Margaret Sprout Prize of the International Studies Association in 1998 for the best book published on ecological politics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Planning Institute. His current research interests are the institutional aspects of transport infrastructure policy, environmental justice, and ecological sustainability. Seymour J. Mandelbaum joined the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania in July 1967, and formally retired as Professor Emeritus on January 1, 2005. He continued the department’s longstanding interest in planning theory while crafting a distinctive concern with the ways in which planners construct pasts and futures, with flows of information, energy, and matter through complex networks, and with the links between communication and community. Dowell Myers is Professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development, University of Southern California. His recent work has explored differences between the planning field’s collective future orientation and the presenttime or historical, individualist focus of the social sciences. Widely recognized as an expert on demographic change as a guide for planning, he has also specialized in analysis of immigrant trajectories and future projections. Deike Peters is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Technical University (TU) Berlin. Before that, she was a lecturer in
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the Urban and Regional Planning Department at the TU. She received a Master’s degree in international affairs and in urban planning from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in urban planning and policy development from Rutgers University. Her academic writing focuses on policy analysis, comparative urban and regional governance (US and Europe), postmodern urban restructuring, environmental and social dimensions of transport, large-scale infrastructure decision making, and planning theory. She also has almost ten years’ experience in transport-related NGO advocacy and consulting to international development institutions. Inger-Anne Ravlum is Senior Research Political Scientist at the Institute of Transport Economics in Oslo, Norway. Her main research interests are institutional reform, policy-making and planning in the transport sector, and especially how institutional design and planning methods affect political decision making. Tore Sager is Professor in the Department of Civil and Transport Engineering at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. His main research interests are planning theory, transport planning processes, and institutional economics. He is the author of Communicative Planning Theory and Democratic Planning and Social Choice Dilemmas. Leonie Sandercock is Professor in Urban Planning and Social Policy and associate director of the School of Community and Regional Planning, where she also chairs the Ph.D. program. Her most recent publications include Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities (1998), Making the Invisible Visible: A Multicultural History of Planning (1998), and Cosmopolis 2: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (2004). She has taught and done consulting work in Australia, the US, and the UK. HaeRan Shin is a lecturer at the University College London’s Bartlett School of Planning. She completed her Ph.D. dissertation on the topic of gendering culture of capability poverty based on Amartya Sen’s capability approach at the University of Southern California. She currently teaches Urban Politics, International Planning, and Advanced Research method courses in London. William J. Siembieda is Professor and Head, City and Regional Planning Department, College of Architecture and Environmental Design, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He holds degrees from the University of California-Berkeley (BA, MCRP), the University of California-Los Angeles (Ph.D.), and was a Fulbright Fellow. His extensive teaching and field experience in Mexico, Brazil, and Central America includes work on strategic planning, land policy, and national housing. His areas of research include: land development economics, housing subsidy policy, and disaster mitigation. He has served on the editorial boards of five academic journals in the US and abroad.
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James A. Throgmorton is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Iowa. His work focuses primarily on the roles of rhetoric and narrative in planning, especially with regard to making city-regions more just and ecologically sustainable. He is the author of Planning as Persuasive Storytelling: The Rhetorical Construction of Chicago’s Electric Future (University of Chicago Press 1996) and co-editor (with Barbara Eckstein) of Story and Sustainability: Planning, Practice, and Possibility for American Cities (MIT Press 2003), as well as author of many articles in a range of planning-related scholarly journals. He is currently working on a critical history of planning in Louisville, Kentucky, from 1890 to the present, as juxtaposed against planning in Berlin, Germany. He received a B.A. in history from Notre Dame, an M.S. in community development from the University of Louisville, and a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, and he has worked in both the public and private arenas as an environmental planner, consultant, and researcher. From 1993 through 1995, he served as an elected member of the city council of Iowa City, Iowa. Ronald G.H. van Ark graduated in Land Use Planning at Wageningen University in 1999, the Netherlands. In 2005 he finished his Ph.D. at the same University. The topic of his research was the role and meaning of contractual arrangements in inter-organizational planning processes. In his dissertation (in Dutch) and in several articles and papers, he discusses the organizational and procedural aspects of these collaborative planning approaches, focusing especially on strategies to deal with complexity and uncertainty in planning processes. Currently, he is working on these topics as a consultant at DHV Management Consultants in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. Niraj Verma is Associate Professor of Planning and Management, and Director of Doctoral Programs at the University of Southern California. Verma is the author of Similarities, Connections, and Systems: The Search for a New Rationality for Planning and Management (Lexington Books 1998) and he has been widely published in planning journals. In addition to his current interest in the role of rationality in the Network Society, Verma is engaged in a joint project with colleagues from Political Science and Religion that investigates the role of religion in development in transitional countries of Eastern Europe. As part of this project he did field work in Romania in 1987 and 1988 where he interviewed heads of Romanian NGOs, including leaders of the Orthodox Church and international aid organizations. This project is supported by the Zumberge Foundation at the University of Southern California. Chris Webster is Professor of Urban Planning at Cardiff University, where he leads the Cardiff spatial analysis research group, directs the UK Centre for Education in the Built Environment, and co-edits the journal Environment and Planning B. His research and teaching interests currently focus on New Institutional Economic analysis of urban management, planning, and urban geography.
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PREFACE
This anthology began in Leuven, Belgium, in 2003 with the Third Joint Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and Association of European Schools of Planning. Although the conference intended to generate a book, no template for the papers was provided beforehand. Preliminary versions of the essays in this anthology were delivered at Leuven and then significantly revised. The complementary units in which the essays are grouped are the result of the papers selected on the one hand and, on the other, were used actively to urge the authors to apply them as a frame when rewriting their papers. The editors were helped in all their tasks enormously by Annemarie Strihan, the editorial assistant. She kept the process moving when the authors and commentators were ready to dawdle. We are deeply grateful to her. We are also grateful to the authors and commentators who stayed with us for 18 months and who tolerated, with remarkable grace, what was often an aggressive editorial hand. We thank also the sponsors of the Leuven Congress: the Flemish Ministry of Spatial Planning, Housing, and Monuments; the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning, and the Environment; the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; the Fannie Mae Foundation; the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders; the National Lottery; and the K.U. Leuven, Department of Architecture, Urban and Regional Planning. Without their financial support this anthology would not have been possible. Louis Albrechts Seymour J. Mandelbaum
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INTRODUCTION
A New Context for Planning? Louis Albrechts and Seymour J. Mandelbaum
In the call for papers, the committee organizing the Third Joint Congress of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Association of European Schools of Planning in 2003, in Leuven, Belgium, asked participants to reflect on whether the “network society” was a new context for planning. There certainly has been a great deal of talk in recent years about networks in both popular and academic journals. Some of the Leuven participants were enthusiastic advocates of an intellectual revolution in our time; some spoke cautiously about incremental changes over the last two centuries. The latter group questioned the extent to which the development of “epistemic communities” and “policy networks” has changed the ways in which we think about interest groups, agencies, civil society, and governance. This anthology captures both of those positions. The papers and commentaries ask whether the “network society” provides a cogent context for planning or could provide one if appropriately revised. Is there a middle path between skepticism and enthusiastic exaggeration? Some 650 papers were delivered at the Leuven Congress. The main criterion for a first selection was the extent to which a paper spoke to the overall theme of the conference. The editors then narrowed that group (some 80 papers) to form this anthology. Each essay was read by the two editors and revised several times. All sections of this collection are organized in the same way: a set of essays grouped into complementary units and a critical commentary by a distinguished planning theorist. The editors have relied on those commentaries to link the essays to each other and to introduce readers to the literature in the field. As we live in a world in which all societies depend on networks, we briefly reflect on some challenges engendered by the image of the “network society.”
1
Louis Albrechts and Seymour J. Mandelbaum
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The Challenges Both social relations and the technical infrastructure of society have changed significantly over the last three or four decades. Even the skeptics among us are prone to speak of the “crisis” of this and the crisis of that. The image of the network society is sometimes brilliant and sometimes a clumsy attempt to relate social and technical relations. A network is a set of channels through which flow matter, information, and energy. The channels connect nodes in which flows are stored and processed. It comprises physical as well as social relations. The character of networks varies. A sewer system and an electric power grid can both be treated abstractly but no one would try to connect a high voltage line to a sewer main. It is, indeed, impossible to imagine a society that is not dependent on networks; that is not a “network society.” Some scholars (Castells 1996; Frissen 2002) argue that the way relations between individuals, firms, and other actors emerge today differs fundamentally from past ways. For Castells and Frissen, the fundamental difference is that the means of communication among actors in networks have increased spectacularly due to new technologies. But networks supporting the concentration of activities in space have grown in size, speed, and global reach since the invention of the telegraph and steam engine. Would it then be a mistake to ascribe that dramatic expansion only to the last two decades or to the development of the Internet? Characteristics of the Network Society Castells in his brilliant trilogy (1996, 1997, 1998a) weaves threads between these trends and a theory of what he calls the information age or the network society. Out of the analyses, a number of characteristics are attributed to the network society. In a first one Castells stresses that the new social structure is open and decentralized. Hierarchy and bureaucracy are reduced and participation and demonstration are enhanced. Many people are active in several networks at once. In this way networks act, overlap, and intersect. Changes in society also give rise to a specific planning- and policy-related literature (Sager, Healey, Innes, Forester, Hajer) grounded in the theory of relation-building processes. This literature focuses the attention on the relational dynamics of policy networks and on the internal dynamics of the networks in which we live our lives. A persistent criticism of traditional representative democracy forces politicians, theorists, and practitioners to rethink traditional governing, politics, and administration. The challenge for planning is to respond and to strive for inclusiveness in democratic procedures, for transparency in government transactions, for accountability of the state and planners to the citizens for whom they work, for the right of citizens to be heard and to have a creative input in matters affecting their interests and concerns at different scales and levels, and
2
Introduction
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for reducing or eliminating unequal power structures between social groups and classes (see also Friedmann and Douglas 1998). Pluralist democratic tendencies are developing in the wake of a crisis of representative democracy and a demand to transform the state in ways that will serve all of its citizens, and especially the least powerful. Out of this shift toward a more hybrid democracy, in some places there emerged a type of governance that expands practical democratic deliberations rather than restricts them, encourages diverse citizens’ voices rather than stifles them, directs resources to basic needs rather than to narrow private gain. This type of approach uses public involvement to present real political opportunities, learning from action not only what works but also what matters. Or is that all wishful thinking! Berry et al. (2004: 550) warn of the dark side of network structures such as convergence to group thinking, dependency on effective leaders and collaboration skills, focus on those who “have access to the microphone.” A second characteristic of the “network society” is that activities become more and more footloose. The new means in the field of ICT allow interaction without face-to-face contacts. The consequence is that spatial barriers become less relevant. Deterritorialization has an important impact on the mainly territorial, organized government. Processes and interactions confine themselves less rigidly to the strict administrative boundaries of an administrative unit. Planners have been struggling for ages with boundaries of cities and regions. Administrative boundaries cannot catch the complex relations of a housing market, a labor market, and the subsequent transport links. The socio-spatial patterning and physical structure of cities, in interaction with the context – in its broadest sense – result from multiple webs of relations, each with its own space–time dimensions. A third important characteristic is virtualization. The physical space of interaction is gradually replaced by a space of interaction without material basis: the virtual space of mass media, virtual financial markets. This allows the network to coordinate its actions increasingly better and over increasingly larger distances. With a simple mouse-click Europeans can buy a book or compact disc with an American dot-com firm (or vice versa). This firm delivers the goods through a sophisticated logistic chain. Payment happens smoothly through branches of financial institutions transferring the right amount of money via all sorts of telecommunication systems with the right firms. Although many transactions take place in a virtual space (Internet, stock exchange . . .), this virtual space needs a material component. Communication via the Internet becomes possible through a network of cables, routes, hubs, and servers. The stock exchange is located in a specific building. Castells (1996) points to the growing distinction between the space of flows and the space of places. In the space of flows all network transactions are settled. For Castells (1996) and Graham (in this book) these are not just virtual communication lines but also physical structures such as large gateways and terminals in the traffic and transport networks. The space of flows constitutes a globalized system of
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Internet hubs, airports, high-speed train stations, financial markets, etc. linked to a number of physical developments for the users of these spaces (hotels, recreative and touristic services, restaurants . . .). The space of places is constituted from these places where local social and economic interactions occur in a more or less closed system. A New Context for Planning? Does all the above mean that the new structural form – the network society – also constitutes a (the?) new context for planning? It definitely provides a powerful analytical context for relationships of many large-scale trends in worldwide processes. Should we read the network society as a sustained attack on the idea of hierarchy and market to steer processes of change in society, or as a focus on the mere relational dynamics of governance processes and forms? But to unravel relationships between trends is not the same as providing a context for places and communities in the (Western) world. Indeed, although according to all the evidence listed above networks are becoming a prime mode of organization, they are not the full content of our society. Society still consists of individuals, groups, and organizations. They form internal and external relations but these relations do not equal society. Their organic and material properties, their rules and resources should not cut out society to bring it back to its supposed bare essence of relationships (see van Dijk 1991). Management theorists Lipnack and Stamps (1994) argue that there is a shift going on from a predominantly hierarchical world to one in which hierarchies and networks will coexist and co-evolve. They regard networks as the successors to hierarchy and bureaucracy; not as replacements for, but as additions to them (Lipnack and Stamps 1994; see also Battram 1998). Toward a Research Agenda Planners hardly ever have an empirically accurate picture of the network(s) they are dealing with. This means actively considering how they theorize on what the network does, how they identify its actors, and how they deal (realistically) with its boundaries (see also Berry et al. 2004). As literature and research in many different disciplines (from biology to policy sciences) draws on networks, there is a need for cross-fertilization across disciplines. Understanding what this literature may add to our knowledge of cities, city-regions, and neighborhoods and how this could be integrated into planning theory and practice could be critical to effective and efficient (spatial) planning. The context (in the broadest sense) is instrumental in framing, guiding, and substantiating the actions of the participants. Therefore, its impact on the
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relational dynamics through which diverse actors come together in settings and try to build trust and understanding (governance practices), and the creative force of new governance initiatives and experiments must be carefully studied. Processes and interactions confine themselves less rigidly to the strict administrative boundaries of an administrative unit. The socio-spatial patterning and physical structure of cities result from multiple webs of relations, each with its own space–time dimensions. The tension between a more relational approach (see Friedmann 1993; Graham and Healey 1999) and fixed, inflexible, administrative boundaries, needs careful consideration. We have lived with the Leuven questions and papers for nearly two years. This introduction looks beyond Leuven to the next step. What sort of papers would we commission were we to organize a second conference on the same theme? We hope that thinking ahead to the next step will encourage an active critical reading of the arguments in this Leuven anthology. We distinguish four topics in that next step: 1
A concern with the design and control of networks and the attributes of their nodes, channels, and codes is certainly not new. As Judith Innes argues in her commentary on the first section, that concern plays a critical role in all forms of planning. It is, indeed, impossible to imagine a society that is not dependent on networks; that is not a “network society.” A second conference should deal with the design of networks of various types and their performance in moving, storing, and processing materials, information, and energy.
2
The development of networks has enhanced the global dispersion of urban activities and, paradoxically, the concentration of those activities in space. That paradoxical pattern is not new and it has not appeared in the same forms everywhere. A second conference would attempt to make sense of the paradox and of its implications for planning new links and enlarged spaces for flows.
3
We are intrigued by the repeated claim in the Leuven papers that the development of “epistemic communities” and “policy networks” has altered the ways in which political actives think, on the one side, about interest groups and the agencies of government and, on the other, about civil society and governance. We are not, however, persuaded that the real or alleged shifts from government to governance have encouraged everywhere intelligent public deliberation and collaboration across the fault lines of conventional politics. Tracking those relations would be one of the principal tasks of a second conference.
4
For most of the participants in the Leuven meeting, the image of the network society was associated with the work of Manuel Castells.
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Unfortunately, Castells was not in Leuven. While he is a distinctive presence in several of the papers in this anthology, we did not succeed in grappling with the network society as a synecdoche – an element of a system that somehow represents and integrates the whole. Readers of this volume will have no difficulty in distinguishing authors who have been deeply influenced by Castells and those who have not. A second conference would help those groups speak to one another.
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PART I
The Network Society: A New Paradigm
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CHAPTER ONE
Communicative Action and the Network Society: A Pragmatic Marriage? Niraj Verma and HaeRan Shin
Pursuant largely to the works of Manuel Castells, sociologists and social theorists have recognized the network society as a new construct within which to think about society. But, despite Castells’ prominence within planning, planning theory has been slow to see the network society as central to its agenda. This tide may be changing. A new literature on the network society is emerging in planning (Innes and Booher 2000; Graham and Healey 1999; Hajer and Zonneveld 2000) and – as this volume further attests – there is continuing interest in the network society on both sides of the Atlantic. This chapter is addressed to planning theorists and to others with more than a passing interest in ideas of a network society. Our goal is to assess whether the thesis of a network society raises fundamental challenges for planning and planning theory, demanding, for instance, a new paradigm or a new theoretical apparatus to deal with planning issues. Alternatively, we want to explore whether the recognition of networks simply implies – as some authors have claimed – an extended role for collaborative planning and related theories of planning (Booher and Innes 2002). Given that there has been a “communicative turn” in planning (Healey 1996), a turn that has come to stand for a vast array of approaches, such as rhetorical analysis, storytelling, negotiation, and even Deweyan pragmatism (Beauregard 1995; Innes 1995), our way of assessing the import of the idea of a network society is to ask whether it can be “accommodated” within the ambit of these ideas. That is to say, might the ideas of a network society find a home within the communicative turn of planning theory or are they so different that they constitute a new kind of planning theory?
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Such a question is more about the potential of communicative action theories than it is about the particular forms these theories have taken in planning. It is for this reason that we have not limited ourselves to planning applications of communicative action but have looked toward Jürgen Habermas as the inspiration behind these applications. Similarly, while there may be other contributors to the debate on the network society, we take the network society to exclusively mean the construct so convincingly articulated by Manuel Castells in his trilogy beginning with The Rise of Network Society (1996) to The Power of Identity (1997) and finally to End of Millennium (1998a).1 From this lens our operational questions become: Can the Habermasian tradition in planning theory incorporate Castells’ ideas about the network society with only modest accommodation in its theory? Or, does Castells’ work on the network society constitute a new paradigm to think about planning?2 Castells describes the network society as a global behemoth of firms, groups, territories, and populations that are interconnected and interdependent. On one hand this brings us closer but in a deeper way it brings about, what Castells calls, a struggle between the Self and the Net. The struggle is consequential. Self-determination, meaning, and identity are challenged by external forces of the Net: globalization, mobility, information, and technology. As a result, meaning and identity do not change as part and parcel of civil society but do so by an enlarging of the struggle outside civil society. The provocative significance of this thesis becomes clear when contrasted to Giddens’ (1991) notion of “reflexive life-planning.” As Giddens and Pierson (1998: 115) tell us, reflexivity is about “how we live in a world after the retreat of tradition and nature,” and where presumably organization is by information rather than tradition. In such an information-rich world, life-planning is about seeing life itself as a project. But, even though the network society is also about information and the connectivity it brings, Castells’ main argument is that the tension between Self and Net makes reflexive life-planning impossible. That is to say, it is impossible to be reflexive and to see life itself as a project because the main struggle between Self and Net does not happen within civil society. But such a thesis, we will argue, relies on a much too formal interpretation of reflexivity. A reading of Habermas, inspired by American pragmatism’s influence in his writings,3 tells us that although reflexive life-planning in a traditional sense might become impossible, in reality, the meaning of reflexive life-planning has itself changed. Reflexivity happens within a vastly intricate web of relations – no less complex than the network society – and in continued contact with everyday practice. So, while the contact with civil society is not a formal contact, such as in the labor movement, it is a de facto contact because members of the civil society are, first and foremost, ordinary human beings with ordinary, everyday aspirations. In this sense, civil society is not limited by the Gramscian idea (1971) of the rise of organizations and institutions that help to secure the capitalist enterprise. As capitalism is becoming the norm rather than only an alternative, the Gramscian idea is much less compelling.
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Rather, civil society is the kind of “deliberative democracy” (Sunstein 2001: 7) where ordinary values are coveted and where there is “a high degree of reflectiveness and a general commitment to reason-giving.” Our chapter is divided into four parts. First, we discuss the roots of communicative action by delving into Habermas’ works. Our goal here is to show how communicative action can help to restore ordinary unconstrained virtues. Next, we visit the idea of the network society to show its key arguments and trace it in Castells’ terms to the tension between the Net and the Self. Our debt in this part is almost completely to Castells’ works. Third, we compare the ideas of communicative action and the network society. Our argument is that there is an analogical link between them and that Castells describes for social movements what Habermas describes for epistemology. Finally, we go to the pragmatism-inspired literature on civil society and democracy and argue that if civil society is broadly interpreted in the context of deliberative democracy, it retains its vibrancy and relevance for the network society. Communicative Action and Habermas As the Marxist ideas of an economic crisis of capitalism are made irrelevant by the successes of the welfare-capitalist state, an important goal of the Habermasian project is to explain the consequences of the emergence of this welfare state (Baxter 2002). A key consequence is the transformation of an economic crisis to a social crisis, where fragmentation and the lack of social cohesiveness threaten the legitimacy of the nation-state. The explanations for this are complex and we will show this through a recounting of some key ideas in Habermasian philosophy. The Tension between System and Lifeworld One way of understanding Habermas’ argument concerning the penetration of a cultural regime by a political one is by framing the question within a Habermasian (1975, 1984) dialectic between “system” and “lifeworld.” System can be best explained by contrast to lifeworld, a concept that Habermas borrows from Husserl and Schutz, and which denotes the broad assembly of shared understandings, ordinary values, and practices. Based on these shared values and practices, lifeworld identifies with communicative rationality, while instrumental rationality defines the logic of the system. The competition between these two rationalities brings out the tension between system and lifeworld resulting in the colonization of the lifeworld by the system; a phenomenon that eventually becomes what Habermas (1975) has called “the legitimation crisis.” Colonization can be thought of as the manipulation of ends by means, i.e., the disassociation and eventual replacement of moral considerations by instrumental ones. This plays out in different arenas. When system denotes the legal system, the concern is the replacement of the ordinary idea of justice by formal
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laws, i.e., Mary Glendon’s (1991) example of the legal language of rights percolating into ordinary American discourse. When system denotes the state, the concern is the transformation of the “citizen” to a “client” of the nation-state, which reduces the nation-state to becoming merely a service provider. The demise of ideas such as loyalty and entrepreneurship is a casualty of this kind of colonization. More generally we can say that the colonization of the lifeworld by the system results in pathologies that interfere with the reproduction of the lifeworld and that this, in turn, contributes to the problems of the nationstate in advanced capitalist societies. If nation building is the expressed goal of the nation-state, this aim is not helped by its colonizing of the lifeworld. Rather, colonization forces it into a situation of crisis. On the other hand, increasing distance between the system and the lifeworld can also be problematic. In the extreme case this implies total autonomy of the lifeworld from the nation-state. An autonomous lifeworld poses a challenge to the capitalist nature of the nation-state because its values, culture, symbols, and traditions are intrinsically different from the functional way in which such values reside in the capitalist state. In the hands of the capitalist nation-state, the symbols and traditions become strategic tools to buttress the very idea of the nation-state. In this reduction, a value such as loyalty, which is otherwise linked with honor and dignity, becomes the worst form of nationalism. Religion – once thought of as the Protestant ethic that accompanies capitalism – can just as easily become an intolerant fundamentalism. As communicative rationality is replaced by instrumental rationality, meaning, motivation, commitment, and loyalty are not produced within the lifeworld, and this creates the legitimation crisis where legitimation refers to “an interchange relation between the polity and the lifeworld.” When the lifeworld is colonized by the system, the concern is the withdrawal of legitimation to the nation-state and the identity problems for the collective or the individuals. When lifeworld is autonomous, the issue is the manipulation of its ideals as strategic elements in the design of the nation-state. Ideologiekritik and Self-examination How might the authenticity and reproducibility of the lifeworld be restored? Planning theorists know of the Habermasian idea of the undistorted speech and its consequent dictums from Forester’s works (1980, 1985, 1993). But, just how does this distortion-free situation result? To answer this is to inquire into the tradition of the Frankfurt School of which Habermas was a leading member. The Marxist idea of an Ideologiekritik is central to understanding the stance of the Frankfurt School and, particularly, to critical theory. Although somewhat simply translated as a criticism of ideology, an Ideologiekritik is, in fact, much more. Raymond Geuss (1981: 26) explains its significance by contrasting it with the customary meaning of criticism of ideology. Whereas this criticism is usually “moralizing,” i.e., it is only concerned with ideology as being immoral or unpleasant, in Marxism and in the Frankfurt School ideology can be criticized for being wrong or delusionary. Another way of saying this is that when
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ideology is immoral, it is not just about false consciousness but also about distorted reason. Hence, Habermas emphasizes getting rid of speech distortions and exposes the conditions of ideal speech. Consciousness cannot be transformed from the outside and Ideologiekritik, in this sense, extracts “the very instruments of criticism from the agents’ own form of consciousness – from their views about the good life, from the notions of freedom, truth, and rationality embedded in their normative epistemology” (Geuss 1981: 87). Said differently, this process of self-reflection has the emancipatory goal of ridding agents of mistaken consciousness – or as Geuss calls it “from the frustrations of consciousness” – and restoring to agents the ordinary values of the lifeworld free from the effects of the system. Habermas has been seen as being interested in the role of Ideologiekritik in reducing identifiable suffering. One method of doing so – and this is a key role of an Ideologiekritik – is by assisting people to reflect on what they would want if they knew what they could want. In this sense, an Ideologiekritik is about restoring meaning as well as being about interests. The word “to restore” suggests a preceeding pathology. The pathology is the replacement of everyday communicative rationality by instrumental rationality where every end becomes a means and where shared values, shared meaning, motivation, commitment, and loyalty become casualties. Restoration of the lifeworld by bringing back communicative action seeks to undo the ills of this pathology. Ideologiekritik, in this sense, is the deepest form of self-examination and the most fundamental form of restoration. Castells and the Network Society Castells’ network society is characterized by the twin phenomena of an ever increasing globalism on the one hand and a narrowness resulting from people’s search for self-determination and control on the other. The globalization is embodied in the widely distributed networks of communication that end up changing the structure of modern organizations. The Net, as Castells calls this, represents not only organizational forms such as the distributed multinational corporation but also other forms such as widely distributed diasporic connections and the almost professionalization and globalization of protest movements.4 Characteristic of the growing reach of the Net is the emergence of almost parochial identities, called the Self, through which individuals take control in an otherwise growing sea of anonymity. The identities of the Self are often fundamental in nature and are developed around a parochial but powerful sense of belonging. The core value around which the Self thrives can take many forms: religious entities may evolve such as the Islamic Jihad; social entities may arise such as the ones around environmentalism or nature preservation; ethnic identities arise as in the independence movement in Indonesia or in Eastern Europe; and professional identities evolve as in “the expatriate worker.”5
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The Tension between the Net and the Self Castells’ contribution is to show both empirically and conceptually how the tension between the Net and the Self plays out and how it ends up changing and redefining technology relationships, power, and experience. We might contrast this, for instance, with the World Systems Hypothesis of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974). Wallerstein studied the transformation from a feudal to a modern capitalist world: a change that was, in its time, no less far reaching. His interesting contribution was to show that the political and economic hegemony of European capitalist countries came at the cost of feudal economies and was achieved by transforming the political and labor conditions of these feudal economies. But, although Wallerstein was interested in disparities and his work foreshadowed the emergence of linkages between national economies, Castells’ variables are more far reaching. In Castells’ world it is possible to work “in real time on a planetary scale” (Castells 1996: 92) allowing for new kinds of flexibility. This is reminiscent of David Harvey’s (1989) description but goes beyond it in documenting the emergence of flexible organizational forms that can change strategies with sudden shifts in global markets (Castells 1996: 439). It is within this Net of flows – and confronted by it – that the Self asserts its independence by its identification with primary identities. Hand in hand with globalization we see the construction of meaning on the basis of cultural and social attributes. Castells (1997: 8) categorizes these into three distinct identities that play different roles and are identified with different social associations. The Three Identities in the Network Society The “Legitimizing Identity” for social action is traditionally the nation-state. But, increased globalization of the Net makes it cede its power and some sovereignty to a diverse group of institutions formed by inter-country unions (such as the European Community) or multilateral agreements (such as Interpol).6 As Castells shows, the more a nation-state acts under the influence of the Net the deeper its problems of legitimation. We see this, for example, in the case of Pakistan, where being part of “the global war on terror” is distancing the current government from its Islamic population (although the dictatorial Musharraf regime may have other problems of legitimacy independent of this issue!). As the legitimizing identity weakens, a stronger “Resistance Identity” takes form. The Zapatistas of Mexico, the Japanese Aum Shrinriko, and American Militia groups are Castells’ choices for inquiry but to the list we might also add the recent Al Qaeda and perhaps also the WTO protests. The “Resistance Identity” develops to counter what it sees as the threats to its immediate surroundings due to globalization and often sees itself as a martyr in stopping the march of a homogeneous culture of globalization. When dissent is visible and proactive, Castells finds it useful to identify it as the “Project Identity.” When the growing reach of the Net makes people feel powerless, project identities such as environmentalism, feminism, gay and lesbian movements make for the possibility of self-determination.7 More
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generally, the more the Net makes the Self powerless, the greater the quest of the Self to search for meaning through project and resistance identities. How and why the identities transform is a complex phenomenon, which Castells explains as involving the everyday interaction of humans with themselves, with others, and with the external world. In our view, Castells’ description matches the spirit of what Habermas might have called “communicative action,” and shows the mutual relevance of their approaches in a fundamental way. We take this up in the next section. Comparing Habermas with Castells Although the three identities – legitimizing, resistance, and project – can be treated as separable, they are also intimately linked. Take the case of minorities who are excluded from the Net. These could be nations, as in large parts of Africa, which are not quite part of the global economy, or they may be groups, such as gays or lesbians, who, before they were understood as collectivities worthy of being seen as such, struggled to be part of mainstream society. The struggle of these groups, while initially forging a resistance identity, can take on a project identity in challenging mainstream society. In Castells’ (1997: 9) felicitous phrase, resistance identity involves the “exclusion of the excluders by the excluded,” but a transformation around a project can change this by a recognition of the status of the formerly excluded leading to their eventual domination “thus becoming legitimizing identities to rationalize their domination.” The forces that condition the creation and transformation of identities in a network society are complex. Castells (1996: 15–16) describes three relationships that are key to understanding this transformation. Production is the relationship between humans and the external world and involves the appropriation and consumption of matter. Experience is the relation of humans with themselves and is often driven by needs and desires. Power denotes the relationship between humans in light of production and experience, often suggesting control of some over others, and often with the potential for serious violence. Add specificity and particularity to these relationships, made possible by symbolic and actual communication between agents and between agents and the external world, and these relations coalesce to form cultural and collective identities. An Analogical Comparison What is the relationship between the Habermasian tension of system and lifeworld and the forging of relationships that undergird the production and transformation of the three identities? One possible answer to this question is to consider the tension between Net and Self as being analogical to that between system and lifeworld. Table 1.1 summarizes the discussion on the two pairs of tensions. It is as important to see the differences between the two, as it is to
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Table 1.1 Comparing Habermas and Castells Tension
Manifestation
Consequences
System versus lifeworld (Habermas)
Colonization of lifeworld by system
Net versus Self (Castells)
Increasing distance between Net and Self
Erosion of ordinary communicative action Instrumentalization of ends and purpose Declining legitimacy of the nation-state Emergence of resistance identities
see their structural similarities. While at least some of the structural similarities should be apparent, the key difference is between the overall orientations of their respective authors. As a philosopher and ethicist, Habermas is interested – and at home – in normative recommendations that emanate from the tension. It is fair to say that the normative conclusion is the restoration of the lifeworld and its reproducibility through communicative action. In contrast, the sociologist in Castells accurately portrays the tension as one of increasing distance between Self and Net. This is a statement of fact that is buttressed by empirical examples. The normative lessons are more tacit and when Castells does venture out he does so in a language of caveats, tentatives, and uncertainties. And even when these speculations appear, they are made because Castells (1997: 361) “feel[s] obligated to suggest some hypotheses, as grounded as possible on the observations reported.” Given the reluctance with which Castells approaches the normative, our attempt to defend a normative role for an Ideologiekritik and for Habermasian communicative action in the network society warrants an explanation. There are several reasons why we head in this direction. First is the issue of the relatively strong connection between Castells and the Frankfurt School. Indeed, both critics and admirers of Castells – and sometimes they are the same people – point to such a nexus (Stevenson 1998: 472). And if such a nexus exists – and there seems to be broad consensus of its evidence8 – it is not inconceivable that some normative implications that derive from the Frankfurt School would be of relevance to the network society. The other reasons have to do with the basis for Castells’ reticence to make normative arguments. As Castells explains extensively in the third volume of his trilogy and also in abbreviated form in other contexts,9 this attitude is consonant with his self-image of an analyst of society: “What I think I know how to do, a little bit, is to analyse society. That is my job, and that is what I have tried to do all my life” (Castells 1998b: 483). Elsewhere in the essay, Castells describes the separation of his own values and the possibility of a detached analysis as instrumental in his goal of maximizing his personal contribution as an analyst of society. Yet another reason, as Castells (1998b: 482) tells us, is
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that despite his strong worries and cares about society in general, there are serious methodological problems in generalizing from the diversity of the various settings and the contexts and processes: [W]hat is advisable for the UK is not the same for the USA, even less so for Brazil or for Spain. And there is no universal solution, or ideology (e.g., the interests of the working class), that could be proposed as a standard everywhere. Such scholarly integrity is laudable but the Frankfurt School or Habermas do not make the kind of “concrete” proposals that Castells’ worries are impossible to make in general terms. Habermas’ normative claim is as general as Castells’ positive one and, like the Net and Self, his constructs – or more generally those of the Frankfurt School – pervade the UK, the US, Brazil, and Spain. Said differently, the concreteness of these normative positions is methodological, not situational and so they are able to accommodate variety in more robust ways.10 We know, from Habermas, that communicative action counters the tension between system and lifeworld. Its success is measured by its ability to further the reproduction of the lifeworld so as to overcome the colonization of the lifeworld by the system. Drawing on the analogical relation of the tension between system and lifeworld with that between Net and Self, success in resolving this latter tension would imply reduction in distance between the Net and Self (Table 1.1 is relevant here). Evidence of this success might come from the very emergence of a project identity because a project identity represents a more sustainable relation between Self and Net. Although it is possible to hold a different view by focusing on the liabilities of the project identity, we are emboldened by Castells’ choice of examples to illustrate this transformation. The environmental movement and feminism are two instances where resistance identities have given way to project identities and in both cases the movements have increased their following and really have graduated to mainstream status constituting what Castells calls a new social movement. In discussing this transition of identities Castells poses what we see as two fundamental interrelated challenges that must be addressed if we are to have any role for communicative action in this transition. The first of these concerns the non-relevance of civil society in this transition and the second concerns the impossibility of what Giddens (1991: 53) calls “reflexive life-planning.” In our view, the two cannot be separated and we will address them together. The Challenges of Civil Society and of Reflexive Life-planning One of the most interesting insights of Castells’ work is that the transformation from resistance to project identity happens as an extension of communal resistance without any reliance on civil society. In other words, in sharp contrast to modernist norms, civil society has become irrelevant to this transformation. In Castells’ words (1997: 11):
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The search for meaning takes place in the reconstruction of defensive identities around communal principles . . . the constitution of subjects at the heart of the process of social change, takes a different route to the one we knew during modernity, and late modernity: namely, subjects, if and when constructed, are not built any longer on the basis of civil societies, that are in the process of disintegration but as prolongation of communal resistance. (emphasis original) We can cavil about the extent to which such a decline has happened in civil society. After all, others have pointed out that “communities without propinquity” (Webber 1963) or Open Moral Communities (Mandelbaum 2000) are competing for space where traditional communities may have declined. But, that is not the point that we want to contest. Indeed, we agree with the general point that civil society is in decline and see this, in Habermasian terms, as the meaning of colonization of lifeworld by system. But then by extension we also see the possibility of arresting or reversing this decline in civil society by recovery of the lifeworld and by ensuring its reproducibility. Castells is silent on the possibility of such a recovery. He stops at documenting the crumbling of civil society under the tension of Net and Self but does not take a stand on whether it is desirable – or even whether it is possible – for a reinvigorated civil society to emerge. However, this seeming agnosticism is accompanied by a much stronger argument concerning reflexive life-planning that Castells regards as impossible. We want to address this latter commentary of reflexive life-planning more substantially because we see it as being skeptical on the possibility of ensuring the conditions that lead to the reproduction of the lifeworld and thus to a recovery of civil society. Giddens (1991: 32) explains reflexive life-planning as the conversion of the Self to a reflexive project. Or, we might say that it is the quest for deeper meaning about one’s project as influenced by one’s life experiences. Extrapolating from Giddens but differing from him in important ways, Castells argues that such reflexive life-planning involves the interplay of “power” and “experience.” Recall that experience is an internal relation whereas power is about the relationship with others and with production. The trouble with the network society, Castells argues, is that it has brought about fundamental disjunctions between the enactment of power and the relationships of experience. When these were contiguous in modern and late-modern societies: temporally, spatially, and intellectually, it was possible to derive nourishment and meaning from them. Now that they are separated into different time-space frames, coping and mastering them is only for elites who can simultaneously inhabit their locales and the globe. While these elites still derive meaning and identity from them, for most people the burden of the separation of power and experience makes reflexive life-planning impossible. It is in this situation, Castells argues, that the search for meaning happens in narrowly constructed domains in the development of resistance identities around communal principles. New social movements, such as environmentalism
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and feminism, emerge, not in the traditional paths set by the emergence of labor movements through the legitimizing and eventual domination of the movement by the state, but by a widening of resistance. As we see it, Castells is building here a much larger thesis that is ultimately the denial of the possibility of enlightenment or even of rationality itself.11 While much has been written about this12 – and this writing is conspicuous by its absence in Castells’ account – the originality here is in tying this thesis to globalization. It is not for us, in this chapter, to mount a full-scale rescue of reflexive life-planning. Still less, do we intend to explain the possibility of rationality in the contemporary world. This has been done eloquently by philosophers who take a pragmatism-inspired position, notably Hilary Putnam (1990) in his articulation of the possibility for a realistic but also liberal and humane epistemology and by Habermas (1990) in showing a role for moral consciousness in a pragmatism-inspired world of communicative action. In expansive form, the subject has been treated by Charles Taylor in his Sources of the Self (1989) and then topically adapted by him and others (including Habermas) in a set of essays that bring the Hegelian idea of the “struggle for recognition” to the issue of multiculturalism in the contemporary world.13 Our intent is simply to pick out some promising pragmatic threads from this conversation and apply them to the case of identity transformation for new social movements. In this we find two issues particularly persuasive: (a) the role of the agent in identity transformation, and (b) the meaning and role of civil society in the contemporary world. Agency and Identity Transformation The agents in Castells’ story, who first become the resistance identity and who then transform from it, are first and foremost ordinary human subjects. Their interests are thus not only in the singular mission of a social movement but also in many attendant everyday events that mediate the lifeworld. Reproduction of the lifeworld among these agents does not mean a crassly instrumental conversation that would magically raise their consciousness about their subjectmatter. Rather, moral consciousness results, as pragmatists such as Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey saw, in the midst of the rich shamble that we call daily life. James’s (1947) way of saying this was to rescue such fundamental ideas as meaning and truth and to make them more relevant to the practices that comprise the everyday lifeworld. Peirce’s stance was to intimately connect the logic of everyday things with ethics. These pragmatists helped us to see how a pragmatic rationality (Verma 1996, 1998) can connect the sentiments of the lifeworld with the play of reason. They looked outwards into everyday practice and not inwards, as philosophers of consciousness have tended to do (Blanco 1994; Hoch 1996; Stein and Harper 2000). Interestingly, Habermas himself provides an excellent account of this direction of pragmatism. “Pragmatism and hermeneutics,” he writes (1990: 9), “oust the traditional notion of the solitary subject that confronts objects and becomes reflective only by turning itself into an object.”
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In other words, reflexive life-planning, as we knew it, may be fading even as a new version of reflexive planning may be emerging. In this latter reflexive life-planning, the rationality of the agents of change is not predicated on the absence of worldly influences, regardless of whether these influences are global or systemic. Rather, these agents maintain their sanity and their freedom in the thick of everyday life by seeing meaning in the ordinary and the everyday. This is the message of pragmatism. One of the most telling illustrations of this comes from the pragmatic philosopher and William James’s student, Edgar A. Singer. Singer (1924) was not showing the meaning and relevance of pragmatism under the constraints of globalization. However, he was interested in the meaning of freedom in a constrained world. True freedom, according to Singer, is not the ability to do different things at the same time. That would simply be caprice. Genuine freedom consists of doing the same thing in different situations and at different times. In other words, freedom is not about escaping the constraints of the world, whether they are borne of globalization or of other forces. It is acting in purposeful ways while mired in these constraints.14 It is quite possible for ideologies and approaches that look very different, i.e., have different structural components, to be in fact united by common sentiments and even to aspire to a common purpose. Castells’ discussion of the environmental movement, which he sees as an example of a new social movement, is useful in this regard. For Castells, the diversity of approaches represents a “creative cacophony” (1997: 112). The contradiction in the label does not go unnoticed and Castells is faced with the task of showing the differences between the various strands as well as their ultimate similarity. He does so by adapting Alain Touraine’s categories of “identity, adversary, and goal” to describe each version of an environmentalism in its own terms. How do these separate movements finally add up to a new social movement? Castells’ position (1998b: 477–8) on this comes through much more clearly in his response to his critics than it does in his books. The main difference between how these new social movements add up as compared to how we expect social movements to develop is in their non-reliance on the “capitalistic/informational logic.” These identity-based social movements act, Castells tells us, “by setting a different hierarchy of values, values that cannot be traded or virtualized: my god, my nation, my locality.” But, these are the everyday values that pragmatism champions and on which Habermasian communicative action depends! We do not argue with Castells’ assessment that new social movements, such as the environmental movement or feminism, are not reflexive in the traditional sense of objectifying or commodifying themselves.15 But, given the lessons of pragmatism and Habermasian communicative action it is not enough for us to say that this resistance to commodification implies the impossibility of reflexive life-planning. While we agree with the sentiments implied in Castells’ account of the network society, we see evidence of the new social movements engaging in a visible form of cognition that is more intimately connected to self-determinism than ever before. Ideologiekritik, the reinstatement of the lifeworld, communicative
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action, and pragmatic rationality are even more relevant to these movements if only because they are so nakedly visible. Meaning and Role of Civil Society The second point concerns the meaning and purpose of civil society in the contemporary world. For Castells, the role of civil society should be to bring legitimacy to social movements. Recall that this is Gramsci’s notion of civil society where the concern is that civil society merely becomes the captive of the elite or the capitalist class that uses it to secure its domination of others. Castells seems to say that the social movements of the network society do not – or cannot – seek this legitimation. Instead, they start as communal movements and continue to grow as communal movements without much to do with civil society. In other words, new social movements – as the social movements of the network society are called – fail the test of democracy when democracy is defined in terms of formal representation or one-person one-vote or other such structural ways of describing democracy. That may be true but there is a larger meaning of civil society where civic discourse in the public sphere becomes the vehicle to rescue the lifeworld from its colonization by the system or by the Net. The democratic value here is of democracy as a social idea (Dewey 1954) or as “communal” in nature (Selznick 1992), or more generally as “deliberative democracy” (Dryzek 1996; Sunstein 2001). In this richer notion of civil society, the possibility of discourse – whether face to face or spatially non-continuous – is what rescues everyday existence and hence everyday values. For Dewey, such a democratic way of life is embedded in human relationships and not in formal voting mechanisms. For Sunstein, the contrast is within those who champion deliberative democracy as either majority rule or popular will and those who see deliberative democracy as being about accountability through reflective and reasoned debate. Communicative rationality makes such a democracy possible and it is this engagement between reason and democratic design that makes for the deepest meaning of reflexive lifeplanning. Social movements, even when they are about resistance play an important part in such deliberative democracies. Their communal stance is a source of engagement and not a threat to deliberation. The Case for a Pragmatic Marriage Planning theory has well recognized the Habermasian tension between system and lifeworld and much of communicative action theory derives in a direct or indirect way from this tension. At the same time, contemporary planning theory has recognized that the existence of the network society is part of the changing context that planners must confront. In this chapter we have argued that although the network society is real and is enormously complex, its recognition does not imply a disavowal of communicative action.
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To make our case we have found it important to go to the roots of communicative action and to some of the most sophisticated writing on the network society. The two writers who have served as our icons for these two traditions are Habermas and Castells, respectively. The Habermasian tension between system and lifeworld, we have argued, bears an analogical similarity with the description of the Net and Self in the network society. This analogy becomes most usable when we see the core ideas in the network society, such as civil society, communalism, and reflexive life-planning, from a broader perspective of the impact of these ideas on human relations rather than as stand-alone esoteric concepts. Such a perspective is associated with American pragmatism, a philosophy that is known in planning theory. It is a perspective that emphasizes the importance of ordinary values and daily living and elevates them to epistemological status. These ordinary values permeate the meaning of civil society and reflexive life-planning and make a pragmatic marriage between communicative action and the network society possible. So, while the network society may not necessitate a new paradigm, read in conjunction with Habermas and communicative action, it vividly underscores the need for a broader meaning of civil society and communicative action along the traditions of American pragmatism.
Notes 1 We find the first two books particularly helpful in understanding Castells’ ideas of the network society and will largely rely on them for Castells’ position. 2 We might point out that although Castells carefully documents the new organizational structure of the Network Society he makes no claim that his work calls for a shift in paradigm. 3 American pragmatism is closely linked with communicative action, largely through the influence of Peirce and Dewey, on Habermas’ theorizing. 4 The protests in places as far away as Seattle and Rome against the World Trade Organization were a case in point. 5 In the heydays of the computer revolution in Silicon Valley, it was not uncommon for people to think of their identity as being tied to their immigration or visa status: “green card holder,” “professional visa status,” or other such categories became immanent. 6 As recent world history shows, not being a signatory to a convention does not insulate a nation-state from the influence – and pressure – of the Net. Nuclear proliferation, weapons of mass destruction, and drug enforcement are examples. 7 A dialectical assessment of Castells’ argument must confront the question of just how such self-determination escapes the captivity of the “Net”? We address this question in the next section when we compare Habermas and Castells and visit the Frankfurt School idea of an Ideologiekritik, which is about self-reflection. 8 There are, of course, differences such as the movement away from theories of the determinism of technology to a more sophisticated account. 9 See, for example his rejoinder to his critics – and particularly to Kumar (1998) and Stevenson (1998) – published in the New Political Economy. 10 Moreover, a strong separation between positive sociological categories and normative goals and categories may itself be ideological and problematic (Proctor 1991) but, although this is a correct argument, pursuing it at this point is likely to detract from our
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11 12
13 14 15
immediate goal of showing the relevance of communicative action for the network society. This may sound sympathetic to the postmodern agenda. Yet Castells is largely dismissive of postmodernism, seeing it as faddish and lacking seriousness. See Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989) for a wonderful exposition on the modernist identity. On the Enlightenment project Taylor (1989: 366) quotes Kant who saw Enlightenment as “Man’s emergence from self-incurred immaturity” or as “the courage to use your own understanding.” Amy Gutman’s (1994) edited collection Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition is a wonderful set of essays, including one by Habermas (1994). See Verma (1998) for a more expansive description of the connection between Singer’s notion, Jamesian pragmatism, and purposeful categories. But see an interesting anthropological essay by Peter Brosius (1999) that sketches how the analytical apparatus used to describe the environmental movement in these terms may itself be contributing to their commodification as visible in their increasingly formulaic treatment. Taking the example of “contestation” which he identifies as a key trend in the environmental literature, Brosius points out, that the emphasis on contestation may have been routinized and naturalized into a bureaucraticized version of the notion of “stakeholders.”
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CHAPTER TWO
Planning and the Network City: Discursive Correspondences Robert A. Beauregard
Although we can theorize abstractly, imagining ourselves doing so in a world free of material constraints, we cannot act abstractly (Flyvbjerg 2001). Action occurs – only occurs – in specific historical and geographical settings. In fact, it is precisely the material basis of action, and no more so than its consequences, that distinguishes action from mere intention. One can think in the abstract, but not act there. This necessary connection between action and setting has particular resonance for planning, a necessity that comes as no surprise to planning practitioners. They know intuitively that what they do must make sense in relationship to what is possible. Any proposed instance of planning thus requires a specific reality that must exist for the intervention to be successful (Beauregard 1998). Conversely, how planners characterize that reality signals their intentions. One way to understand the relationship between planning aspirations and the context in which those aspirations will have to be achieved is to consider the relationship between planning interventions and corresponding understandings of the city. How is what planners imagine as possible entwined with the city whose possibilities planners are attempting to unlock? The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on the many ways in which the city is conceptualized and the implications this has for planning practice. The theoretical framework is the interplay of representation and “an epistemologically mediated reality, constructed linguistically as well as materially” (Walton 1995: 62; see also Mitchell 2002). The focus is a specific discursive construction – the adjectival city – and one of its most recent manifestations, the network city. Numerous theorists and commentators deploy single adjectives – global, European, garden, spontaneous – to characterize the city. Doing so opens up
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and closes down opportunities for planning intervention. To focus the discussion, I will address three of these consequences: (1) the potential for purposive intervention locked within the adjective, (2) the importance of intellectual and professional networks in providing lessons for planning practice, and (3) the way in which the network city enables planners to negotiate the disjuncture between specialization and synthesis. The Adjectival City In the late nineteenth century, scholars began to write about the city from a professional perspective. Faced with the city’s inherent complexity and the unavoidable differences among cities, they drew on adjectives to stabilize their understandings. Adna Weber, one of the first to systematically explore the processes of urbanization, carefully distinguished between commercial and industrial cities and among American, European, and Asian cities (Weber 1963). For him, these distinctions were not just ready labels. They also served an analytic purpose by enabling comparisons and thereby organizing the evidence. Of course, a phenomenon so complex as a city, and so variable across time and space, will be subjected to a variety of adjectives. The architect Sir Richard Rogers (1997), for example, conveys his sense of an ideal city by applying two adjectives: sustainable and humanistic. He further disaggregates the sustainable city into the just city, the creative city, the ecological city, the compact city, the polycentric city, and the diverse city. Because each adjective represents a different city (Low 1996), a different type of intervention is implied. Any reader of the urban literature can quickly generate a list of such adjectives. In the early twenty-first century, “global” and “sustainable” are two of the most common, followed closely by “edge” and “world.” “Postmodern” seems on the wane and “tourist” and “postcolonial” ascendant. Those in area studies are quite adept at thinking about southeast Asian cities, European cities, and North American cities. Urban historians, of course, navigate across the centuries and between various eras from “medieval” to “colonial” to “postwar,” while the more economically inclined have left behind “industrial” for “post-industrial.” City planners will remember “garden city” and urban designers can hardly avoid the “physical city.” “Third world city” and “mega-city” share a conceptual space (Robinson 2002), while numerous other characterizations – postborder, unruly, fantasy, informational, and captive – hover in orbit around the main adjectival planets. One of the most important ways to think about these adjectives is in terms of their theoretical intent (Beauregard 2003c). Frequently, the chosen adjective refers to a particular theoretical stance or point of view. To write or speak of the “gated city” is to propose a critical perspective concerned with the erosion of public space, invidious spatial divisions, and social polarization, all wrapped up in a political economy of the city. The “postmodern city” has a similar theoretical thrust. Its use by such scholars as Michael Dear (2000) is meant to
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portray a theoretical orientation at odds with the Chicago School of urban sociology and the tenets of human ecology. One reads the phrase and knows what to expect. Another example is Neil Smith’s (1996) “revanchist city.” The adjective itself contains his argument; the middle class in the US of the 1980s and 1990s mobilized neoliberal policies (e.g., zero tolerance policing) and gentrification to re-take the city from the poor, homeless, criminals, and racialized “others” who had taken it from them in the 1960s and 1970s. “Sustainable city” also signals its intent (Portney 2003). The sustainable city is one that can only be understood at the intersection of ecology and economy. The primary theoretical function of these adjectives is to enable the theorist to manage the complexity of the city. This is where the network city is most powerful. Certain adjectives – unruly, wild, unfinished – point to the city’s complexity but suggest little in the way of a resolution. The authors of such phrases embrace the city’s unpredictability and resistance to theoretical discipline. Their intent is to turn their listeners and readers away from any expectation that one can make final sense of the city or interpret it as a purposive totality. To say the city is unfinished or incomplete, however, is to suggest something different; a city that is changing as we speak of it, a city without a final destination. Such cities are only temporarily capitalist, post-industrial, or global. Adjectives that have a clearer theoretical thrust are those that function as metaphors: the machine city and the organic city are two of the most common of these formulations (Donald 1999: 27–61; Ellin 1996: 241–69). Here we are encouraged to think of the city as being like a machine or like a living organism. If the machine is an analogy for the city, we can think of the city as having parts, with each of those parts serving a purpose in a larger scheme. The function and technology (whether computer chips or gears) of the machine (the city) offer a logic for intervention. The city as organism operates similarly. It has a heart (the central business district), a brain (its institutions), and arteries (highways, sidewalks). Consequently, the organic city is amenable to a medical intervention, as when blight is surgically removed from the urban core. These adjectives organize the city’s complexity and provide us with ways of thinking about how to act. Such metaphorical characterizations were quite common in the first half of the twentieth century but have become less so as theorists have chafed at their simplicity and their functionalist and teleological qualities. What has become more common is the use of adjectives as synecdoche (Amin and Graham 1997). While a metaphor asserts a similarity in a difference, in synecdoche the “whole as a totality . . . is qualitatively identified with the parts that appear to make it up” (White 1978: 73). Thus, for example, the city becomes the “tourist city” or the “commercial city” or the “fortress city.” In each case, we are meant to understand that tourism or commerce or defensive spaces and activities such as gated communities and surveillance cameras do not constitute all of what exists in the city or the city’s sole function. Rather, these elements are put forth as the defining ones for a given time and place.
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By distilling the city into a single and pivotal element, the theorist can explore what is essential about the city, leaving aside what is less important. Complexity is curbed, bounded. No expectation exists that the city will be considered in its messy totality. To the extent that an element is richly connected to others, our understanding is enhanced. If it is not, the adjective limits our perception and appreciation. In fact, this is one of the dangers of the adjectival city – the marginalization or suppression of an important quality (for example, gender relations) of the city (Spain 2002) or the stretching of the label to cover incompatible realities (Collier and Levitsky 1997). It is in regard to the messy totality of the city that the “network city” is most important. The “network” adjective reduces the city’s complexity and reintegrates it in a way that makes the city intellectually and practically manageable. Network City/Network of Cities As an adjective, the term “network” is quite successful in negotiating the multidimensionality of the city. It simultaneously erases complexity and then re-introduces it in a more malleable form. The innumerable parts of the city, or the differences among them, are recognized and then connected to a larger whole – the network. Such a rhetorical move has theoretical power, making it one of the more attractive metaphorical constructions currently present in urban theory, if not (yet) a new paradigm. In its ideal-type formulation, a network consists of a set of components, all linked to each other and functioning so as to achieve one or more common purposes (Castells 1996: 470–1). These purposes are utilitarian, based not on an organic or even teleological “essence” of the network but on the aggregate of member interests. Networks are self-organizing. Being a member of the network – whether as an individual, nonprofit organization, business, or government – is voluntary and each member contributes to the network based on their capacity and the predicted benefits. Efficiency is not a network quality. Rather, what is valued is the collaboration, openness, adaptability, and creative redundancy that enables the network to be innovative and to function regardless of fluctuations in membership and changes in member interests. Ideal networks are often contrasted with hierarchies and systems. Associated with Weberian bureaucracies (Mouzelis 1967), hierarchies are viewed as rigid entities that channel authority, impede the flow of ideas, and stifle innovation; although Pumain (1992) argues that hierarchies are simply a special type of network. Systems are also contrasted with networks. They have a core function, strive for efficiency, and are tightly designed. To posit a system is to suggest not only a stable knowledge of that entity’s dynamics but also of its purpose. A system is focused; a clear path exists to a pre-determined goal. Moreover, the actors in a system are less volunteers than employees, metaphorically speaking. In the ideal formulation, networks are neither hierarchies nor systems.
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Leitner and Sheppard (2002) label this ideal-type formulation the progressive interpretation of networks. They argue that the progressive network is centered in civil society and serves as an alternative to capitalist markets and strong states. They contrast it with a neoliberal interpretation in which networks are cast as mechanisms for shrinking the state and dispersing its powers while strengthening markets so that they become arenas of opportunity for individuals, governments, and businesses. Neoliberal networks rely on competition rather than cooperation, strategic alliances rather than serendipitous encounters, and professional models of network governance rather than mutual adjustment. Innovation is meant to support competitiveness and flexibility so that capital can move quickly in and out of investment opportunities. Yet, as Leitner and Sheppard point out, it is the ideal type network, the progressive network, that dominates the discussion. Neoliberal intentions tend to be veiled. The progressive interpretation is what one finds in writings on the worldwide web, nonprofit organizations, flexible workplaces, and professional networks (see, for example, Boyer (1999)). It is also the portrayal that pervades writings on cities, particularly by scholars who draw upon the “spaces of flows” made famous by Manuel Castells and who emphasize the purported revolution in information technology. An interest in networks and cities, though, has existed for decades. It can be traced back to Walter Christaller and August Lösch and central place theory (Lampard 1968; Pumain 1992) and forward to the notion of systems of cities (Bourne and Simmons 1978) and world systems (Friedmann 1986). Subsequently, the metaphor was given a boost by research into industrial districts (initially in the Third Italy and later in Silicon Valley) and their regional networks of firms (Castells and Hall 1994; Scott 1993). These themes combined to produce global cities and, when crossed with telecommunications (Townsend 2001), engendered a vision of the network city that seems to underlie most scholarly writings on this theme. The story of the network city, however, must begin back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the first systematic probings of the city’s form (Choay 1988; Ellin 1996). These probings were as much practical as theoretical and became centered on the emerging professions, particularly city planners but also civil engineers, transportation specialists, and public administrators. Urban professionals began to conceive of the city analytically rather than holistically. In doing so, they disaggregated the city into a series of systems: water supply, sewage disposal, modes of transportation, housing markets, retail centers, and policing services among many others. These systems – not yet networks – enabled professionals to isolate parts of the city for intervention, thereby improving the city’s micro-manageability. At its apogee in the 1950s, this perspective gave rise to “plug-in” systems – components – that could be combined to create cities and their neighborhoods (Jencks 1973: 67–76). The contemporary version of this perspective turns systems into networks. The emphasis is shifted from centrally controlled and fixed activities and
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technologies to entrepreneurial or consumer-driven activities suffused with a high degree of flexibility. Graham and Marvin (2001) are well-known proponents of this perspective. They write of the demise of the integrated city and its replacement by a splintered urbanism of unbundled infrastructure driven by risk minimization and profit maximization. The public telephone system of the modern era has been replaced by competing land-line and wireless telephone providers, Internet telephone capabilities, and telephone cards among the available options. This unbundling brings competition, but it also undermines public provision of services. The infrastructure of the city is increasingly “networked” rather than “systematized.” For Graham and Marvin, flexibility and innovativeness are beneficial. Yet, the privatization of basic necessities and public goods is regrettable. Not everyone is networked, and even when networked not equally so. The network city is not only about what is happening within the city. It is also about systems of cities; that is, how the city is linked externally to other cities throughout the world. The foundational writings here involve world cities and the work of John Friedmann (Friedmann 2001; Knox and Taylor 1995) and others to identify the functional differentiation of cities on a global scale. In the earliest formulation, theorists distinguished world cities from regional cities and further divided regional cities into those at the periphery and those in the center, meaning the advanced industrial countries. The intent was not simply to differentiate but also to better understand how regional economies, and the world economy, were organized through the connections among different types of city-regions. This investigation has its empirical roots in international trade, specifically the commodity chains formed by transnational corporations, immigration, and telecommunications (Knox 1997). A sense that a new round of globalization was under way in the 1980s spurred theorists to search out the mechanisms that were being created to tie together production and consumption, labor, foreign-direct investment, and financing. Out of this emerged the global city, the city whose nodal position in urban networks provided the command-andcontrol functions and financial and legal services that shaped global production, consumption, trade, and immigration (Sassen 1991). Urban networks are not so voluntaristic or flexible as the ideal formulation implies. Cities such as New York, London, Tokyo, and Frankfurt have disproportionate control in financial markets. Washington is near-hegemonic militarily and a dominant player in diplomatic networks. Johannesburg, a regional city in Africa, holds sway in the world diamond market. Nevertheless, such networks are more or less open and while some cities wield greater influence than others, the networks, with exceptions, are without centralized control, despite having very powerful entities (for example, the World Bank, OPEC) engaged in organizing them. What makes these networks open to new members is their purported synergism (Paye 1996). To the degree that innovation is one of the network’s most valued objectives, any city that can add to this capability will be welcomed.
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Consequently, the notion that such networks exist takes a normative turn. Networks became growth opportunities for cities (Beauregard and Pierre 2000). Given the increasingly globalized nature of regional and national economies and given the shrinkage of central government supports, numerous theorists argue that urban economic growth is a function of the ability of a city-region to be competitive in global networks. There, such city-regions establish synergistic relationships, uncover opportunities, and are exposed to “best practices” (Leitner and Sheppard 2002; Tomlinson 2002). This can only occur if actors in the cityregion recognize the importance of being competitive. That much of what occurs in markets and intercity networks, such as Eurocities, involves both competition and cooperation is elided in this formulation (Friedmann 2001: 127–9). The global aspect of network cities should not blind us to an important regional or metropolitan formulation. This is the multi-nucleated metropolis that many theorists argue has displaced the nuclear metropolis with its single central city, an urban form that existed for over a century beginning in the mid1800s (Gottdiener and Kephart 1991). Office functions within edge cities have significantly challenged the older central business districts of these metropolitan regions. Central place functions have been dispersed. One interpretation of these multi-nucleated metropolises is as networks of centers, each center servicing a sub-region but also dependent on all the others within the metropolis for the functions, such as corporate legal services, that it does not contain (Bingham and Kimble 1995). Discursively, the network city takes the disparate parts of the city or the complexity of multiple cities and brings them together in a single entity, the network. Then, by positing the network as open, fluid, and innovative, complexity is re-introduced. The city is simultaneously unpredictable and organized. Using the network metaphor, the urban theorist manages to embrace complexity (albeit one that has been tamed) yet avoid complexity’s debilitating tendencies. Planning and the Network City How we imagine the city opens up and closes down opportunities for planning. Consequently, certain adjectival cities are more useful than others. For example, the “contemporary city” provides no direction for either analysis or intervention, while the “private city” suggests little need for, and even antagonism to, planning. Contrarily, the garden city, a characterization with particular historical resonance, invites a series of integrated interventions and suggests the urban form that will be its ultimate outcome. Planners must imagine the city they desire before they can satisfy their urge to plan. Three themes tie the adjectival city, and network city in particular, to planning. The first is the most general and concerns the potential for purposive intervention contained within the adjective. The second focuses on the importance of networks of cities for the sharing of planning ideas and tech-
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nologies. The last considers the way in which the network city helps planners to negotiate the divide between specializations and synthesis. Consider the potential for intervention implicit in adjectives. Adjectival cities characterized as wild, disarticulated, or spontaneous, subvert the planning imagination. There is no predictability and no logic and thus no points of intervention. The wild city resists being tamed. The disarticulated city precludes the kind of functional relationships that are the value-added of planning. And, the spontaneous city is too unpredictable. Such cities have a low receptivity to planning. At the other end of the spectrum is the “planned city.” The planned city implies a central analytical capacity, responsive leadership with the capacity to effectuate plans, and a strong sense of what form the city should take (Nelson 1977). The corresponding decision model, one of comprehensive-rationality, assumes a monolithic analyst and policymakers acting in the public interest. The planned city is both functionally and conceptually centered. In the US context, though, the planned city seems a political liability. Given the ideological disposition against large-scale and centralized planning in the US and against state intervention generally, it has unsettling undertones, though one could imagine it being attractive during certain historical periods as it was during the Progressive Era and in the decades of urban decline and mass suburbanization just after World War II. Of course, the comprehensive-rational approach associated with the planned city has lost favor over the last few decades and been replaced by a more democratic, de-centered, flexible, and citizen-driven model of planning (Forester 1999; Healey 1995). Whether in the form of participatory planning or communicative action, or another variation on this theme, contemporary planning is disinclined toward the concentration of power that the planned city implies. The tendency in contemporary planning – more in theory than practice I suspect – is to mobilize intentions not by relying on the power of a centralized authority but by drawing on the collective will of those for whom – and with whom – planning is done. At the same time, contemporary planning theorists and practitioners have embraced the notion of the city as multi-centered. This and the move toward more participatory and open planning practices have their roots in the abandonment of the self-assuredness, even arrogance, of earlier planners. The “ideal” network city dovetails nicely with these trends. It does so both in its implications for how collective action in the city might unfold and in its formulations of how the city works. The progressive network, as defined by Leitner and Sheppard (2002), is a relatively democratic social entity. Entry and exit are relatively uncontrolled, each participant is expected to contribute, opinions and actions bubble up from public deliberations, and rewards are widely distributed. Voluntarism and flexibility are defining qualities. Participatory and communicative action models of planning parallel this network philosophy. They rely on individuals voluntarily coming together to
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craft shared goals and then to adapt as obstacles appear, failure strikes, and success happens. Just as organizations, say, are empowered by being part of networks, individuals are empowered by participating in joint planning exercises. The parallels between networks and these new models of planning are striking. In fact, it would seem that these models rely on the existence of networks to function at all. Such models, moreover, have a tendency to be communitarian in their assumptions (Sandercock 1998a). They expect individuals to be pro-active, flexible in their opinions, and willing to search for a common good. Networks are often conceived in a similar way. The common good that they create is likely to be a bit more ephemeral than what planners, with their future orientation, might be comfortable with, but this transience can be conceived as flexibility. As flexibility, the trade-off between long-term commitment and adaptation to rapid change becomes tolerable. Networks thus make planning participation and communication manageable in a way that, for example, classes or interest groups – both hierarchies of sorts – do not. These latter ways of thinking about society fix interests and positions and establish barriers that block engagement across social divides. Consequently, the search for a common good and the fluidity of democratic debate are undermined. Joint action is the strength of (ideal) networks and of (ideal) communicative action. In the network city, individual citizens – socially connected – are available to participate in planning activities. Such a city is not dominated by one or a few groups. At the same time, its underlying logic – of things potentially linked to each other in functional ways – facilitates intervention. Democratic planning and network cities make sense together. The network city also encourages planners to greater recognition of the debt that planning theory and practice owe to the intellectual and professional networks that channel ideas and technologies among cities. The importance of early planning consultants, such as John Nolen, in the US, in spreading planning practices from one city to the next has been recognized. Less studied is the robust flow of people and ideas across the Atlantic Ocean in the early twentieth century, not just involving the work of Ebenezer Howard and Garden City advocates but also ideas about large-scale clearance (Paris and Birmingham), zoning (Berlin and Frankfurt), and housing (London) (Rodgers 1998: 112–208). The contemporary equivalent is “best practices.” Numerous government agencies and foundations publicize the successes that have occurred in specific places and encourage other cities to emulate them. Agencies such as the International Monetary Fund tout the importance of specific practices to countries and cities around the world. What large city has not hoped to replicate the planning success that Barcelona achieved by tying the Olympics to redevelopment? Richard Tomlinson (1999), for example, tells the story of World Bank consultants visiting Johannesburg and asking whether the city’s future would be that of Detroit or Pittsburgh. These flows occur through networks that
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link cities to each other. Their existence makes the network city even more important for planners. Last, the network city helps to resolve planning’s enduring tension between specialization and synthesis. By recognizing and reducing the inherent complexity of the city, it enables planning to be both functional – focusing on the component processes of the city – and synthetic, bringing those processes together into an organic whole. This allows planning specializations – transportation, environmental, land use – to maintain their integrity while providing a mechanism for considering how these specializations interact, thereby enabling interventions to be coordinated. The challenge for planners is to figure out how one sub-network connects to another. In doing so, and if they are to remain true to the network characterization, planners must avoid a pre-conceived notion of the outcome of their interventions. The network city is not teleological; it does not function according to a pre-determined image of itself. To this extent, the synthesis that planners desire is elusive but attainable. Of course, the compatibility between the network city and contemporary planning depends on how each is interpreted. A network city formulated in neoliberal terms in which competition and individualism are the defining values is less compatible with planning than the ideal or progressive model that I have been discussing. Nonetheless, the parallels between planning and the network city are undeniable. Conclusion In order to act, planners need to conceptualize the city. Without a sense of context, plan-making neither enjoys the benefits of limits nor the possibility of implementation. One extremely evocative way to characterize that context and to give meaning to the city is to capture its defining quality with a single adjective. Common in the urban literature, such adjectival cities and the rhetorical move that they represent have been given little attention. Their influence on how planners assess the potential for acting effectively cannot be ignored. The network city offers a particularly receptive way of thinking about cities. It focuses on the dynamics of the city’s connective tissue and, by doing so, brings action into view. It offers, in its ideal-type formulation, a fertile field for democratic deliberations and thus participatory planning and communicative action. It sets the city in an array of cities that are connected economically, politically, socially, and intellectually, cities whose connections bring ideas and technologies for improving planning practice. And, the network city suggests how planning specializations might be retained and synthesis achieved. Capable of managing the complexity of the city, adjectives can either open or close opportunities for intervention. That the network city does the former and not the latter is a large part of its appeal.
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CHAPTER THREE
Escaping the Prison of “the Present Place”: Can We Plan the Future of Localities in the Context of a Network Society? Dowell Myers The concept of a network society poses severe challenges for urban planning. Networks challenge planning to break the confines of its spatial borders. The practice of urban planning is spatially bounded because planners’ authority, if not responsibility, is restricted within borders sharply demarcated by governmental jurisdictions and units of political representation. Nonetheless, despite these political and administrative restrictions, the social and economic context for planning is heavily shaped by flows of activities that cross spatial boundaries and pass through locales. Simultaneously, temporal dynamics also challenge the spatial confines of a present place. Over longer sweeps of time, the disjuncture between the local place and broader planning context grows ever greater. With the passage of time, networks have longer opportunity to work their influences on the local place. In particular, the local population is in flux. Migration networks transform the place by importing a large proportion of the population to replace others who have departed. And over time the ebb and flow of investment capital favors some places more greatly than others. Even though bounded by space and time, the present place constitutes the strategic site within which residents and elected officials are self conscious of changes that confront them and which they wish to control. These local actors may be less conscious of how the social networks in which they participate shape development of shared meaning, valued conceptions of local identity, and the multiple, conflicting place identities that are socially constructed (Healey 1999). Multiple, competing narratives arise from interest groups in each place (Molotch 1976; Throgmorton 2003b). These place-based outlooks and debates
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sharply control the ability of the present place to interact with regions beyond local borders and futures not yet present. In this chapter I consider the challenges of “the network society” for urban planning. The heart of the problem is that planning practice is imprisoned in an orientation to “the present place.” How can planning better incorporate changes from beyond the local borders? In turn, how can planning prepare local contributions for the larger region beyond the borders? Given the confines of present consciousness, it is always difficult to plan the future. The odds of consensus about problems and solutions are always weighted to the shared experience of the local place or to the memory of its recent past. Finally, how can planning help residents achieve a satisfying self-identity that is based, in part, on attachments to a local place even while it changes in response to regional or global forces? These are weighty challenges to consider. Satisfying answers are not easily found, but the juxtaposition of these multiple challenges suggests the need for a more richly formulated response. Indeed, the locally grounded perspective of urban planning is beginning to illuminate new facets of the network society that have yet to be appreciated. The Prison of “the Present Place” Spatially Fixed Boundaries of Planning Authority The practice of urban planning in the US and in most democratic societies is conducted largely at the local level. Local governments control the development process and local residents fiercely defend their home rule of land use and other matters within their communities. Urban planners strive to improve the quality of places within their jurisdictions, leaving discussions about regional or national development issues to others. The relative importance of planning for broader areas varies from country to country, as well as between states in the US. To varying degrees, financial incentives from higher level governments, or outright control of infrastructure or other vital elements, may be able to enforce local respect for goals of extralocal areas. In general, however, the democratic process strengthens local voters’ control over matters within their own communities. The Orientation of Urban Planning to the Present Planning is not only conducted within local places, it is also oriented toward the present, even while espousing an intention to address the future. Given planning’s professed goals, it may seem paradoxical that planning is so oriented to the present, rather than the future, but the predominant forces direct planners’ attention to the present. Planners aim to be responsive to local stakeholders, and the democratic process directs attention to current concerns of voters and elected officials. The latter operate with time horizons limited to the next election, as well as to the pressures of short-term budgetary cycles. And the
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voters are most sensitive to current problems and perceived deficits. Even when planners try to lead a forward oriented investigation into longer term goals of advance planning, the decision-making process is locked in the present. Local citizenry and officials evaluate the planning alternatives in light of their current goals and perceptions of the world. Planners also may have shied away from addressing the future for professional reasons, namely to avoid “the twin hazards of uncertainty and disagreement” (Myers 2001b). It goes without saying that necessary consensus in support of collective planning is undermined by dissension over goals, as well as by uncertainty about the causes and solutions of problems. The future is especially problematic because facts in the future are impossible to test, verify, or legally defend, and both facts and goals for the future are difficult to agree about. Accordingly, local consensus is achieved more easily with regard to current problems or shared knowledge of recent local events. Only with more highly skilled narratives might planners create persuasive stories of local futures that are embracive of extralocal forces and ethical duties to a broader geographic sphere (Throgmorton 2003b). Confrontation with the Network Society The result of these forces is that urban planners have been driven to be strongly focused on the local area and the present. Planning practice has been imprisoned in the “present place,” making it little able to address either regional needs or concerns of the future. This contrasts sharply with demands imposed by the network society (Castells 1996). Global communications allows capital and enterprise to distribute freely across a broad terrain. With improved regional transportation systems, local places have become ever more tightly wired to the economic and social forces of the surrounding region and even the globe. The paradox noted by Castells and others is that the process of global integration and hyper communication is accompanied by an opposing force of local fragmentation. Residents search for self-identity in relation to ascribed or acquired self-characteristics, including a sense of belonging and attachment to places. Nonetheless, in this integrated spatial context, residents and leaders of a local place cannot control its work force, employment base, cultural messages, or many things other than the local land uses and physical appearance. Control of the physical place becomes a surrogate for control of the social, economic, and perceptual. Even that control is difficult in the face of relentless pressures. Not only is the spatial separatism of the local place challenged as never before, but its temporal isolation is also under stress. Castells emphasizes how the pace of work, of enterprise development and of industrial evolution has been accelerated. For example, where once we had factory towns that provided stable work and residence environments for two or three generations of time, now we have an economic life cycle that seems much more ephemeral. Today, change is more of a constant and looking toward the future a more frequent necessity.
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Global
Network Society
National
Regional
Local
The Present Place
Present
Nearterm
Longterm
Figure 3.1 Planning’s “Present Place” Prison Relative to the Network Society
Figure 3.1 offers a diagram of spatial and temporal relations that contrasts the network society with the prison of the “present place” in urban planning. Whereas planning is focused at the local level and in present time, the network society expands the activity sphere of local places by embedding them in regional, national, and global forces. The network society also stretches the time frame to include the near term, the period in which the next economic change or other innovations will be introduced.
Breaking the Restrictions of the Present Place Responsibilities of the Place to the Surrounding Region The space–time discordance between urban planning and the network society is not easily resolved. However, that discrepancy will make planning ever more powerless to cope with the changes under way in many local areas. This challenge may prove a healthy opportunity for urban planning, because the issues exposed are ones that have undermined planning success for many years. Residents in local places often feel that their current place has no necessary linkages to the surrounding region or world at large. Even though the
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roadways permit most residents to commute outside to work, there is no presumption of reciprocal responsibilities to the region. Some years ago, Frank Popper coined the term LULU (locally unwanted land uses) to characterize the garbage dumps, prisons, half way houses, and low-income housing projects that were needed in the region but which were not considered to be desirable in most communities. Planners who serve in the “present place” may well recognize the wisdom and ethical duty of their community to share in these regional responsibilities. However, local citizens and elected officials are prone to act in ways that are more locally self-serving. The planner who serves the interests of his/her community usually finds it difficult to argue for regional responsibilities. The challenge being faced in much of the US is how to adapt the precepts of home rule to the needs of larger regions. Communities that cannot address reciprocal ties at this level will have an even harder time responding to the national and global forces of the network society. European nations may be better able to address extralocal concerns through a multi-level governance based on the concept of subsidiarity, namely that government decisions should be taken at the appropriate geographic scale for a given function. The Place as Temporary Residence in the Network One way in which local places are most clearly impacted by larger areas is the movement of local residents into and out of the community. Although this has always been true, in recent decades the spatial integration of populations has been extended to the international arena (Castles and Miller 1993). For some communities and regions, the population influx and outflows have become so large that the implicit assumptions of urban planners and urban theorists have been completely overturned. The transience of local residents accentuates the classic distinction of policies based on people versus those based on place. The experience of the two diverges when residents are mobile, either moving in or out. The policy implication is that investments targeted to a place may benefit people for a sustained time only if the residents are permanently rooted in that locale. The divergence between history of people and the place in which they reside is highlighted in an essay on “Demographic Dynamism,” in which I have documented the pervasive assumptions of urban theory that the history of the residents and the city are synchronous (Myers 2001a). Evidence collected from census data revealed that more than 60 percent of adults in the Chicago or New York regions were born in the vicinity, but only 27 percent of adults in the Los Angeles region were born in California. (Among the dominant white majority, more than 80 percent of adult New Yorkers were born in the region, but still only 31 percent of Los Angeles residents were born in California.) Massive numbers of Los Angeles residents either migrated from elsewhere in the US (white or black residents) or from abroad (Asians and Latinos). This high rate of mobility has reciprocal effects on social networks. Not having grown up in the region, Los Angeles’ residents are much less likely to
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be rooted by parents and kinship networks, or to have deep longstanding social connections. Indeed, many of these residents may not have any memory or personal knowledge of what Los Angeles was like in the 1950s or 1960s. The opposite conclusions hold for residents of New York or Chicago. In fact, despite its reputation as a global city (Sassen 1991), with so many homegrown residents, New York does not reflect the impact of the network society as fully as does Los Angeles. Often the new arrivals to a place have different goals and ambitions for the place than do longtime residents. The group that is arriving and growing in numbers will increasingly assert its view of desired changes (or non-change) while those who are longer established often exercise an entrenched political position to resist the views of newcomers (Spain 1993). An apparent contradiction may be that the old time, long-settled residents who claim seniority and special status for their views may in fact be on the way out (if for no other reason than old age and death). The newly arrived, short-term residents could well represent the future, although that is contested by the oldtimers. The example of new immigrants is especially challenging to planners. By definition, these are mobile people newly arrived in the community. A key question is whether they will settle permanently or whether they will move on to other communities later in their lives. The dilemma for local planners and government officials is that an investment to help new immigrants adjust to life in their new country may not be repaid at a later time if the upwardly mobile immigrants carry their newly developed assets to another community (Myers 1999). In such cases, it makes much more sense for a higher level of government to fund the investments in new immigrant residents, but the current philosophy of devolution in the US has thrust more of the service burdens to lower levels of government. That strategy seems inconsistent with the practical effects of the network society. In sum, the longstanding discrepancy between history/future of residents and history/future of place has been accentuated under the network society. Some communities and regions are feeling this more acutely, but all places serve as only temporary destinations for at least a portion of their residents. Planners can no longer afford to assume that the people found residing together in a place at one point in time have always been, and will always be, linked together in that place. Challenges of a Network Society Can Present Residents Plan a Future Place? Planners imprisoned in the present place face not only spatial but temporal confines. Just as planners find it difficult to address needs or reciprocal relations beyond the local borders, so are those planners trapped in short-view improvement activities. The “twin hazards of uncertainty and disagreement”
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about the future (Myers 2001b) drive planners to seek consensus around issues that are most tangible in the present. One approach to enlist citizen participation in planning the future has become very popular in North America. “Visioning” is a group exercise that encourages residents to imagine desired changes in their communities or regions. Although successful at mobilizing audience attention in some contexts, the technique has been faulted for several reasons, including the false hopes created, lack of follow through, and disconnection between citizen imaginations and professional projections of feasible outcomes (Helling 1998; Grant and Orser 2002). Given the divergence cited above between history of residents and history of place – the transiency of local residence – there is a deep problem of how today’s residents are to plan tomorrow’s place. Only if we assume the future residents will be the same people as today’s, or at least that they will hold similar goals and preferences as today’s, can this process be reasonably legitimate. The argument here is different from the standard rationale for a regional framework for establishing needs and sharing resources. That rationale is based on class disparities in the internal spatial structure of regions (Orfield 1997). The present argument complements that point of view but emphasizes the temporal discontinuities and inequities that surround decision making in the present place. Local citizen desires for the future often conflict with regional needs for the future. Two examples illustrate the pitfalls. One is the common situation of housing construction in a community. Is housing a desirable goal for people who are not yet residents? Residents of today pass judgment on the desirability of new housing, but the prospective future residents of that housing have no voice. Indeed, one of the greatest imbalances in the democratic planning process is that the future residents of housing have few advocates relative to the many current residents who already have housing and who see few benefits of new construction (and indeed only costs of added congestion, loss of open space, and possibly new fiscal burdens). Even though we know a certain amount of new housing will be needed for young people coming of age, it is often difficult to get existing local residents to acknowledge that truth and accept a share of the obligation to future generations. A second example is the planned reuse of a retired military airbase in Orange County, California, a formerly suburban area south of Los Angeles that is now home to three million residents. The future use of the El Toro airport has been hotly contested and local residents are sharply divided. (About 60 percent of elected officials and residents oppose building a new airport, while 40 percent support it.) Although air travel demand has grown rapidly along with the population, many residents long for a future that reflects the lowdensity suburban past. They have voted to turn the air field into a large park, even though regional air traffic has already surpassed the combined capacity limits of Los Angeles International Airport and several smaller air fields.
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Contradictory Demands for Control of a Localized Identity Even as global integration proceeds through digital communication and a homogenizing mass culture, the counterforce is a movement toward fragmentation of places and more individualized choices of identity. Whether based on inherited ethnicity or religion, on group memberships from the past, or on new lifestyle choices formed around leisure pursuits, members of Western societies are seeking distinction and identity as a defense against the anonymity of mass integration. The local place of residence forms a key component of this identity. Castells (1997: 60) highlights the importance of these “territorial identities.” People socialize and interact in their local environment and build social networks among their neighbors. Castells argues that a process of social mobilization must occur in order for “people to cluster in community organizations that generate a feeling of belonging and, ultimately, a communal cultural identity. People must engage in urban movements through which common interests are discovered and defended.” However, the same dynamic is also at work among the business community and local development interests, whose own social mobilization is founded on what Molotch (1976) calls nurturing of “the growth machine.” Members of social networks occupying the same space often find themselves in conflict, because their group projects have opposing objectives, whether it be the local development and business interests versus neighborhood and environmental activists, or whether it be the longtime residents of a community versus a network of newly arrived immigrant entrepreneurs (Fong 1994). Castells (1997: 66–7) explains how local citizen movements evolve and develop their strong attraction for local residents. When the world becomes too big to be controlled, social actors aim at shrinking it back to their size and reach. When networks dissolve time and space, people anchor themselves in places, and recall their historic memory . . . These defensive reactions become sources of meaning and identity by constructing new cultural codes out of historical materials . . . This form of identity building revolves around resistance identity. It leads to a new meaning of project identity. Of the three main sets of goals Castells posits for urban movements, two may be especially tied to contests over “the present place.” Both the affirmation of local cultural identity and the conquest of local political autonomy (and citizen participation) firmly wrap residents’ self-identity and newfound meaning within the borders of their place. This is well illustrated by the Orange County case above of the proposed airport. As Castells (1997: 61) notes, this may be seen as a “defensive identity” – defensive against the unpredictable and uncontrollable. This actually has been deliberately fostered by local and federal governments. Such urban movements
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have been integrated into the structure and practice of local government either directly or indirectly through a system of citizen participation and community development. In addition, NIMBYism has mutated beyond its origins in the environmental movement so that not only environmental threats but any unwanted local land use is now opposed. But Castells (1997: 62) draws a major distinction between the search for controlling space (a defensive reaction) and the search for controlling time. The latter is a local desire for the preservation of nature and of the planet for future generations, substituting a long-term approach for the “instant time approach of instrumentalist development.” Castells views the offensive timing approach with special favor because it opens up “the reconciliation between culture and nature, thus introducing a new, holistic philosophy of life.” In light of the present analysis, one wonders if it is wise to summarily judge residents as acting so benevolently with regard to the future. Surely it is good to introduce a long-term perspective where one is lacking. But whose future should be promoted? Within the present place, which social network’s preferred vision should be made paramount? And, when the interests of residents in the present place diverge from those in the region or beyond, how do we reconcile that disparity in the planning process? Locally Persuasive Planning Narratives In a series of essays and books, James Throgmorton has argued for a rhetorical approach to planning, one that emphasizes narrative structure, audience response, and the planning aims of persuasive storytelling about the future. This body of work is best summarized, especially with regard to themes of the network society, in Throgmorton (2003b: 6): [C]ities and their planning-related organizations can be thought of as nodes in a global-scale web, a web that consists of a highly fluid and constantly (albeit subtly) changing set of relationships . . . Plans, in turn, can be understood as persuasive stories about how particular nodes or links in the web should or will change in the future. To plan effectively, planners (and others) have to recognize that they are embedded in an intricate web of relationships, that they have to construct understandings of that web, and that they then have to persuade others to accept their constructions. But they also have to accept the fact that people tell diverse and often conflicting stories. That means planners must also find ways to set these alternate stories side by side, let them interact with one another, and thereby let them influence judgements about how particular nodes and links in the web should change, are likely to change, and why. Planners need to help local residents construct desired local futures using many tools available today (Myers and Kitsuse 2000). Our challenge is to help
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them find meaning and identity that is locally anchored while at the same time acknowledging responsibilities to a broader world. In this capacity, it is necessary to assert a locally based narrative that embraces local interests and integrates those with broader objectives. A host of themes suggest themselves as potential bases for helping local actors create future communities that both serve the world and meet the demands for locally based identity and meaning: the sustainable or green community; opportunity for the children’s generation; the wired community; the creative and socially responsible community; the fair share, balanced community; our legacy of the good community. These are narratives that planning scholars should help write, illustrate with the specifics of one community, and then make available for customization by local communities worldwide. Conclusion Local residents’ sense of meaning derived from their local place attachments is drawn from an imaginary base – in reality, the prison of the present place. However, each locality is not an island that is independent of its regional or the global economy, or independent of regional needs and of the transportation and communication systems that knit together the separate places. And the current residents are not synchronous with the historic or future residents. The residents are merely the current placeholders, and yet they seek to anchor and cohere their identities in a fixed place and permanent time. That is a powerful social force, even if the fixity and permanence is imaginary. Local residents are encouraged in this fiction by planners and elected officials. The artifice of “the present place” is aided and abetted by governmental structure of place-based voting and present time decision making. Local municipal plans are shown with sharp spatial boundaries and the residents are led through visioning exercises to dream what future conditions they hope to see within those borders. No matter that the bulk of residents may be only temporary members of the community, or that the fate of the locality is strongly controlled by forces from beyond the borders. Planners need to explore how we might plan localities in ways that acknowledge extralocal ties and that reach beyond the present to embrace broader futures (Figure 3.2). To escape the prison of the present place, planners need to identify a wider spatial framework, and they need to expressly address temporal development of the community that will dynamically forge the future. Following Throgmorton (2003b), planners should engage citizens in broad, future-oriented narratives that help residents see their communities more globally and imagine how their communities can become better because they are more regionally responsible and sustainable places. Planning for the future cannot be successful from the present place alone. Although this may be an essential starting place for every resident, the local
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Global
Network Society
National
Regional
Local
Expanded Domain of Local Planning
The Present Place
Present
Nearterm
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Figure 3.2 Breaking Spatial and Temporal Confines of the “Present Place” Prison
community cannot remain the fixed limit. Imprisoned in this perspective, planners, officials, and residents are prevented from seeing the dynamics of network flows that link localities across space and across time. The future can only be developed successfully if we take account of the lack of fixity and permanence that has been the fictional basis for local planning.
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CHAPTER FOUR
The Discourse Network: A Way of Understanding Policy Formation, Stability, and Change in the Networked Polity Nicholas Low
Introduction A feature of modernity is self-improvement, and “planning” is modern society’s official approach to social “self-improvement” – whether improvement of the city or improvement of the decision and implementation process. In this skeptical post-modern world, such a statement sounds a little ludicrous. Yet, if in the late 1960s some French philosophers could tire of the endless appeal to social self-improvement of the Stalinist parties of the left – giving birth to postmodernism – it may be that today, faced with a world tumbling again into global war and the insidious creep of global environmental degradation, it is time to rekindle the flame of social self-improvement. What has to be rejected, though, are two nineteenth-century beliefs about society and its processes of change: that a small coterie at the apex of a representative parliamentary government can garner the wisdom to steer society toward a better future; alternatively, that a simple set of rules held in place by such a government can automatically mobilize the collective wisdom to steer society toward a better future. On the one hand the hierarchy, on the other the market. Useful though these two kinds of institutions have been in many ways, they do not exhaust the description of modern society. A third institutional form is the network, which is increasingly seen as a necessary supplement to hierarchy and market. We have Manuel Castells, among many others, to thank for the observation of the “network society.” Albrechts (2003: 264) observes that planning “forms knowledge, produces discourse, constitutes a productive network and builds
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institutions that act as a catalyst for change” – and sometimes not only change, but also continuity. In this chapter I do not want to debate whether the “network society” is a new social form or simply an aspect, now thickened and intensified, of a social form that has always been present in modern societies, but has been ignored. I want to argue that planners, as political agents, need to pay attention to a particular aspect of the network society; the “networked polity.” I then want to propose that networks be viewed as institutionally stabilizing features of modern societies, and that stable networks of people are held together by stable networks of ideas: “discourse networks.” In order to make the concept more concrete I refer to conventional transport planning, which has proved extremely resistant to attempts to introduce a change of direction. The context is Australian but there are parallels with other wealthy developed countries. I conclude by reflecting on the normative consequences of such a perspective. The Networked Polity Castells and others have noted how the geography of urban centers and businesses is influenced by the speed and information-bearing capacity of the means of communication, whose basic material organization is a network of circuits and nodes. Castells’ point is that the spatial form of cities and regions today is constituted by the network: “the spatial articulation of dominant functions does take place in our societies in the network of interactions made possible by information technology devices” (Castells 1996: 412). He continues, “places do not disappear but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network” (ibid.). Places thus become, primarily, nodes or hubs. Such is the impact of advances in communications technology on the organization of spatial relationships. But what of the organization of political relationships? There is a substantial and growing body of work on the impact of networks on the polity – that is to say the structure of relationships linking civil society and the state. Thatcher (1998) provides a comprehensive survey so we need not cite directly the many scholars who have contributed to this perspective. It is possible to identify a political form that we might, with Ansell, term “the networked polity”: “a distinctive form of modern polity that is functionally and territorially disaggregated, but nevertheless linked together through a web of interorganizational and intergovernmental relationships” (Ansell 2000: 303). Ansell immediately qualifies this statement by saying that “it is doubtful that such a polity does or could exist in a pure or extreme form” (ibid.). However, two different observations of modern politics suggest that the network is playing an increasing role in political structures. The first is the observation that networks importantly help government function in circumstances of increasing complexity. The second is that political issues increasingly transcend both established spatial boundaries and functional bureaucratic divisions – environmental
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problems being a striking case in point. Eckersley (2004: 111), for instance, argues that those affected by environmental risks have a right to be represented in the processes of decision making that impose such risks. Environmental risks typically extend across territorial, temporal, and even species boundaries. She explores the moral and prudential ramifications of this “ambit claim” for ecological democracy. We will not go further down that track but rather concentrate on the implications of networks for systems of governance with particular emphasis on networks of persons and concepts. To crystallize the definition of the networked polity it may be helpful to contrast the network with the two other key political structures of modern societies: the market and the hierarchy. The social relations of the market center on the contract. Exchange takes place according to a matrix of legally binding promises among formal equals. The hierarchy organizes social relations through structures of command, obedience, and defined function – actors carry out designated functions in exchange for a variety of positionally distinctive rewards. The social relations of the network combine a sense of equality among the participants with a sense of mutual obligation that is not, however, normally legally binding. Actors in a network do not command and obey. Nor do they buy and sell. But they do exchange, and what they exchange is information, political support, and trust. Ansell enlarges on the hierarchy–market–network distinction. The hierarchy, he says, is characterized by a vertical form of organization with the strategic “thinking” part at the top, while operatives at the bottom of the chain of command suffer from “structured ignorance” limited to narrowly specified routine tasks. Networks, within and between bureaucratic hierarchies, can operate both horizontally and vertically, enriching communication and diffusing the thinking capacity of the organization. Their participants work by “mutual adjustment” rather than command (Lindblom 1959). The “organic organization” (Burns and Stalker 1994) actively encourages lower level units to communicate with higher level units in “many-to-many communication.” Front line operatives are granted more discretion, and there is increased emphasis on projects on which multifunctional teams work, rather than programs in which staff are dedicated to routine tasks (Ansell 2000: 305–6). Markets, according to Ansell, are characterized by “discrete” exchanges in which the goods or values to be exchanged are carefully measured. The parties to the exchange are “well defined” and “act authoritatively on the agreed terms at a pre-specified time and over a narrow time horizon” (Ansell 2000: 308). Markets are also “impersonal” and the parties’ knowledge of one another is narrow and limited. It is surprising that Ansell seems to miss what is central to markets, namely the legally binding contract between parties to any exchange, though it is implied in what he says. Networks, by contrast, have “thick rather than thin” communication and the “goods” exchanged are characterized by unclear or ambiguous values. The absence, normally, of contractual exchange must mean that mutual trust plays a much more significant role in networks than markets, though it is far from lacking in the former.
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Paraphrasing Ansell then (2000: 311), the networked polity is a structure of governance in which both state and societal organization are vertically and horizontally disaggregated (as in pluralism) but linked together by cooperative exchange (as in corporatism).1 Knowledge and initiative are decentralized and widely distributed. Horizontal relationships are at least as important as vertical relationships and, accordingly, communication is many-to-many rather than many-to-one (the upward chain of accountability). Exchange is diffuse and social, rather than discrete and impersonal. The logic of governance emphasizes the bringing together of unique configurations of actors around specific projects oriented toward integrative solutions rather than dedicated programs. Ansell’s is, on the whole, a positive and even optimistic account of the direction of modern European politics. The networked polity defeats such negative-sounding phenomena as “structured ignorance,” “many layers of middle management,” “command and control,” “mechanistic organization” (Ansell 2000: 306), a “program-oriented mentality,” “compartmentalization of information,” and “turf boundaries” (p. 310). It embodies positive sounding features such as: “many-to-many” relationships, a “high degree of connectivity,” “heterarchical organization,” “project teams,” “shared common commitments” (pp. 308–9) and “cooperative exchange” (p. 311). Nevertheless, the author in the final paragraph raises three crucial questions which he does not attempt to answer: Who benefits? Is it effective? Is it democratic? If the networked polity is symptomatic of the network society and “the space of flows,” then Castells’ answer to “who benefits?” would probably be, “the techno-managerial elite” (Castells 1996: 415–16). In answer to the last two questions, Habermas’ critique provides some useful insights. He finds a profound contradiction between democracy read as the responsiveness of governments to the diverse needs and demands of their constituents (the state “knowing itself ”) and “effectiveness,” meaning the capacity of the state to act decisively in the interests of those constituents (the state’s “steering” capacity). However, he contends that to be democratic, a society must be able both to “know itself ” and “steer itself ” (Habermas 1996). Democracy is therefore beset with antinomy. To know itself, a society must understand its challenges and the options available, and employ rational, inclusive, and empowering arguments to define and inquire into societal problems. To steer itself, a society must have the capacity to take action to deal with the challenges it faces in knowing itself. Habermas considers “mediatization” the central impediment to democratic knowing and steering. Despite the apparent existence of constant debate, government increasingly relies on steering mechanisms based on the logics of instrumental reason, rather than on conscious collective deliberation (Habermas 1984: 187, 1996: 35). Instrumental reasoning leads to choices based upon achieving success in a given sphere. In a market society money and law instrumentally coordinate action such that individuals act for economy or profit – the medium’s success criteria. The medium of money tends to “steer” society via “markets,” as many individuals act according to the same logic.
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A similar analysis can be applied to hierarchy as a structural form, with professionalism and bureaucracy working as the steering media (Habermas 1984: 65, 214). Professional training acts with hierarchy to create mediatized responses to policy needs. The effect of mediatization can be seen in the resistance to change of transport infrastructure and housing policy. Investment continues to be poured into transport infrastructure when open debate might suggest alternative priorities; market principles appear to encourage the continuing construction of highly unsustainable housing estates and office buildings when an inclusive debate might suggest different principles based around, for example, sustainability and zero greenhouse emissions, principles that are already well understood and have been implemented in isolated instances. Accordingly, the various media (law, bureaucracy, professionalism, markets) represent one pole of a dilemma: instrumental steering in the interest of decisive action versus the deliberative formation of norms. In liberal democracies media both facilitate democracy by making it effective, but also restrict it by preventing discursive norm development and rational dialogue. It seems likely that networking may facilitate effectiveness in an instrumental sense, that is, may help actors in the network achieve their goals. But in focusing on the responsiveness of the system to the diversity of actors within it, it is important not to neglect the wider responsiveness of the system to actors beyond it, populations whom democracy is meant to serve. The advantage of a hierarchy for democracy is that the trail of accountability leads with reasonable transparency to an elected official. The danger with a networked polity is that the trail becomes utterly confused (see Hart et al.: 1996). The danger is that the network could become, indeed has already become, yet another steering medium with its own internal logic defeating public, discursive, normative planning. Only passing attention is given by Ansell to another aspect of network governance: the effect of discursive structures in coordinating network activity. Ansell (2000: 308) notes that the parties to a network “share common normative commitments.” In fact, these normative commitments are the filaments that link the nodes of a network together. Recent work in institutional analysis by North and his colleagues has placed considerable emphasis on “shared mental models.” Denzau and North (1994: 4) divide the institutional field into two parts: “Mental models are the internal representations that individual cognitive systems create to interpret the environment; the institutions are the external (to the mind) mechanisms individuals create to structure and order the environment” (emphasis added). These mental models are resilient. Denzau and Grossman (1993) and Denzau and North (1994: 22–6) discuss the process of discursive change. A critically important, prior distinction they make is between change within the “model space” (learning) and change of the model space or “representational redescription.” What then do they mean by “model space?” It seems that they mean something like (but not exactly like) the notion of “paradigm” in the history of science identified by Kuhn (1970). The dimensions of the “model space” are shaped by one or more key
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assumptions that generally do not change as learning from new observational data occurs. These assumptions define the parameters of a discourse network. It could even be argued that discourse is what forms a network, allowing ideas to travel, rather than the network shaping discourse. It is the discursive factor in networks, I want to propose, that makes them such formidable and impenetrable barriers to paradigm change. Equally, perhaps, exposing the discursive filaments to the public gaze and public debate may be a way of introducing some public selfreflection and eventually fundamental change, when it is needed, in policy settings. Discourse Networks and Urban Transport in Australia Within the policy network literature, different kinds of analysis point to the structuring connection between groups of ideas and groups of people (Rhodes and Marsh 1992; Smith 1993). The concept of “policy community” emphasizes the social structure of mutual influence with implicit rules of inclusion and exclusion (Laumann and Knoke 1987). At international level, members of an “epistemic community” may come from different scientific disciplines but share a common body of knowledge which they interpret in a similar way with similar policy implications (Haas 1992; Toke 1999). The work of Sabatier and his colleagues locates shared core beliefs centrally in the coordination of policy (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). Hajer focuses upon the discourses that influence conceptions (Hajer 1995: 42–72). These discourses are comprised of particular “storylines” that tell what the problem is and what to do about it (Davies and Harré 1990). Storylines connect different core belief systems with policy solutions. All these analytical systems illuminate the connection between social interaction and the beliefs of policy actors within and among more formally structured organizations. Knowledge about how to make urban transport sustainable is reasonably widespread in Australia. Planners and politicians in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth have even expressed serious commitment to the idea. What is interesting now is what is blocking its implementation. For instance, the metropolitan plan for Melbourne – Melbourne 2030 – unveiled in early 2003 after much internal turbulence, presented an uncompromising vision of Melbourne as a compact city, complete with brownfield development, transit villages, and commitment to public transport, walking, and cycling (State of Victoria 2002). Yet the government (of the State of Victoria) is going ahead with the construction of an outer ring motorway costing AU$2.5 billion or more (about £1.02 billion, 1.46 billion euros) which will displace funds from public transport and encourage a car-dependent “edge city.” This infrastructure policy is guaranteed to increase outward-sprawling pressures which, in the longer run, governments will find hard to resist. A theory is needed not only of what promotes social transformation but also of what resists it.
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No doubt resistance to social change is overdetermined. It is not difficult to pick the usual suspects: the “road lobby,” the oil and automobile companies, the engineering profession, the weakness of the public transport agencies, the propaganda of the road service agencies (e.g., the Royal Automobile Club of Victoria), all constantly reinforced by the shock jocks of talkback radio, as well as cowardly or blinkered politicians responding to what they perceive to be public demand (see Mees 2000). But apportioning blame does not serve as an explanation. The idea of a conspiracy among these various actors is intuitively unappealing, as is the notion that any one of them gets what it wants by simply going to the government of the day and lobbying for it. Positions have to be argued, reasons given. It is not as though counterarguments or oppositional lobbies do not exist. The rise of the Green Party throughout Australia in recent years (commanding up to eight percent of the vote nationally and much more in some places) is evidence of the considerable dissatisfaction of a substantial proportion of the electorate with the major parties. The uptake of “sustainability” rhetoric by governments shows the impact of the “green lobby” as well as simple common sense on the part of the public. Whether the substance of sustainability will follow is still very much in question. There is a wealth of public documentation containing reasoning for transport and land use policy. This not only sets the terms of public debate, but it also defines the parameters of what is debatable. It contains a range of “storylines,” and implicitly filters acceptable from unacceptable stakeholders. As Maarten Hajer discovered in relation to the acid rain debate in Europe, storylines cover metaphors, analogies, historical references, clichés, and appeals to collective fears or senses of guilt. Because storylines are what hold discourse together, they are “prime vehicles of change” (Hajer 1995: 63). Storylines both legitimate an actor’s political stance, and position other actors – e.g., as helpful and politically relevant or the reverse. As well as excluding actors from influence, storylines facilitate coalitions. However, while discourse is important, it does not explain the influence of budgetary and socio-organizational factors: the division of responsibility for transport infrastructure funding in a federal system (resource dependency), the cohesion of infrastructure planning agencies (policy community), and the power position of their personnel in the public service (authority). These are the “external” structures mentioned by Denzau and North (1994). Formal institutional structures limit what action can occur and what storylines are influential. Moreover, the concept of “storyline” is insufficient to capture all aspects of discourse. First, in environmental planning, especially where it impinges on infrastructure projects, formal logics play a key role in policy making, especially environmental impact statements which contain closely argued logical structures. Although they may make reference to storylines, they need to be treated differently from government policy documents and other documentary sources. The logic needs to be carefully unpacked and the black box of a statistical model’s assumptions opened up. Second, arguments often need to be backed by evidence of an external reality, so discourse is not always mere
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rhetoric. Sometimes the evidence can be tested in courts or through quasijudicial processes. Storylines coordinate action through what Hajer calls “discourse coalitions.” These are “the ensemble of (1) a set of storylines; (2) the actors who utter those storylines; and (3) the practices in which this discursive activity is based” (Hajer 1995: 65). Hajer distinguishes between discourse coalitions and “traditional political coalitions or alliances” in that storylines, not interests, form the basis of coalition (Hajer 1995: 66). Our view is that this is not the key point. Interests are always present. More importantly, coalitions are facilitated through storylines that provide common, largely tacit understandings for groups of actors, whether they have any actual alliance or not. These understandings powerfully shape the tacit attitudes of one group to another. Vigar (2002) in his analysis of transport politics in the UK showed how the “paradigm” of “predict and provide” gradually shifted toward “predict and prevent” or a “new realism” (Owens 1995; Goodwin 1996). We do not think that “predict and provide” constitutes a “paradigm” but, rather, that is one among a number of storylines supporting a paradigm. In fact, a close reading of Vigar’s analysis reveals the existence of a number of related storylines (e.g., “local economic competitiveness,” “balanced approach,” “heroic engineering”) as also can be found in the work of Mazza and Rydin (1997) comparing traffic policy in UK and Italian cities. Gleeson et al. (2003) found four main barriers to sustainable transport in Australia: a balance of funding at federal level strongly favoring roads, institutional divisions between road and public transport agencies at state level, discourses that excluded consideration of alternatives, and weak political leadership to change the pattern of transport planning. In recent research we found ten varying storylines coordinating action among the engineering, town planning, and economics professions, with central and local government and road service agencies (Low et al. 2003). Our research so far shows that what we have to deal with is a loosely connected, though not necessarily logically coherent, set of storylines (and sometimes arguments) appealing to different groups of actors. Though discourse creates the potential for coalition, actual communicative linkage among actors is not necessary for action to be discursively coordinated. Linking the research of Hajer with that of Latour (1987) and Callon (1987), we use the term “discourse network” to describe the specific set of storylines and arguments that coordinate action in a particular policy domain (findings are discussed in Low and Gleeson 2001, and Low et al. 2003). The “knots” in the network are the related discursive threads of argument, the “nodes” (or “arenas,” (Albrechts 2003: 257)) are institutional structures binding people together, often in particular places, for telephonic or face-to-face communication (Latour 1987: 180, 232). While many planning events take place over a short time, the discourse network is a language domain created through continual persuasive activity over a period of many years. We believe that discourse networks have the primary function of, so to speak, pointing people in the same direction, in the way a magnetic field does to iron filings. In doing so they are able to overcome sector
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logics. These people may have widely diverse opinions and cultures, and the diversity of storylines reflects the diversity of professional, political, and bureaucratic contexts from which they come. For instance, in the transport domain, the well known “predict and provide” storyline (a typical sector logic) appeals to engineers who like the scientific appearance of statistical modeling. A different kind of engineering storyline, “technical fix,” appeals to those who like technical innovation: there is no need to worry about greenhouse emissions resulting from growth in road vehicles because vehicles will soon be powered by hydrogen-based fuel cells. The storyline that excessive demand for road space can be managed by congestion pricing appeals to economists – therefore, again, there is no need to worry that investment in roads will induce additional traffic and produce terminal gridlock. In Australia, though undoubtedly less in Europe, planners have been aligned with road-building policy by the storyline that low-density cities cannot be served effectively by public transport. Politicians are particularly attracted by the storyline that building roads will bring economic growth. All of these stories point to one solution: build more and better roads. All have been challenged – singly. We argue that the whole discursive network needs to be seen for what it is: the discursive foundation of a single policy project. Once a discourse network is well established, there is no need for active coalitions or conspiracies. The web of storylines is enough to ensure that influential persons think and speak in harmony when it comes to discussion of what is, in reality, an extremely controversial policy. Consider the latest war on Iraq. The US president, and the British, Spanish, Danish, and Australian prime ministers (among others), formed a coalition, but articulated a variety of different storylines – shifting emphasis from moment to moment and audience to audience. In opposition, the global peace network was able to mobilize through the Internet a variety of contrary storylines to bring together temporarily a huge variety of oppositional elements articulating in one voice the simple message, “No War.” In both cases the immediate purpose was rapid coordinated action in response to a perceived crisis situation. But whether the coalitions (of the willing and the unwilling) will endure will depend to some degree on how well the discourse networks they constructed can be sustained. The discourse network should be seen as a key element in the networked polity. People are connected to one another by communication media. The networked polity is one in which nodes form around projects coordinating people from different places, organizations, and organizational cultures. To people, interests, and communication technology, therefore, should be added the power of discourse. Institutional Change in the Networked Polity Renewed interest in institutions took hold in political science during the 1980s and 1990s (Hall and Taylor 1996). This “new institutionalism” pays particular
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attention to informal aspects of institutional life, networks of actors, and their cultural norms subsisting within and between formal hierarchies (Torfing 2001: 281) or the “networked polity” (Ansell 2000). The foregoing discussion of “mediatization” raised the question of how societal steering, essentially planning, should be conducted. Questions of particular importance from the planning point of view are how institutions change in the networked polity, and whether (and how) such change can be guided. The new institutionalists are interested in history, in questions such as: how did we arrive here? Denzau, Grossman, and North, for instance, consider that discursive change tends to be marked by “punctuated equilibrium.” The process takes the form of long periods of slow, gradual institutional evolution punctuated by relatively short periods of dramatic change, which we can presume to be periods of “representational redescription” (Denzau and North 1994: 23). During the latter, equilibrium is upset, and a change of the “model space” occurs. The process of punctuated equilibrium is not quite the same as that of “paradigm shift” in Kuhn’s analysis because of the relative precision of terms used in science compared with the interpretive flexibility of meaning characteristic of terms used in political speech and common parlance. Instead, in the field of governance new meanings in one field of application gradually permeate other fields through analogy or metaphor. As this begins to happen, “ideological purists, such as religious fundamentalists, try to resist any change, and their resistance may generate a crisis” (Denzau and North 1994: 25). In Torfing’s perspective, the institutional path becomes dislocated not only by the absorption of new interpretive schemes (as above) but also by the impact of exogenous events. The history of environmentalism in the late twentieth century provides many examples of both: exogenous shocks from Minamata disease, Love Canal, and Bhopal through the “ozone hole” to “global warming”; new interpretive schemes from the “silent spring” and “limits to growth” to Factor 4, Agenda 21, “sustainable development,” and the “triple bottom line.” The oil price has delivered in the past acute external shocks and may be about to deliver some more. This perspective of institutional change pertinent to the networked polity raises new questions about how public policy ought to be shaped. It directs attention to an uncomfortable feature of modern politics, namely that policy is not entirely, and sometimes very little, shaped at will by an elected superior tier of politicians who “make policy.” There is institutional continuity stemming from the cultures and organizations of political structures spanning between state and civil society. Sometimes this continuity is desirable, sometimes it needs to be shifted. But when? Who is to decide, and how? When considering the difficulty that some planners and advocates have encountered in bringing about change in the obdurate field of transport policy in Australia, let us not fall into the assumption that institutional change is always desirable. Paul Pierson’s work, after all, reflects upon the great difficulty of dismantling the welfare state (Pierson 1994). If Pierson is to be believed, European nations have “path dependence” to thank for not being made into clones of the US, thus retaining major elements of their public welfare services.
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The fact that Australian cities still have substantial and extensive rail-based public transport systems is also probably due in no small part to path dependence. Urban planning, and certainly environmental planning, operates over time horizons much longer than those of markets or politics in a representative democracy. It could even be said that institutional and policy continuity is a condition of effective environmental planning. Under what circumstances and when is institutional change, in the sense of “representational redescription,” desirable? The answer at first appears to depend on where one stands politically. If that is indeed the answer, then we live in a relativistic moral universe in which no universal values can be discerned. Whether values are judged to be “good” or “bad” just depends on what interests one represents or from what group one derives one’s identity. The arguments of some philosophers (Derrida, Rorty, Bauman) and some planning theorists (from Rittel and Webber to Flyvbjerg) tend strongly in this direction. If that is the case, then the best planners can do is to leave the matter to be decided by whatever political system happens to prevail in a particular place and time – any political system, because to decide on whether political systems are better or worse, values have to be employed, such as justice, that are meaningless unless in some sense universal. Most environmental planners, we would imagine, do not want to be part of such a relativistic moral universe, and, in any case, there are equally powerful and cogent arguments against pure relativism (e.g., Bhaskar 1993). If those who argue that the stability of the global climate is being destroyed by carbon emissions are correct, not many people are likely to argue that institutional change to correct the global economy is unnecessary. Yet we cannot leave the answer to be determined by prior moral norms, not because we believe in a relativistic moral universe but because one of the universal values we hold true is the essential indeterminacy of democratic politics. That leaves open the question of the key actors and their legitimacy. Even if we assume that strategies to influence path dislocation may be designed by benign actors with the public interest at heart, if benign actors can learn how to change embedded institutions, then so can malign ones. If there is to be democracy, the question of when deliberate institutional change of path is to occur should be left in the hands of an informed public, and the outcome of the decision process cannot be determined in advance. There are, however, a number of reasonable qualifications that could be added. Bhaskar’s argument is that there exists a reality out there “beyond the text” even though we interpret it through our own mental maps. Therefore, we need to find the most effective ways of illuminating that reality. Since there will always be different interpretations of the truth, the best way is to create a forum where competing models of reality can be laid out (together with the supporting evidence), for some kind of debate to take place, and for judgment to be made by . . . well, whom? The only answer one can give to this, if one still believes in democracy, is “a well informed public.” Let us remember the insistence of John Stuart Mill on the vital importance of education for democracy – an ignorant and bigoted public will make ignorant and bigoted decisions. “Social learning,”
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in which the participants “enter a public dialogue with a preparedness to have their preferences changed through reasoned argument,” becomes a crucial aspect of deliberation (Eckersley 2004: 117). If there is to be deliberate, as opposed to accidental change of path (brought about by exogenous shocks), then the only just way of doing it is to let the public, in full possession of the facts, decide, in something like an “environmental review” of the internal and external aspects of key institutions (following the distinction of Denzau and North 1994). In this respect, some attention might be given to Fishkin’s ideas about deliberative polls and citizens’ juries to strengthen democracy (see Fishkin 1992, 1995). This “review” would always be a complex, time-consuming, and financially expensive process that could not occur very often. Nor should it, in the interests of continuity. Perhaps such a review could be conducted on a 15- to 20-year cycle. There are, of course, precedents for such periodic reviews in the field of urban planning. There are also many kinds of practical problems of fairness and representation to be resolved about this process, as well as lessons from past failures. If planners are to be proactive policy advocates and networkers employing many kinds of strategies in support of their goals, should the same planners also have charge of the design and management of an inclusive deliberative process such as a periodic environmental review? Such questions cannot be pursued further here. What should be understood, though, is that in the networked polity we can no longer depend so heavily for reasoned institutional change on the model of topdown steering by elected politicians, with the parliament or council chamber as the only forum for deliberation. Conclusion This essay has suggested that the network society may increasingly be governed by a networked polity. It was then proposed, with some illustration from the transport policy field, that the network in question is not just one of people but also of ideas. This discursive network is path dependent and changes only slowly in ways we are only now beginning to understand. If we can no longer rely on hierarchy or markets to deliver democracy, then the question of how democracy is to be inscribed in the real polity needs to be revived. This essay ends on a somewhat inconclusive note, but it is as well to signal that democracy is a far from completed project, while also looking forward to a more deliberative form of democracy fitted to the reality of a network society. Note 1
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Networks may augment and link hierarchies. Viewed as a political structure, the specific network characteristic, however, is that the nodes are not integrated within a structure of command. This point does not appear in Castells’ analysis where networks are understood primarily in terms of channels of information from node to node, irrespective of the formal power relationship among nodes.
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COMMENTARY
Networks and Planning Thought Judith E. Innes
Networks may well turn out to be the defining concept of the emerging era. While networks have always existed, globalization, information technology, and the accompanying rapidity of change and increasing complexity of our social and political systems have greatly increased the importance of networks and our need to understand and work with them. Fortunately there are major literatures on networks dating back into the 1960s for scholars and practitioners to draw on, as well as literatures emerging today with the revival of interest in networks. Understanding what this work has to offer will be critical to effective urban planning in the century to come. It offers a rich set of ideas and empirical findings that can and should be integrated into planning thought and practice. A good starting place for those new to the topic is a review article (Berry et al. 2004) for public managers. This outlines three intellectual traditions in network thinking that are as relevant to planning as to public management. In the sociological tradition the authors identify three distinct schools of thought, each with potential for enriching different aspects of planning thought. Sociometry diagrams relationship networks among individuals and identifies patterns of interaction, cliques, and small-group dynamics. It also has developed methods to look at the quality and intensity of interactions. The Manchester anthropologists believe in focusing both on structures of relationships and on the contents conveyed in these. They look at the roles of people in these networks and pay attention to embedded context and institutionalized expectations. They have developed measures of the quality of dyadic relations such as reciprocity, intensity, and durability and measures of macro network features such as density, reachability, or diffusion of information. This group includes the classic work of Claude Fischer (Fischer et al. 1977), who looked at place-based social networks and how they are linked to attachment to place and to the creation of authentic community. The Harvard
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structuralists developed the mathematics of networks and were able to develop models to see the larger patterns of network dynamics. In the political science tradition the authors also identify three streams of thought. The first links policy change, agenda-setting, innovation, and diffusion to networks. Another looks at agenda-setting through the lens of community power, interest groups, and issue networks of policy insiders. This includes the work on advocacy coalitions (Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith 1993). A third stream of thought is linked to Ostrom’s institutional rational analysis and her research on collaborative management of common pool resources (Ostrom 1990). Public administration scholars tend to focus on network management as they rely increasingly on decentralized forms of action where different groups are tasked with implementing aspects of public programs. They have written on intergovernmental management, typologies of networks based on field studies, the different skills needed for managers in networks as opposed to hierarchies (Gage and Mandell 1990), and the impacts of networks on policy outputs and democratic values (Provan and Milward 1995). Another line of research focuses on network performance and outcomes, as befits a field which tries to use networks instrumentally (Provan and Milward 1995). Recent literature is exploding, emerging in part from the information technology field, which addresses the workings of complex, far-flung networks. This looks for example at what is efficient and effective in terms of pathways and connectedness. The business literature explores such topics as how effective business strategy can involve a large organization working with an array of smaller and more nimble organizations. This kind of networked group can stay ahead of the rapid changes in society and respond quickly to external events and changes in technology and opportunities (Saxenian 1994). I have laid out this brief summary in the hope that it will trigger ideas in the readers about intellectual traditions they can draw on to help build planning thought for the network society. As a field we have barely tapped the potential of network thinking and certainly have not tightly linked our work with these highly pertinent bodies of research and theory. All three of the disciplinary traditions speak to key aspects of what we do in planning. The sociological tradition offers rich opportunities for new work on place-based networks and how they are changing and for linking them to non placebased networks. It can help us see the social and spatial consequences. Sociometry can help us with understanding the small-group work that constitutes much of planning’s basic activity. This work allows opportunities for rigorous quantitative analysis and identification of network patterns that we cannot see without this kind of study. The political/policy science tradition offers much to those who think about and try to develop more effective planning practice and theory to aid that practice. The concepts and empirical research on how policy networks operate can help us to build theory and gain insights into what network planning and governance might look like. The public administration tradition can help us to work instrumentally with networks to accomplish goals. The information technology literature helps us to see large and complex network
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patterns that offer models and empirical evidence about which patterns produce which results. The business literature provides a model for how public agencies, jurisdictions and nonprofits can cooperate for greater productivity and faster response time to crises and urgent needs. It is my view that ultimately understanding the role of networks in contemporary society and learning how best to build and take advantage of their power in planning will depend on the use of complexity thinking. In this view our complex social/political system is in the best case a complex adaptive system – that is, one that operates on the basis of distributed intelligence, with all its actors able to work in their own local arenas with some shared heuristics, but also able to make their own self-interested decisions as they face their immediate environment. This involves considerable dialogue, and depends on a system that is not hierarchical and regulatory, but rather incentive-based. It involves three features, diversity of players, interaction among them and selection mechanisms that allow individual actors to use feedback from the environment so they can adapt their actions in a timely way (Axelrod and Cohen 1999). If these conditions can be met, complexity theory suggests that both urban systems and planning systems can be productively responsive to change and move to higher levels of performance. The chapters in this section each have something different to say about networks and cities or networks and planning, as each looks at the idea from a different angle. Low’s focus is on networks in governance – on networks as part of the polity. In particular he looks at discourse networks, which, he says, are a key element of a networked polity. He illustrates this with the example of urban transport in Australia and adds to our understanding of how storylines and language help to empower certain networks and frame policy debates. Low also examines how discursive change, along with exogenous events, play a part in institutional change. He notes that hierarchy and markets cannot be relied on to deliver democracy, but that a more deliberative democracy can fit better to the reality of a network society. His argument is a valuable one in linking discourse, deliberation, and institutional change through the concept of networks. Verma and Shin take as their starting place Castells’ concept of the network society and of networks, which they describe as a globally interconnected and interdependent “behemoth” of firms, groups, territories, and populations. They explore the potential theoretical relationship of the “network society” to Habermas’ views of communicative rationality. They conclude quite correctly, I believe, that the communicative action paradigm is broad enough to accommodate the new reality. Indeed, my own work has linked networks particularly to collaborative planning, arguing that collaboration builds networks and helps them to work effectively in a variety of ways (Booher and Innes 2002). Beauregard is interested in the literary and linguistic dimension of the network idea, exploring the metaphor of the “network city.” He compares along the way some of the other adjectives and metaphors that have been used to
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describe the city, making the case that these descriptors help the scholar and planner to intellectually manage the complexity of the city. In his view the network metaphor is a particularly powerful one in that it opens into a variety of other ideas, gives form to the city’s complex and changing organization, and helps us see it in new ways. The networks are potentially self-organized, voluntary, interest-based, collaborative, adaptive, and innovative. Beauregard’s attention to metaphor is valuable for planning thinkers. Too often we ignore the importance of language and figures of speech for shaping our ideas. His argument that the network concept can lead us in more interesting directions than some other city descriptions gives us food for thought. Myers identifies the importance of networks, especially at the place-based local level and notes how networks are now making linkages across places. He is interested in how networks can help with thinking about and doing planning for the future – in how networks might stretch into at least the near-term future to help people to go beyond thinking solely about the present place. His chapter reminds us that planning is, indeed, about the future and that we need to explore ways that the network idea can help us advance planning’s fundamental purposes. To move forward on integrating the ideas and potential of networks into planning thought and practice, as a community of scholars, we need first to familiarize ourselves with the ideas and accomplishments of scholars in other fields who have made important advances in the understanding and analysis of networks in many settings. Second, we need to design and implement systematic empirical research (both quantitative and qualitative) to document the networks that exist in urban settings and planning processes today. We know very little about these though we talk about them a lot. This research should look at the linkages between actors as well as at the content of what flows through the network. If it is information, what kind? If it is heuristics or shared meanings, how do these come about? If it is power, how does the power play out and who benefits? We need to gather adequate data to identify patterns in networks and assess what kinds of patterns are productive and how they came into being. We should also look at how networks evolve over time and at what kinds of results emerge from networks. We need to find ways to identify the kinds of networks we want to encourage and the kinds we should change or even destroy (such as power elite networks, or criminal networks). Professionals in policy fields will never be able to “use” networks in an instrumental way as they might a planning tool like zoning, because these are evolving, typically not bounded, and adapt constantly. We are all embedded in networks and they both constrain us and offer opportunities. We need to “go with the flow” while trying to improve that flow to achieve some of the outcomes that can at best emerge from networks. These include social cohesion, linkages of otherwise excluded groups into the opportunity system of the larger society, mobilization that requires many players acting on their own, integration of various forms of knowledge into action and policy, and the building of
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deliberative democracy and a civil society which can better participate in public decisions. As we learn more about how different network patterns produce different results, we can do things such as create more densely linked networks through collaborative processes or encourage clusters of networked players in particular places or among particular unorganized interests. We can have an impact on the information and ideas that flow through networks, find ways to reward those who participate, and troubleshoot when necessary networks start to disintegrate.
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PART II
Organization of Space and Time
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Impact of Physical Networks
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CHAPTER FIVE
Cities and Transport: Exploring the Need for New Planning Approaches Luca Bertolini
Which Transport for which Cities? The major cities of Western Europe and North America changed dramatically in the last half of the twentieth century. The vast flows of people, capital, energy, goods, and information through ever expanding networks impressed themselves on – without eradicating – the older spatial patterns of the pre-war metropolis. The tasks of adapting old forms to new possibilities (and vice versa) demand a shift in the way that professional planners, and most importantly infrastructure specialists, describe their objectives and actions. Rather than focus just on mobility and communication demands, the deliberative process of the “network society” appropriately focuses on the complex interaction between the forms of movement and those of land use, environmental quality, and sustainability; on balancing the transformative claims of the extended networks and the conservative claims of local political jurisdictions and neighborhoods. In recent years, I have tried to shape these conversations swirling around (an extended) transportation planning by embedding them in a normative conception of “urbanity”.1 For this purpose, I distinguish four dimensions of the concept: 1
specialization and interchange in the economic sphere;
2
diversity and freedom of choice in the socio-cultural sphere;
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civic exhibition, or the public realm;
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connectivity, in addition to the traditional emphasis on proximity and territorial continuity.
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In the first part of this chapter, I illustrate the practical implications of these four dimensions of urbanity for an extended transportation planning by pointing to several projects and controversies in Amsterdam.2 In the second part, I explore the related issue of how to actually bring about change. Specialization and Interchange The first dimension of urbanity refers to the ongoing division of labor, particularly developed in cities, where opportunities to network with closely related, specialized activities and various producers, and to interact directly with consumers, abound. An innovative urban climate emerges from the combination between this extensive division of labor and the multiple physical and institutional marketplaces (see, among others, Storper (1997), Porter (1998), Simmie and Kirby (1998) on the territorial and cultural dimension of the urban economy). Besides this innovative cultural climate, the development of specialized economic activities requires an array of attractive conditions for location. Accessibility becomes increasingly important in this respect. In Amsterdam (Figure 5.1), several new “nodes” emerged next to the historic core (around the Central Station – CS), still the node best connected by public transport. The new nodes typically combine excellent public and private transport accessibility. The main node, the Schiphol airport, integrates in a unique way intercontinental air links and direct connections to regional and national motorways and railway networks. The airport area has concentrated within it a rich range of activities requiring spaces for offices, conferences, hotels, retail, and logistics; office space rents rank the highest in the Netherlands and the employment base – roughly 50,000 – is equivalent to the city center’s employment. Besides the airport area, other transportation interchanges have specialized functionally, such as Amstel and, particularly, Zuid stations that have clustered large office complexes in financial and business sectors. The areas around Sloterdijk and Bijlmer stations accommodate a mix of warehouses and office spaces (some of these offices are part of a dynamic ICT sector). The firms there benefit more, not only from space availability but also from better access to the regional labor market and to the metropolitan facilities, than do firms in the city center, dependent on public transportation, and firms in the suburbs, dependent on private transportation. On the contrary, many specialized, small-scale professional services remained located in the densely built historic center, a pedestrian and cycling area, which proved to be the ideal setting for Internet-based and multi-media businesses. Services have clustered functionally: hospitals along the western and southern sections of the motorway ring; the congress and exhibition center, the insurance exchange, the district tribunal, and the Free University around Zuid station; a regional retail and leisure complex at Bijlmer station. In the old city, more small-scale shopping, entertainment and cultural activities continue to thrive. These patterns of functional specialization have been reinforced, after
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Built-up areas Airport Seaport Railway Motorway Railway station
Zaanstad
Central Station
Haarlem Sloterdijk
Almere
Lelylaan
Amstel Zuid
Schiphol Airport
Bijlmer
Hoofddorp
0
5 Kilometers
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Hilversum
Figure 5.1 Amsterdam, the Metropolitan Area, with Main Transport Infrastructure and (Sub)Centers
an unfortunate attempt to develop downtown offices there between 1980 and 1990, through newly opened (or in the course of being opened) cultural and leisure facilities along the waterfront, east and west of the Central Station. All in all, two basic types of urban centers are thus developing in Amsterdam: dynamic sub-centers in nodal zones enjoying exceptional accessibility by both car and public transport, and an expanding and specializing old city. Similar trends can be observed in other cities and towns in the metropolitan area, albeit with a somewhat lower dynamics and a more local orientation. While its lower accessibility by car puts the old city at a disadvantage, it also fosters a unique environment. Certain kinds of economic activities, including many high-profile, and innovation-oriented activities, appear to profit from its specific, diverse accessibility mix. The high share of car-free modes can be said to be even a necessary prerequisite for the unique degree of informality and conviviality (a decisive location factor for many). But there are limits: a key transport planning challenge is that of identifying the level of regional accessibility, including accessibility by car (and truck), that the historic center still needs in order to maintain its vitality and to avoid turning into the exclusive domain of tourists. On the other hand, the emerging sub-centers need to ensure that slow forms of accessibility, including pedestrian, fit a lively urban environment. At the regional level, the broad concern is how to deal with this diversity of accessibility conditions and with changes caused by transformations in the hierarchy
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of transportation networks. Transport planners should not reject these differences and instabilities through a pursuit of generic accessibility improvements or through an exclusive focus on shorter-term mobility management. Rather, they should capitalize on the distinctive accessibility features of different locations, in order to cater for the combination of mobility requirements – both fast and slow, both individual and collective, both physical and virtual – that seem to characterize contemporary urban economies (Phelps and Osawa 2003). Reinforcing such diversity would not only be important for the economy, but also conducive to an urban environment where a variety of cultures and lifestyles can thrive, as will be discussed below. Diversity and Freedom of Choice A variety of lifestyles and cultures and their interactions provide the city’s inhabitants with a host of new choices that represent, traditionally, one of the most attractive dimensions of urbanity. This does not mean that each location must be organized in terms of a mixed formula; but rather that there will be a mosaic of different cultures at the scale of the city, often displaying characteristics of homogeneity within their particular communities. Homogeneity becomes problematic in spatial terms only if its magnitude is a factor aggravating deprivation. Diversity in the accessibility features of locations can contribute to the development of such a variety of living environments. In Amsterdam, residential choices (at least of those who can choose!) seem increasingly influenced by differences between more and less accessible, more and less intensely used, urban areas. For instance, the walking and cycling environments of the historic “canal belt” of Amsterdam and the car environments of the green suburbs around Hilversum and Haarlem are both highly desired residential environments, albeit by different sorts of populations. Furthermore, a recent upsurge in the demand for high-quality apartments has emerged next to multimode peripheral nodes that are well connected to destinations outside of the urban region. At the other extreme, there are the relatively non-accessible locations that provide an ideal setting for experiments in alternative cultures and lifestyles, illustrated by the squatter tradition in Amsterdam. On a different level, the accessibility to natural features (green areas, water) plays also an important role in bringing about an attractive and varied range of living conditions. As regards the use and perceptions of nature and open space, the immediate surroundings of the home seem more important to users than the facilities available on a larger scale (in Amsterdam, for instance, 90 percent of the green areas used by residents is in the immediate vicinity, only 10 percent is in more remote areas). However, from the point of view of transport planning and infrastructure development, the crux of the matter lies, rather, at the regional scale, as choices at this scale directly affect the possibilities at local levels. In Amsterdam, the traditional concept of a “lobe city” (star-like, built-up urban “fingers” along public transport corridors alternating with “wedges” of open space at walking and cycling distance) is still relevant in terms of its aims – especially that of generalized access to open space – but
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it does not meet the needs of the increasing scale of activity, the differentiation of lifestyles and, crucially, the high mobility. A more useful concept in this respect may be that of the “aesthetics of mobility,” recently introduced by the Dutch architect Francine Houben (Houben and Calabrese 2003). Houben’s central thesis affirms a shift of emphasis from places to routes in the use and perception of the landscape, from “staying in” to “moving through.” Under this thesis, the transportation infrastructure needs to be considered as a “room with a view.” Houben applies this idea mainly to motorways and railways, although the “slow” cycling, pedestrian, and sailing routes that network the urban with the regional landscape and that make possible its discovery and experience, are as important as the “fast” routes. Civic Exhibition In the preceding sections the focus has been on the potential role of transport and infrastructure policies in fostering specialization and diversity in the economic and socio-cultural sphere. An essential characteristic of urbanity, however, is that alongside opportunities to create these individual realms, there are enough places for the various economies and lifestyles to meet and confront each other, or opportunities for the development of “public” realms (Lofland 1998). As Geddes (1915) already contended a long time ago, for a city to be truly urban, it is of fundamental importance to have meeting places, which are the scene of the population’s strivings and conflicts, and act as places of “civic exhibition.” Fundamental preconditions for developing a strong public realm are qualities such as physical and institutional accessibility, non-coercion of behavior, conditions for spontaneity, an informal sphere, and, perhaps above all, the presence of diverse people and activities, coupled with the possibility to express even radical differences (Sennett 1970, 1977; Crawford 1995; Deutsche 1996; Lofland 1998; Hajer and Reijndorp 2002). Traditional examples of places where this can occur are city squares and streets, parks and markets. In today’s highly mobile urban society, however, places at the confluences of traffic flows are possibly becoming more important (Bertolini 2000; Hajer and Reijndorp 2002; Bertolini and Dijst 2003). These are invariably the places that gather the most diverse groups of people; on the contrary, many traditional public spaces tend to be increasingly dominated by a single group, be it the tourists in the historic city center, or the local residents in the socially homogeneous peripheral estates and suburbs. But there is a flip side, best typified in Amsterdam by Schiphol airport. Schiphol is often referred to as the prototype of a new urbanity and, arguably, it is a distinct contribution to other dimensions of urbanity, but only to a limited extent is it a place of civic exhibition. The efficient handling of flows is such a paramount objective in this “zero-friction” environment (Hajer 1999), that there are few civic exhibition opportunities for different individuals and groups. And this seems the core of the problem, because it is precisely the presence of contrasting manifestations of culture and lifestyle that is important (Crawford 1995; Deutsche 1996). In this respect, there may be more interesting possibilities at
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other emerging urban nodes, and, most notably, at the railway station areas in Amsterdam. A unique variety of mobility flows (from local to regional, and beyond) is matched there by a great variety of functions (including offices, retail and leisure, and housing). However, too often the reality is still that of a strict separation of flows and functions in space and/or in time, and of strong limitations to the range of possible uses. To a large extent, transport planning and infrastructure development cannot determine the actual degree of mixing and interaction in the public realm. They are never neutral, however. For instance, the internal organization of the transportation interchange and the characteristics of the physical links to the immediate surroundings will have a direct impact on the opportunities for interaction between different groups. How much do the worlds of car and public transport users, of cyclists and walkers actually overlap? And how permeable is the transportation interchange to the local neighborhood? These are matters that become even more important if put in the context of a strong in-built tendency of new urban centers and networks of mobility to form enclaves and effectively “splinter” from the rest of the city (Graham and Marvin 2001). Connectivity The fourth and last dimension of urbanity is the most explicitly linked to transport planning and infrastructure development. The assumption of a direct, simple relationship between the urban built environment and the city’s social and economic life – or of an urbanity strongly rooted in physical proximity – is increasingly questionable. Since the industrial revolution, modern transport and telecommunications techniques have provided humans with ever more ways of interacting in the absence of physical proximity. It has thus become increasingly possible for people to live, work, and recreate in different places, and for firms to spatially de-couple different components of the production processes. Many urban households and businesses continue to seize these opportunities to escape from the disadvantages of physical concentration and to decentralize spatially. There is, however, an intriguing paradox (Ascher 1995; Hall 1996; Urry 2002; Graham in this book). Notwithstanding all the hype about decentralization or even dematerialization of the city, physical interaction between people in many urban activities is proving to be still irreplaceable and increasing rather than decreasing in value. It has been demonstrated, for instance, that face-to-face contacts play a pivotal role in high-quality business services (Wheeler et al. 2000), but it seems that this has also been the case with the up-and-coming sectors of culture, leisure, and the media. Physical human interaction appears to be retaining its essential role in the socio-cultural sphere too, as testified by the enduring, and in many cases growing, success of live festivals and other events. The effect of the progress in transport and telecommunication technologies seems to grant the possibility of being much more selective about when (i.e., for which purpose) and to what extent (i.e., how often) physical proximity – or face-to-face contact – is needed (Mitchell 2000; Urry 2002), rather than to produce a one-way decentralization or even diffu-
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sion of the city. All these developments make connectivity – or the qualities of the “space of flows” (Castells 1996) – an increasingly important dimension of urbanity. Infrastructure provides the material links allowing for the spatially disjointed city to continue functioning as a whole and, thus, for the possibility of maintaining physical contacts when required. Connections at various scales are needed to complement the variety of types of economic activity and individual lifestyles that go with urbanity, each with its specific accessibility demands. In this respect, transport planners face a practical dilemma. While the evolution sketched above ideally requires connections at all levels, infrastructure development remains highly capital intensive and, increasingly, also politically complex to implement, making it essential to set priorities: which spatial scales should be privileged? In the Amsterdam case two appear especially important. The first is the regional scale, which corresponds to a broadly defined daily urban system, or, roughly, to the area represented in Figure 5.1. This is because it is at this scale that by far the largest and growing share of the everyday flows of people and goods feeding the local economy and civic society takes place. The main thing missing is a high-grade public transport system; moreover, the congestion in the overcrowded motorway network is becoming a pressing issue. The second strategic spatial scale is that of the international links. Exchanges are expected to intensify, in parallel with developments in business and tourist networks. Currently, these links rely almost entirely on air travel, but soon high-speed trains will also serve them. The first point here is that more convincing, long-term answers to the question of how to combine sustained growth in air travel with quality of life in the airport surroundings need to be found. The second important task is to find ways to link effectively all the major centers in the region (not just the airport or the high-speed train stations) to these evolving international networks. In the field, a clear vision on transport development priorities is absent, and the municipality – like local governments elsewhere – seems, rather, to participate in all sorts of negotiations for all sorts of infrastructure, reacting to opportunities and threats as they arise. What, then, is a better approach? A more explicit debate and clearer choices relative to the urbanity dimensions discussed above would be part of it, but the intrinsic complexities of change in real world cities must be also recognized. The latter point is the object of the next section. How to Bring about Change? In the preceding section, the task of transportation planning has been specified through the characteristic dimensions of urbanity. In this section, the focus will shift from discussing relevant problems and potential solutions to identifying specific urban mobility policies that can bring about change in the existing urban transport and land use system. This is a crucial and often neglected
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point. Most urban mobility policies are defined in terms of optimization: how to maximize mobility benefits and minimize mobility costs. Policy documents typically follow this line (see for instance, Commission of the European Communities 2001, or World Business Council for Sustainable Development 2001). While certainly reasonable, this approach also has important limits. A well-known difficulty is agreeing on definitions and measurements of benefits and costs, that is, on the goals of the policy process. But there is more than that. An approach that centers on optimization also requires that there is a sufficient degree of certainty about the ways to achieve those goals, that is, about the actual impacts of suggested policy measures. This is, however, seldom the case. Rather, uncertainty about both policy goals and ways to achieve them seems an intrinsic feature of the urban mobility system, which fundamentally restricts the scope for optimization and, more generally, for a purely rational-choice approach to change. A considerable body of literature on the limits of rational-choice approaches has emerged; this is particularly relevant to complex processes of change, such as those connected with urban mobility issues (for an overview, see Chapter 2 in Meyer and Miller 2001). However, promising ways of dealing with these issues have been proposed. A recent and particularly appealing way is the application of evolutionary theories and methods. The rest of the chapter explores this potential and illustrates it in the Amsterdam case. The Transport Land Use Feedback Cycle, and Beyond The relationship between transport and urban form has long intrigued scholars. Both historical (Muller 1995; Hoyle and Knowles 1998) and geographical (Cervero 1998; Kenworthy and Laube 1999) analyses document the high degree of interdependency between the two. However, causal links remain difficult to prove. A feedback cycle where changes in transport and land use patterns both influence each other, and where external factors also interfere, is the widely accepted way of illustrating this complex relationship (Manheim 1974; Hanson 1995; Wegener and Fürst 1999; Meyer and Miller 2001). The time aspect is particularly important (Batten 1996; Wegener and Fürst 1999): while the activity and mobility patterns of individual actors can adapt quite rapidly (in some cases even on a day-to-day basis), changes in the shape of transportation networks and in urban morphology are of a very long-term nature (in the order of decades). Limits to the rationality of actors (due to lack of or inability to cope with information, organizational constraints, conflicting interests, etc.) further complicate the picture. The node-place model introduced by the author (Bertolini 1999, Figure 5.2) offers a framework to further penetrate this dynamics. The basic idea underlying the model is that – in line with the feedback cycle – improving transport provision in a location (or its node-value) will create conditions favorable to the further concentration and diversification of functions there (because of improved accessibility). In turn, intensification and diversification of land uses in a location (or increase in its place-value) will create conditions favorable to
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the further development of infrastructure there (because of growth in the demand for connections). The emphasis on “conditions for” is important, as it allows a distinction between the existence of a development potential, and its actual realization. As we will see, the latter may or may not occur, and reactions can be in different directions. Five ideal-typical situations can be distinguished in the model. Along the middle line are “balanced” locations, where the node and the place are equally strong. At the top of the line are areas “under stress.” Here the intensity and diversity of both transportation flows and urban activities is maximal. This indicates that the potential for land use development is highest (strong node) and that it has been realized (strong place). The same can be said about the potential for transport development. However, these are also locations where the large concentrations of flows and activities mean that there is an equally great chance of conflicts between multiple claims on a limited space. At the bottom of the middle line is a third ideal-typical situation, represented
Node Stress Unbalanced node
Balance
Unbalanced place Dependence
Place
Figure 5.2 The Node-place Model
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by the “dependent” areas. The struggle for space is minimal here, but the demand for transportation services from residents in the area, workers, and other users and the demand for urban activities from travelers are both so low that supply can be held in place only by the intervention of other factors (such as peculiarities in the topography of the area or in the morphology of the transportation networks, external subsidies, etc.). Finally, two “unbalanced” situations can be identified. On one side – at the top left of the diagram – are the “unbalanced nodes,” areas where transportation supply is much more developed than urban activities (such as at new motorway outlets or new railway stations). On the other side – at the bottom right of the diagram – are the “unbalanced places,” where the opposite is true (as, for instance, in many historic city centers). The latter two are particularly interesting sorts of location types. It can be assumed that they will show a strong tendency to move toward a more balanced state. However, and this is crucial, this could happen in two radically different ways. An “unbalanced node” could either increase its place-value (for instance by attracting property development) or decrease its node-value (perhaps through reduction in the level of transportation services). A reverse reasoning can be applied to an “unbalanced place”: either the level of connection will be increased or a different, and perhaps more locally oriented, functional mix will be developed. The emergence of “unbalanced” nodes and places, either as a deliberate policy move or as the result of autonomous trends, can be seen as a condition for the development of the transport and land use system: without unbalanced situations, there will be no change at all. At the same time, the fact that the system can react in different ways means that different, and possibly divergent, development paths are possible. Development Paths With the help of the node-place model both up- and downgrading processes of either single locations or entire urban-regional systems (as accumulations of single-location developments) can be analyzed. Let us illustrate this through an application of the model to station areas in the Amsterdam urban region (Figure 5.3; for details see Bertolini 1999). In Amsterdam, there are examples of station areas under stress (Central Station, CS), of dependent locations, and of unbalanced nodes and places (most evidently Sloterdijk, AS). Since this analysis was done, developments have confirmed this characterization of the different locations: for instance, the “under stress” Central Station is still struggling with the complex redevelopment, the “dependent” Vlugtlaan (AV) has been closed down because it was not economically viable, and the unbalanced station areas in the periphery of the city show the greatest development dynamics. Strikingly, both upgrading and downgrading processes are under way here, as described in the preceding sections of this chapter. Most interesting are the cumulative patterns at the level of the entire urban region. As already discussed, areas at the very top of the middle line can offer high opportunities for development but may bring about the most intense
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AC
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0.0 0.0 Legend Amsterdam Amstel Amsterdam Bijlmer Amsterdam CS Amsterdam Lelylaan Amsterdam Muiderpoort
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Figure 5.3 Application of the Node-place Model to Station Areas in the Amsterdam Urban Region
conflicts. The (relative) borders of growth will be reached here before the ones in areas with lower node- and place-values. The withdrawal, in the beginning of the 1990s, of an ambitious project to redevelop the areas around Amsterdam Central Station (as part of the so-called IJ-banks project) is a concrete signal of this. Crucial factors were the great complications and high costs of accommodating a massive new program in a location already “under stress,” combined with institutional risks. If growth is not to end up in areas not well connected to the railway network, it becomes important then to have alternatives with adequate public transport capacity. Amsterdam has those alternative station areas, and in this respect differs from other cities in the Netherlands and elsewhere. The better starting position of Amsterdam does not mean that planning always capitalizes upon it, however. While the market demand has been clearly oriented toward the peripheral railway and motorway rings for several years, node and place development initiatives have long remained uncoordinated. There are, for instance, important public transport nodes in relatively undeveloped places, and intense and/or diverse concentrations of activities around relatively undeveloped nodes. Current developments, such as the intensification and diversification of functions around Zuid station and the
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improvement of transport services at Bijlmer station, go in the right direction, but address the situation only partially, because they still try to direct growth toward single areas, not toward the entire urban-regional network of nodes and places. From a change-centered perspective, it is particularly interesting to connect the development patterns in the urban region to the morphology of the transportation networks. Most importantly, in Amsterdam the railway network shows a combination of a radial and a tangential pattern (Figure 5.1). Without this highly articulated network, peripheral areas would never have enjoyed a public transport accessibility matching that of the historic city center, and new development would most likely have ended up as car-dependent locations, as in many other cities, ultimately resulting in a very different urban configuration. This fact underlines that the process of shaping conditions favorable to a particular transport and land use pattern is a very long one. The present network morphology in Amsterdam is the result of a very long chain of decisions and actions at different levels that often, unconsciously or unwillingly, contributed to the final result. These include the reservations for a railway freight line around the city as early as the beginning of the twentieth century (which never materialized, but which provided for crucial rights of way), the development of a national motorway grid since the 1960s (which, in Amsterdam, could largely profit from those rights of way), and the gradual connection of the Schiphol airport to the national railway system since the 1980s (which followed the same corridors). Perhaps needless to say, all these decisions and actions were unrelated to any deliberate attempt at developing the multimode, polycentric urban system described in this chapter. The only major transport infrastructure that purposefully sought to support such a pattern is the metro ring line, which connects all the major peripheral centers, and which was opened as recently as 1997. Although Amsterdam’s pattern of development has evident theoretical advantages, it was lengthy and dependent on chance to some extent. It may not represent the best solution for other cities. The gap between the model and the reality requires an alternative strategy. For instance, how much of a solution is transit-oriented development (Calthorpe 1993) of this sort for car-dependent American cities? Haven’t they gone too far? And how about exploding, resourcepoor cities in the developing world? Will they ever be able to build such extensive transportation networks? The point is not to exclude an affirmative answer. However, the great complications, unpredictability, and very long-term nature of every transition to a different transport and land use pattern should be better assessed than the urban mobility literature and practice do. This means that, crucially, the same general urbanity objectives discussed in the preceding sections of this chapter could, and often should lead to different transportation and infrastructure choices in different contexts, depending on specific possibilities and limitations. What works for urbanity in Amsterdam will not necessarily work in San Francisco or Curitiba, and vice versa.
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An Evolutionary Approach The way of looking at the interaction between transport and land use changes sketched above has many analogies with the kind of evolutionary thinking that is successfully extending from biology into the social sciences and particularly into economics (Nelson and Winter 1982; Van den Bergh and Fetchenhauer 2001). Within this stream of work, the assumption of (a single) equilibrium as a “natural” state of the system is also questioned, and attention is directed, rather, to processes of change. Most relevant are studies of technological change, which have often focused on transportation (Grübler 1990, 1998). In these studies, technological change is seen as a process in which, similar to biological evolution, new technologies emerge and old ones disappear through a continuous process of variation and selection. A crucial concept is that of coevolution, or the idea that in the process also the selection environment (in our case, the city) changes together with technologies (in our case, transportation networks). The application of evolutionary theories and methods to the study of the interaction of transport and land use in an urban setting, as embodied in the node-place model discussed above, and more explicitly and thoroughly elaborated in other fields, seems extremely promising. More specifically, the main objectives would be: (i) to understand better the interdependencies between changes in the urban transport and land use systems as they translate into different co-evolution paths, and consequently (ii) to identify transport and land use policy interventions that can facilitate such a development within given (or chosen) context-constraints. The latter would most notably include limitations, but also possibilities in the locally available economic, social, and/or environmental resources. Conclusions: Claiming Ground In this chapter I have explored two related paths of enquiry into the relationship between transport and cities, in order to go beyond some of the limitations of the current approaches to urban transport planning and infrastructure development. The first path of enquiry, reacting to the generic way in which urban qualities are typically treated in urban mobility discussions, has searched for links between transport planning and infrastructure development issues and a broader debate on the dimensions of urbanity, as most notably carried out in the urban studies and sociological literature. The second path of enquiry has attempted to address the limits of approaches centered too much on ideal models and non-replicable examples, by shifting the focus to the evolution of existing urban transport and land use systems. The worth of this double exercise does not lie so much in the provision of final answers but, rather, in the identification of relevant questions. Economic and social processes shape mobility networks and urban morphologies, but the latter provide, in turn, a still essential physical support for those same processes, selectively constraining and
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facilitating them. This second relationship has always been central to the discipline of urban planning. However, the present shift to a “network society” urgently demands that more attention is given to the specific implications of developments in the infrastructure domain, claiming ground that is still too much dominated by narrow technical rationalities and obscure political bargaining. Notes 1 2
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I am greatly indebted to Salet 1996, and to our common project documented in Bertolini and Salet 2003. Amsterdam – with 735,000 inhabitants – is the core city of a metropolitan area of around 1,750,000 inhabitants, which is, in its turn, part of the wider constellation of cities known as the Randstad, the highly urbanized West of the Netherlands, with around 6.5 million inhabitants. While Amsterdam is unique in many respects, I believe that this discussion can be of inspiration for other cities as well.
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CHAPTER SIX
Networking for Trans-national “Missing Links”: Tracing the Political Success of European High-speed Rail in the 1990s Deike Peters
Introduction Already well before Manuel Castells’ (1996) The Rise of the Network Society, “networks” had become an important new buzzword concept in planning and public policy-making. Broadly speaking, scholars associate it with the move from more hierarchical political and societal structures firmly rooted in the idea of the sovereign nation-state to a world where decisions at the local, regional, national, and global level all involve an increasing multitude of both governmental and non-governmental actors. This move toward multi-level governance has been particularly dramatic in Western Europe, where the establishment and progressive institutionalization of the European Union as a new form of both government and governance has brought about important shifts in policy-making structures (Marks et al. 1996; Bache 1998; Hix 1998; Peterson and Bomberg 1999; Scharpf 1999; Wallace and Wallace 2000). This chapter uses the development of trans-national high-speed rail infrastructures in Western Europe in the 1990s as a case study to investigate which kinds of governance “networks” were, and still are, responsible for embarking on such a vast international infrastructure program. This study questions the often only implicitly made yet wide-spread assumption that a move from hierarchical structures to “networks” necessarily implies a move toward more democratic and transparent decision-making structures. Rather, the evidence supports instead Benz and Papadopoulos’s (2003: 2) conclusion that “networks are necessarily exclusive – i.e., they consist of interactions among limited groups of actors. They
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constitute particular power relations, which do not conform to the principle of equality and inclusiveness.” At least in the case of infrastructure planning, “democratic” networking at the EU level includes a rather narrow set of key actors. The story of “networking for ‘missing links’ in Europe” appears more like a story of semiexclusive “old boys networking” between industry representatives and national politicians than anything else. On the other hand, broader political and social movements in favor of a “modern,” “sustainable” transport system as well as other factors, more institutional and structural, also played a key role in promoting the construction of an international high-speed rail system. This chapter also provides insights into the effectiveness of the EU as a new form of governance. The move toward an “ever closer union” has had an undeniably positive impact on decision making in Europe. However, this favorable assessment is mostly limited to contexts in which prospects for economic modernization and growth provide additional motivating factors for taking action. Analyzing Networks: Inspiration from the Literature What is the best way to go about analyzing and characterizing stakeholders and their powers and preferences within the new context of European governance? The concept of “policy networks” is a particularly abused term here. At this point in the debate, there are probably more articles claiming to “clarify” the concept as there were articles defining it originally. Although my own approach is similar to that of Robinson (1994: 872) who treats the term as “a ‘generic term’ encompassing all types of interest group mediation,” at least one key distinction should be made: The German (and Dutch) literature on the concept tends to treat networks more broadly as a new form of governance and an alternative to markets and hierarchies, while British and American scholars tend to focus more narrowly on how networks influence the development and implementation of particular policies. Börzel (1998), for example, distinguishes between an (Anglo-American) “interest intermediation school” and a (German) “governance” school of policy networks. Building on Rhodes’ (1997: 7) definition of policy networks as aggregating the interests of actors in a highly “differentiated polity” in a context of fragmented policies, Peterson and Bomberg (1999: 8) characterize EU policy networks as tending to be “technocratic, consensual, and policy-specific.” What remains unresolved, however, is how far policy networks should be regarded as a full-blown theory, a model, a method or even simply a metaphor. This chapter tends to treat it as the latter, thus reverting to the broad way the British originators of the concept employed the term (Richardson and Jordan 1979). But what are the alternatives to relying on the over-used concept of “policy networks”? Two well-known alternative – also increasingly fashionable – policy concepts for analyzing multi-level decision making and networking in Europe are Sabatier’s “advocacy coalitions” and Haas’s “epistemic
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communities.” According to Sabatier (1988: 138), “advocacy coalitions” can be comprised of a mélange of interest groups, administrative agencies, analysts, researchers, journalists, and other stakeholders with an interest in a given policy sector. By contrast, Haas’s “epistemic communities” are a more narrowly defined group consisting of “a network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain . . . [and] (1) a shared set of normative and principled beliefs . . ., (2) shared causal beliefs . . ., (3) shared notions of validity, and (4) a common policy enterprise” (Haas 1992: 3). The usefulness of these two concepts has been widely and controversially discussed in the literature (Sabatier 1998; Radaelli 1999; Toke 1999; Dudley et al. 2000; Dunlop 2000; Miller and Fox 2001; Zito 2001). Yet both actorcentered models and concepts do not give adequate attention to the structural rationales underlying material decisions. In other words: the key problem of the inadequate or unclear conceptualization of the relationship between the agendasetting powers of the so-defined “networks,” “coalitions,” or “communities,” and external institutional constraints and/or structural factors (“discourses”) remains. I therefore take additional inspiration from two key sources: from Peterson and Bomberg’s three-tier model of EU decision making and the so-called “discursive” or “argumentative turn” in policy analysis and planning. According to Peterson and Bomberg (1999: 9): the student of EU decision-making must be concerned with explaining a range of different decisions taken at different levels in a multi-level system of governance. [One should therefore] draw on a range of theories that are “pitched” at different levels of decision-making. More precisely, they suggest distinguishing between three types of decisions: history-making, policy-setting, and policy-shaping decisions. Only for the last, sub-systemic level of decision making, do they consider policy network analysis to be the most appropriate theory for explaining decisions. By contrast, they find New Institutionalist approaches (see e.g., Bulmer 1994), with their focus on path dependency and differentiation between institutions as “rules of the game” and organizations as “the players” (North 1990) most appropriate for the intermediate, policy-setting level, and (liberal) intergovernmentalism (especially Moravcsik 1998) and/or neofunctionalism (see e.g., Burley and Mattli 1993) most appropriate for the history-making level. In the end, the message of their three-level model aimed at “putting theory in its place” is unmistakable: “Policy network analysis . . . [only] seems apt for a system of governance that is weakly institutionalized, resource-poor and has no ‘government’.” As we will see in our case study example, these three criteria do not apply to highspeed rail decision making. More importantly, depending on the level of decision making, very different rationalities and modes of power come into play – something that policy network analysis does not adequately account for. This brings us to our second analytical amendment for analyzing EU networking in practice: discourse-orientation.
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Defined broadly, the “discursive” or “argumentative turn” in policy analysis and planning focuses on “practical processes of argumentation” and on how “institutionally disciplined rhetorics of policy and planning influence problem selection analysis” (Fischer and Forester 1993: 2). Following Hajer’s (1995) The Politics of Environmental Discourse, there has been a rapidly evolving literature on (environmental) discourses in planning and public policy. Its interdisciplinary influence is reflected in several recent articles in scientific journals relating to environmental studies, planning, geography, and even anthropology (Campbell 1996; Nygren 1998; Fischer and Hajer 1999; Lumley 1999; Ruzza 2000; Harper 2001). In the wake of Foucault and other postpositivist critics, scholars of all disciplines have found it necessary to focus more closely on the various discourses that both researchers and practitioners employ. Struggles over transport-infrastructure decision making, in particular, clearly illustrate the use of different discourses and their consequences, and there is now a rapidly evolving literature on sustainability discourses in transport policy (see e.g., Flyvbjerg 1998; Sager 1999; Baeten 2000; Langmyhr 2000, 2001; Richardson 2000; Vigar 2000, 2001; Willson 2001; Peters 2003a; Low et al. 2003).1 Additionally, Flyvbjerg et al.’s recent study on Megaprojects and Risks (2003) has refueled a debate over the rampant problem of excessive cost overruns and the misleading information that project promoters often provide with regard to large-scale transport projects. Such “sugarcoating” certainly has also been a factor in getting high-speed rail projects approved within EU member states. Yet rather than tracing the genesis of individual highspeed rail lines in the national context, the following case study focuses more on the general networking and the discourses in favor of high-speed rail in the EU in the 1990s. I have characterized EU transport policy in general as being dominated by the discursive framework of “ecological modernization” (Peters 2003b) and demonstrated that within the particular policy arena of Trans-European Transport Networks (TEN-T), EU transport infrastructure investment policies are mostly being guided by the two key “storylines” of “missing links” and “bottlenecks” (see especially Peters 2003b: 332–6). I will now take a closer look at how such discursive elements play out in the case of trans-national highspeed rail in Europe. The Case Study: Networking for a European High-speed Rail System The Push for European High-speed Rail in the 1990s: Key Decisions and Stakeholders Plans for developing a high-speed, European-wide integrated rail system predate the EU and had been discussed in other international forums, but no trans-national high-speed lines had resulted from these initiatives. By contrast, numerous national-level high-speed rail lines were established in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in France and Germany. Yet even among these
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national initiatives, only France followed a genuine network approach from the beginning, based mainly on the construction of a new “TGV” high-speed system. In Germany, the initial approach to high-speed rail was to concentrate on particular stretches of the dense network to overcome bottlenecks. Today, Germany features a comparatively dense network consisting of a mixture of newly constructed lines especially intended for its high-speed ICE trains, and others which are more multi-purpose, running both the very fast (> 250 km/h) ICE trains and more conventional EC or IC trains (up to 200 km/h) at frequent intervals. Then, in 1992, the EU’s Maastricht Treaty made the development of the so-called Trans-European Networks (TENs) a European Union priority. In particular, five of the 14 TEN transport priority projects endorsed by the EU’s Essen European Council in December 1994 were high-speed rail links, with another five being conventional rail and/or multi-modal projects. In 2001, the EU proposed six additions and two extensions to this priority project list, again with a strong emphasis on high-speed rail. In 2003, the EU then extensively revised both the guidelines and the financial regulations for the TEN-T as a whole. Moreover, in light of the accession of the ten new EU member states in May 2004, several additional potential priorities for funding, as well as a significant rise in overall funding for TEN-T projects were proposed. Despite these official EU plans, the EU has not been the primary decision-maker in devising these networks, however. And it was also not the key initiator. The EU explains its own role in developing the TENs as follows:2 Responsibility for creating transport networks lies mainly with the Member States, in line with subsidiarity . . . The Union’s role is to act as a catalyst and problem solver – it takes project proposals from the Member States and turns them into a network design, it encourages Member States to push the projects forward and tries to find ways around financial and regulatory obstacles. To think of “the EU” and “Member States” as the only relevant stakeholders would be misleading, however. Following the Peterson and Bomberg model, Table 6.1 provides an overview of the key decisions and their respective levels, as well as the pertaining stakeholders, rationalities, and power modes relevant to high-speed rail decision making in Europe in the 1990s. Power of Decision and Discourse: Putting the Priority “Missing Links” on the European Map The original discourse around the so-called “missing links” within European transport networks was not brought into play by national or inter-governmental initiatives but by industry players (Peters 2003b). More specifically, it was the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT), an industry lobby group based in Paris, which in the 1980s and early 1990s produced a series of reports pushing the EU and national governments to embark on a series of costly, high-profile
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Table 6.1 Key Decisions and Stakeholders for the EU High-speed Rail Initiatives in the 1990s Level
Type of Decision
Examples Relevant for the Case Study
Key Stakeholders
Type of Rationality
Key Mode of Power
Supersystemic
Historymaking
Maastricht Treaty, commitment to TEN-T
National governments industry lobby (ERT)
Political
Decision and discourse
Systemic
Policysetting
Misc. Council Directives and White Papers
High-level Political Eurocrats, technocratic NGOs, and other interest groups
Decision and discourse implementation
Subsystemic
Policyshaping
Commission initiatives and memorands
Mid-level Technocratic Eurocrats, consensual NGOs, and other interest groups
Implementation, operation
Source: Adapted and expanded after Peterson and Bomberg 1999: 9
transport infrastructure projects linking Western European countries. ERT membership is by invitation only, consisting of about 40 all-male chief executives of large, multi-national – including transport and oil sector – giants such as Total, BP, Volvo, Volkswagen, Rolls Royce, and Renault.3 The ERT’s first landmark report (1984) “Missing Links – Upgrading Europe’s Transborder Ground Infrastructure” proposed three core measures that would eventually – over the course of the next 20 years – be turned into real(istic) infrastructure proposals endorsed by national governments, the EU, and the private sector: (1) the Anglo-French Channel tunnel, (2) road/rail links from Scandinavia to Northern Germany across the Oresund and/or the Fehmarn Belt, and (3) a general network of high-speed train links. Astonishingly, these proposals are mostly congruent with the subsequent rail sector priority proposals for the EU TENs.4 These concrete infrastructure proposals were followed up by further ERT reports in 1989, 1991, and 1992. ERT pro-high-speed rail lobbying of European transport was particularly intense in the late 1980s. The ERT was operating at a level where, according to former ERT General Secretary Keith Richardson, members were “able to phone Helmut Kohl and recommend that he read a report, . . . or [have] lunch with the Swedish Prime minister” (quoted in Doherty and Hoedeman 1994: 135–7). Other scholars have confirmed this highly influential nature of the ERT’s interventions. Tim Richardson (2000), for example, quotes a Brussels bureaucrat as summarizing TEN transport policy as follows: “TEN-T as a policy has been around for a long time, developed
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from the missing links and the European Round Table, and all this kind of business, you know.” Subsequent to the ERT’s initial report, the “Missing Links” rhetoric was picked up by the European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT), and by the European Union. Of particular importance was Delors’ “White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness, and Employment,” which was endorsed by all heads of state and also promoted the idea of the TENs (Commission of the European Communities 1993). The Commission then gave the respective high-level expert (“Christopherson”) Working Group the mandate to identify a list of potential priority projects. Pressure from industry lobby groups was not the only reason for the success of the “Missing Links”/TENs concept and the resulting EU-backed high-speed rail initiatives in the early 1990s, however. Another important strategic reason was that in the particular political context of the 1990s, (transport) infrastructure policy provided a new, “safe” field of cooperation at a time when it was too early for the EU to seriously embark on a common defense/foreign policy and/or monetary union (also see Turro 1999: 102ff.). In this context, the TEN-T priorities are interesting precisely because they do not just express an obvious patchworking together of Member state preferences of national network connections, but also an emerging consensus among those Member states that vesting the EU with additional political powers would ultimately be beneficial to everyone. As Piodi (1997: 24, quoted in Peters 2003b: 321) notes: The 1990s saw the start of the European Union’s involvement in infrastructure policy . . . This innovation was far more radical than has generally been suggested by politicians, researchers or journalists. Historically, the role of public works in the Member States has far exceeded their specific function . . . [T]hey also function as a symbol of the tangible reality of power, which is of crucial importance even in the modern age. The fact that responsibility for this sector has been conferred on the Union means that the prospects for the political legitimization of the Union have been enhanced . . . Its new responsibilities mean that it now plays a major role in the decision-making process at all levels of government in the Member States. Additionally, the promotion of new, competitive high-speed rail lines as a modern, clean, and technologically advanced transport mode was highly compatible with the discourse of “ecological modernization” which has dominated political decision making in EU countries since the 1990s. “Ecological modernization” emphasizes “sustainable growth” and a competitive, efficiencyand market-oriented approach to the environment using advanced, high technology (Hajer 1995; Fischer and Hajer 1999; Peters 2003b, especially pages 117–23). In the 1990s the ill-effects of mass motorization were increasingly problematized and official rhetoric turned against road-based transport. Tellingly, much of the focus in academic and policy debates was on safety issues, emissions control and, most recently, pricing schemes. Sustainable
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transport, understood in the context of ecological modernization, always implied a desired modal shift from road (or air) to rail (or non-motorized) transport, as reflected in many official EU and OECD/ECMT policy statements. So the EU’s emphasis on high-speed rail provided a highly visible, politically important signal supporting this new discourse. Overall, TEN-T network policy should thus be interpreted not simply as an example of (realist) intergovernmentalism but, rather, as a process of multi-level governance that already included key actors beyond the national governmental level. Nevertheless, discourses and decision-making rationalities at this super-systemic level were highly politicized and access to the decisionmaking process for both civil society and lower-level bureaucrats was rather limited. Power of Implementation: Funding and Constructing the TEN-T HSR Projects Vesting the EU with the power and responsibility to develop a Trans-European transport network and a list of priorities did not yet answer the key question as to how individual projects would be funded and implemented. Grant funding for TEN-T projects was provided through various EU programs. Additionally, the house bank of the European Union, the European Investment Bank (EIB) provided billions of euros for TEN transport projects over the last decade. Despite the EU’s stated preference for rail, the TEN-T funding record initially remained more dominated by road funding than by rail funding. This contradiction to official policy rhetoric was most pronounced in the mid-1990s. From 1994 to 1999, over 70 percent of the EU’s EDRF Objective 1 funding for the least developed regions went to roads, and 69 percent of the €5 billion TENT project funding in the four EU Cohesion countries (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain) went to roads as well. Meanwhile, until 2000, the EIB had also committed less than 30 percent of its transport funds to the rail sector. However, over 60 percent of the EU’s special TEN-T budget line until 1998 went to rail, with two-thirds of that devoted to high-speed rail. For the years from 2001 onwards, the TEN-T budget figures show that now that three of the other TENT priority projects were completed, almost 37 percent of all special EU TEN transport funding, a total of about €1 billion, was to go into the five high-speed rail priority projects, with another 10 percent going into the other remaining priority projects.5 However, no matter how large the EU’s committed sums seem when seen by themselves, they cover but a fraction of the total investments necessary. As the EU itself notes: The EU budget for 1995–2000 earmarked a total of €1,830 billion for the TEN-T. The European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the European Union’s Cohesion Fund contributed a total of some €14 billion for projects of common interest in the “cohesion countries.” The transport networks’ share [of the RTD budget] is expected to be around €4 to 4.2 billion . . .
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To appreciate the scale of this investment we need to compare these sums against the figure of €400 billion or so which is the overall cost of the projects currently ongoing or planned (including €110 billion for the 14 priority projects identified at the European Council in Essen).6 So without extensive support from national governments and/or the private sector, the projects cannot get off the ground. Nevertheless, the EU’s official political and financial support to the various cross-national high-speed projects identified has made a crucial difference in getting these approved and financed. The example of the TEN-T priority project No. 2, the so-called PBKAL (Paris–Brussels–Cologne/Köln–Amsterdam–London) high-speed train, is a particularly interesting example. Conceived as Europe’s first cross-border highspeed passenger link, the PBKAL was launched in 1989 by an official agreement between France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. While the French section of the link was completed in 1995, the UK, Belgian, and Dutch sections were in financial difficulties, since studies undertaken at the national level had generated relatively low levels of economic profitability for the various stretches. (The German section had not been evaluated yet.) Then, in 1995, the EC/PBKAL Working Group published its final report, which included an annex written by Rana Roy (1995) called “Lost and Found: The Community Component of the Economic Return on the Investment in PBKAL.” In this annex, a detailed economic argument was made that the various national-level studies ignored significant additional supra-national benefits which, if properly included in a new, Community-level analysis, would demonstrate the project was economically attractive enough to warrant additional Community support. The success story of this “community component” argument is recounted by the author in a later paper (Roy 2000: 1): It is a peculiarity of cross-border projects that correctly specified national evaluations of their respective national sections will tend to generate an incorrect estimate of their overall economic profitability and, therewith, an incorrect estimate of the extent of public support which they merit . . . The solution to the problem depends on the presence of a decisionmaker with an interest in, and responsibility for, recognising and securing this stream of “supra-national” benefits. Clearly, in the case of the TENs, the European Union has an interest in recognising and securing these supra-national benefits. . . . In the case of the PBKAL, therefore, the solution was to produce for the Union a new evaluation which integrated the formerly excluded stream of benefits: we called it the community component. The new evaluation of the PBKAL established that the community component constituted 27% of the corrected economic return of the project as a whole. With it, the project – as a whole and in each of its national sections – passed the relevant hurdle rates; without it, it did not. Lost and Found thereby established the case for the level of public subsidy required to enable the project to proceed. In turn, this
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triggered the national and Union subsidy decisions that have indeed enabled the project to proceed. It also triggered the injection of one billion euros to the Commission’s TENs budget (emphasis added). What is interesting here, especially given its alleged influence in releasing key funds for TEN-T high-speed rail projects, is that while couched in very objective, economistic terms, the study was by no means an independent evaluation of the PBKAL’s viability. Rather, the study had been provided to the EC Working Group by the European Center for Infrastructure Studies (ECIS). The ECIS, officially a research bureau, had been formally set up in early 1994 by the ERT, and in particular by Umberto Agnelli, president of Fiat, essentially in order to ensure the implementation of the ERT-backed missing links projects by providing technical and financial advice to the Commission. During the relatively brief period of its existence, the ECIS proved highly successful at its task. In 1994, ECIS founder Agnelli chaired a High Level Panel on Private Finance which presented various proposals for the decisive EU Essen Summit and the Christopherson Group on the TENs. As a result, the Summit endorsed both the idea of public–private partnerships for cross-border projects as well as the concept of a “single agent” to improve the regulatory framework for decision making. Apart from the “Lost and Found” report, ECIS provided several other key “independent, academic” inputs for the Commission promoting TEN-T investment. The other important one was the 1996 follow-up report “The Macroeconomic Effects of the PBKAL,” which was extensively used by the Commission for its special report to the parliament on the job creation effects of the TENs and for their general 1996 TEN report. NGO watchdog organizations always pointed to these close links between pro-growth industry players and the Commission and criticized this highly unequal situation of access to decision makers, albeit with little success.7 The ECIS was closed in 1997 under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Funding from the European Commission was cut, and plans to reopen the Center never materialized. While EU and national-level support for the TENs indeed slowed down somewhat in the late 1990s, TEN-T support through loans from the European Investment Bank (EIB) increased. This transition from EU and national-level grants to EIB infrastructure loans reflects, in part, the increased maturity of several of the TEN-T priority projects. By 2003 EIB support for the PBKAL stood at €2.4 billion since the 1990s (European Investment Bank 2003). Power of Operation: Interoperability as an Ongoing Challenge As evident from the above section, decision-making rationalities at the systemic, policy-setting level are already moving from being less political to being more technocratic. The emphasis on decisions and discourse is increasingly replaced by a focus on implementation. This section will now focus on the operational aspects of international high-speed rail. At this sub-systemic,
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policy-shaping level, decision-making rationalities are still technocratic but increasingly consensual. Power supply systems and gauge widths for rail systems can vary widely from place to place. Unlike road-, water-, or air-based modes, the rail sector therefore always had to face the difficult issue of interoperability. The frequent lack thereof has been problematic from the mode’s inception. Therefore, much effort has been sunk by industry interest groups into lobbying for interoperability. And, unlike in the case of infrastructure expansion schemes, sustainable transport advocacy organizations are almost unanimously in favor of making better use of existing infrastructures and are therefore highly supportive of this approach. Apart from the re-evaluation and extension of the priority project list, the first implementation report on the TENs focused on how to shift the emphasis from infrastructure investment to quality of service, on the integration of the modal networks, their extension to the east, and on how to use existing infrastructures more efficiently by using Intelligent Transport Systems. Interoperability, which lies at the heart of these challenges, is primarily a question of technical standardization, and therefore requires the EU and its partnering agencies to work out specific legal measures to be implemented by the member states. The EU Council already adopted Directive 96/48/EC on the Interoperability of the Trans-European High-Speed System on July 23, 1996, but it took the joint representative body defined in the directive, the European Association for Railway Interoperability (AEIF), several years to draw up the pertaining tools and methodologies and the resulting technical specifications for interoperability (TSIs). Pending the adoption of these TSIs, the Commission adopted two instruments to guide technical choices for projects in progress,8 and in May 2002, the TSIs for six subsystems were adopted by the Commission: for maintenance, control and command, infrastructure, energy, rolling stock, and the operation subsystems.9 Concerning conventional rail, a Directive 2001/16/EC for Interoperability was adopted by the Commission on March 19, 2001 and had to be implemented in the Member States by late April 2003. More importantly, the EU’s so-called “second railway package” – establishing a European Railway Agency and outlining three additional rail-related directives – was passed via the EU’s co-decision procedure in April 2004, with a third package aimed at further opening the rail market for international services already adopted by the Commission. The Commission is thus confident that new Trans-European high-speed and upgraded lines can and will from now on be built to the new interoperability standards.10 Not surprisingly, when looking at the key stakeholders involved in making the TEN-T priority high-speed rail lines truly interoperable, a significant shift away from high-level to mid- to lower level bureaucrats at the EU can be discerned. At the same time, high-powered lobby groups such as the ERT leave the scene in favor of international organizations, associations, and NGOs with specific expertise in the rail sector. Key commentators on the various directives were the International Union of Public Transport (UITP), the Community of
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European Railways (CER), the International Union of Railways (UIC), and the Union of European Railway Industries (UNIFE) as well as the Brussels-based umbrella organization of European Traffic Clubs, Transport and Environment (T&E). Together with the European Commission, UITP, CER, UIC, and UNIFE created the European Research Advisory Council (ERRAC) which aimed to bring together “all stakeholders in the railway sector in Europe.” Conceived as an advisory board to the EU, ERRAC made interoperability one of its five priority themes, and began to forge strategic alliances between the Commission, national government representatives, and other private and public organizations. ERRAC, whose primary mission is “to establish and carry forward a Strategic Rail Research Agenda that will influence all stakeholders in the planning of research programmes, particularly national and EU programmes,”11 thus exhibits an interesting membership structure, which could in fact be said to comprise an entire “policy network” of European rail within itself. Its terms of reference specify a structure whereby its 40 members are to come from Member States (15), European Commission (4), manufacturing industry (6), Research establishments and academia (2), operators (5), infrastructure managers (3), environmental (1) and urban planning (1) organizations and transport users groups (freight (2), rail safety (1), and passengers (1)). On its website (www.errac.org), ERRAC also provides detailed listings of the current members of both its plenary and its interoperability working group. Between these two membership lists, a further shift from higher-executive representatives to more issue-specific experts, as well as a larger share of private industry sector specialists at the expense of government representatives and public officials can be discerned. So, while the political success of high-speed rail in the 1990s had much to do with the “ecological modernization” discourses advanced by influential lobby organizations and high-level policy makers, the actual implementation and completion of the now-adopted ambitious transnational network plans in this decade depend much more on the continuous work of various rail sector interest groups. And at this operation and implementation-oriented level, technocratic and consensual forms of decision making are much more common than exclusive lobbying. Summing Up Different “networking structures” work at different levels of decision making. When it comes to making historical decisions such as the legal commitment to create Trans-European transport infrastructures in the Maastricht Treaty, highlevel political considerations dominate, and the pertaining discourses on “Missing Links” reveal the added symbolic and rhetorical functions that the TEN-T plans had at that time. The most powerful stakeholders at this level are not only those holding formal decision-making powers (governments) but also those having the means and resources to shape the overall policy discourse in their favor (industry lobbies).
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Regular, day-to-day Commission work dedicated toward finally making European rail systems interoperable, on the other hand, is much lower-profile and less glamorous, in consequence requiring stakeholders to employ rather different, more technocratic but also more discursive/communicative strategies to achieve success. The most powerful stakeholders at this level tend to be those who best understand the technocratic and operational intricacies of lower-level decision making and who are thus able to emerge as agenda-setters from below. In sum, analyzing the political success of high-speed rail in Europe in the 1990s in terms of EU policy networks really only makes sense when talking about matters of rail governance, such as international interoperability. With regard to the historic decision made in the Maastricht Treaty to develop an EUwide high-speed rail system (followed-up by additional commitments at various EU summits later on), this is more a result of targeted lobbying of selected industry elites on one hand, and a more general, structural discourse in favor of rail among politicians and transport experts on the other. Yet it seems that no matter which form of networks dominated (old-boys or issue-based), the EU as an institution has proven to be a useful catalyzing force for “getting things done” at the international level, especially in terms of setting a strategic agenda in favor of a particular mode of transport. Notes 1 Although the authors of these various articles have not yet entered into a full-fledged debate with each other, this is foreseeable for the near future. The journals European Planning Studies and International Planning Studies have been especially prominent in advancing the debate. 2 The quote was originally taken from the official EU website at http://europa.eu.int/en/ agenda/ten/role.html (accessed June 30, 2003). The text has since been moved, but the text can still be accessed via the web archive at http://web.archive.org/web/2002121804 2158/http://europa.eu.int/en/agenda/ten/role.html (last accessed August 26, 2005). 3 For full list of current ERT members, see www.ERT.be. 4 The channel tunnel itself and the Eurostar were completed as a private sector-led venture. Nevertheless, the channel rail link accessing the Channel from the UK side, which still has not been fully completed, remains on the list of the 14 Essen priority projects. The Oresund link was included in the original priority list and successfully completed in 2000, while the Fehmarn belt was now included in the new, additional list of priority projects. As for the transborder high-speed network, the ERT working group initially only called for three sets of routes connecting Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt, London, Lille, and some additional cities – a proposal that was eventually modified and extended into TEN priority projects no. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 19. 5 For a detailed multi-annual indicative table, see Table 5, originally quoted in http:// www.catt.go.jp/kaigaichousa/2003EU/e-eumain.html#300 (accessed July 3, 2003). 6 See http://europa.eu.int/comm/transport/themes/network/english/hp-en/bfin/tn_16_en. html (accessed July 3, 2003). 7 In particular, see the (old) Corporate Europe Observer (CEO) website archived under http://web.archive.org/web/20030626010345/http://www.xs4all.nl/~ceo/eurinc/contents. html (last accessed August 26, 2005), which contains an online version of their 1997 publication “Europe Inc.” Also see CEO’s website http://www.corporateeurope.org/ and the provided links to similar organizations (accessed July 4, 2003).
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8 Decision 2001/260/EC on the Characteristics of the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERMTS) and Recommendation 2001/290/EC on the Basic Parameters of the Trans-European High-Speed Rail System. 9 The texts for these TSIs were published in the EU Official Journal L245 of September 12, 2002. 10 For more details, see http://europa.eu.int/comm/transport/rail/interoperability/high_speed_ en.htm (accessed July 5, 2003). 11 See http://www.errac.org/about.htm (accessed July 6, 2003).
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CHAPTER SEVEN
Strategies for Networked Cities Stephen Graham
Introduction: From Dreams of Transcendence to the “Remediation” of Urban Place As a foundation for developing integrated urban and ICT strategies there is clearly a desperate need, as sociologists Haythornthwaite and Wellman (2002: 4–5) suggest, to move beyond generalized and deterministic discourses about the “impacts” of “cyberspace” on society to look in rich empirical detail at the complex ways in which ICT technologies are being used in real ways in real places. As they suggest, “the reality of the Internet is more important than the dazzle” (ibid.). Indeed, some now argue that many ICT-related shifts in everyday urban life are actually more intriguing than could possible have been predicted in the generalized scenarios pumped out en masse between the 1960s and 1990s. The architecture critic Keller Easterling (2003: 3), for example, argues that “the explosion of changes to the world’s markets, cities, and means of shipping and communication [are] far more strange and unpredictable than any of the swaggering futurology scenarios.” Manuel Castells (1996, 1997, 1998a) has done much to pave the way in analyzing these complex articulations between place-based and electronically mediated interactions as they unfold, often at great speed and with counterintuitive logic. The important work of media theorists Bolter and Grusin (1999) also emphasizes that the whole raft of current ICT innovations is not being used in ways that are divorced from the use of existing media, means of communication, and material practices in places. Rather, they are allowing for the subtle “remediation” of TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, telephones, publishing, books, art, video, photography, face-to-face communication, and the social and anthropological experience, and construction of place. This is happening as established practices subtly combine with, rather than disappear through, socially constructed technological potentials.
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The starting point for this chapter, then, is that ICTs, far from being a complete and revolutionary break with the past, thus maintain many intimate connections with old media, old technologies, old practices, and old (electromechanical) infrastructures and spaces (telephone systems, broadcasting systems, electricity systems, highway systems, streets, airline systems, logistics systems). It follows that the so-called “information age” is best considered not as a revolution but as a complex and subtle amalgam of new technologies and media fused on to, and “remediating”, old ones (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 183). There are a great many more continuities and synergies than many would have us believe. We are not experiencing some wholesale, discrete break with the urban past ushered in by the “impacts” of new technology. Rather, we are experiencing a complex and infinitely diverse range of transformations where new and old practices and media technologies become mutually linked and fused in an ongoing blizzard of change. As Bolter and Grusin (1999: 183) suggest, “cyberspace”: is very much a part of our contemporary world and . . . it is constituted through a series of remediations. As a digital network, cyberspace remediates the electric communications networks of the past 150 years, the telegraph and the telephone; as virtual reality, it remediates the visual space of painting, film, and television; and as social space, it remediates such historical places as cities and parks and such “nonplaces” as theme parks and shopping malls. Like other contemporary telemediated spaces, cyberspace refashions and extends earlier media, which are themselves embedded in material and social environments. Unfortunately, however, prevailing discourses about cities and ICTs have often failed to come to terms with the subtleties of remediation. Very often, instead, they adopt simplistic and technologically determinist assumptions that ICTs will simply substitute for cities and urban life. This has resulted in six major analytical and policy problems which confront networked city strategies. Understanding these will be the inevitable starting point of any sophisticated attempt to develop city-ICT strategies, which are the concern of the second part of this chapter. It is therefore worth briefly discussing each of these weaknesses in this first part of the chapter. Ignoring Global Urbanization and Mobility Trends The first problem is obvious: deterministic end of city accounts are simply, empirically wrong. These accounts fly in the face of a contemporary reality marked by the greatest processes of urbanization in human history. They fail to explain the rapid rates of economic, demographic, and physical growth not just of the “megacities” of the global South but of many high-tech and old industrial cities of the global North, many of which have experienced a startling economic renaissance in the last 20 years (at least in certain districts). A few figures give a flavor of the scale of contemporary urbanization processes on our planet. Between 1900 and 2000 the world’s urban population
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grew from 10 percent to 50 percent of the global population. Mumbai’s population has quadrupled in 30 years (1972–2002). In one hour 60 people move in to Manila, 47 move to Delhi, 21 to Lagos, 12 to London, 9 to New York and 2 to Paris. By 2025 there are likely to be 5 billion urban dwellers on Earth (two-thirds of whom will live in “developing” nations) (all figures from Koolhaas et al. 2001: 1–6). End of city discourses studiously ignore the fact that urbanization and growing ICT use are actually going hand in hand. City spaces are dominant hubs which shape and configure all aspects of global ICT infrastructure investment and global Internet and telephone traffic. Cities and urban regions are actually massively dominant in driving demand for land and mobile telephony, the Internet, and new media technologies. This dominance shows no sign whatsoever of slackening. Again, a few figures are salutary here. Eighty percent of telecommunications investment within France goes into Paris. In 1998, 25 percent of all of the UK’s international telecommunications traffic was funneled into a single optic fiber network in central London run by WorldCom that was only 230 kilometers long. Anthony Townsend (2003) reports that more optic fiber underlies the island of Manhattan than is threaded across the whole of Africa. And, in 2003, the Internet geographer Matthew Zook showed that only five metropolitan regions – New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, and Washington DC – accounted for 17.7 per cent of the world’s total Internet domains. These are the familiar .coms, .nets, .orgs, etc., that are widely portrayed as being “placeless” and “without a geography” (see http://www.zookNIC.com/ Domains/index.html). End of city perspectives also ignore the rapid rise in all forms of physical mobility at all geographical scales. These have actually grown in parallel with the application of ICTs; they have not been replaced by ICTs. Evidence for this is difficult to avoid: the growing gridlock of city streets; the staggering rise of global automobile ownership; the exponential growth of airline travel; intensifying levels of consumer and business tourism; growing energy consumption; and a general acceleration of flows of goods, commodities, and raw materials at all scales across the world. Debunking the “Virtual” Myth: Ignoring the Material Bases of ICTs The second problem with ICT-based end of city visions is that they ignore the very material realities that make the supposedly “virtual” realms of “cyberspace” possible. “Cyberspaces” do not exist on their own; the many supposedly “virtual” domains and worlds are brought into existence, and constantly facilitated, by massive, globally extended sets of material systems and infrastructures. In their obsession with the ethereal worlds of cyberspace – with the blizzards of electrons, photons, and bits and bytes on screens – end of city commentators have consistently ignored the fact that it is real wires, real fibers, real ducts, real leeways, real satellite stations, real mobile towers, real web servers, and – not to be ignored – real electricity systems that make all of this possible. All these are physically embedded and located in real places.
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They are expensive. They are profoundly material. They sharply condition the functionality of digitally mediated encounters (contrast an always-on broadband Internet computer with the scratchy and slow service available by dialing up over a phone line). Finally, ICTs have very real geographies in the traditional sense (i.e., they are in some places and not in others). Because the material bases for cyberspace are usually invisible they tend only to be noticed when they collapse or fail through wars, terrorist attack, natural disasters, or technical failure. Even when they are visible – as with mobile phone masts and telecom towers – they are often disguised so as not to be “ unsightly.” (In the UK many mobile towers are camouflaged as fake trees!) Thus, in contrast to the vast and land-hungry infrastructural edifices that sustain transport, electricity, and water flows, the myth that cyberspace is an ethereal and immaterial realm continues to retain power. It is also now very clear that the geographical patterns of the material bases and investment patterns of cyberspace are not spreading across the world equally. They are extremely, perhaps increasingly, uneven. In a world of increasing economic and infrastructural liberalization, the giant transnational media and infrastructure firms that build and control the material bases for cyberspace tend to concentrate their investments where the main markets are – in major cities, urban regions, and metropolitan corridors. For example, even now, large swathes of the world’s poorest countries have little telecommunications infrastructure to speak of. A third of the world’s population has yet to make a telephone call (let alone log on to the Internet). And, even in advanced industrial cities, the spaces where one is able to access the new premium ICT services – such as broadband, third generation mobile, or wireless Internet – are often still limited to the “premium bubbles” of connectivity located in downtown cores, affluent suburbs, airports, or university campuses. Overgeneralization and the Weaknesses of “Impact” Metaphors The third problem with the utopian and anti-urban predictions of end of city visionaries is that they massively over-generalize. They imply that all experiences are the same anywhere and that ICTs relate to all cities in the same way at all times. This ignores an increasingly sophisticated body of theoretical and empirical research which suggests that, while ICTs do have important implications for cities, the relationships are much more subtle, complex, and contingent than that endlessly repeated world of simple, deterministic, substitution, total dematerialization, and a wholesale stampede of urban life into the clean and infinitely extendable domains of “cyberspace.” ICTs are helping to facilitate significant reconfigurations in the geography, mobility patterns, and social, economic, and cultural dynamics of cities, and in the ways in which urban life is represented, lived, and managed. But these changes are subtle. They are often counterintuitive. And they tend to involve many other processes of change. In short, ICTs don’t have “impacts” on cities in and of themselves. Rather, complex social processes and practices occur that shape the nature, use, and
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application of ICTs in urban (and non-urban) contexts in a wide variety of contingent ways. ICT use subtly combines with, rather than replaces, the traditional urban experience which centers on the placement and movement of the human body (or bodies) in the room, the building, the street, the transport network, the neighborhood, or the city. The use and experience of ICTs is therefore associated with myriad urban changes in different spaces, times, and contexts. Indeed, one ICT artefact – say, an Internet computer – can, itself, be used to sustain a wide range of uses by a range of different people at different times of the day and in different physical situations. Each may entail different relations between ICT-based exchange and the spaces, times, and social worlds of the places that provide the context for its use. All this means that generalization about ICTs and cities is hazardous to say the least. The ways in which places become enmeshed into geographically and temporally stretched electronic networks such as the Internet is an extraordinarily diverse, contingent process. And, while there certainly are a growing range of transnational and even “global” interactions on the Internet, we must also remember that many such relationships are profoundly local. Theoretical Laxity and the Dangers of Binary Thinking: Overemphasizing ICTs, Underemphasizing Place The fourth problem with deterministic end of city predictions is that they tend to dramatically overestimate the capabilities of ICTs to mediate human relationships. At the same time, they dramatically underestimate the complexity, richness, and the continuing anthropological and cultural power generated by co-present human bodies in places. The communications theorist Sawhney criticizes “the very transmission-oriented view of human communication” in ICT and city debates. Here “the purpose of human communication is reduced to transfer of information and the coordination of human activity. The ritual or the communal aspect of human communication is almost totally neglected” (Sawhney 1996: 309). In such transmission-oriented accounts more information or more bandwidth is always equated with more knowledge, more mutual understanding, and more wisdom. Squeezing more bits down a wire, or over a wireless system, is assumed to lead to deeper, more satisfying relationships. And the crucial difference between formal knowledge – which tends to be more easily accessible through ICT networks – and tacit knowledge – which is often developed and divulged much more in trustful, face-to-face encounters – tends to be ignored or underplayed. Above all, while there is no doubt that ICTs can act as “prostheses” to extend human actions, identities, and communities in time and space, it does not follow that the human self is “released from the fixed location of the body, built environment or nation.” Rather, “the self is always somewhere, always located in some sense in some place, and cannot be totally unhoused” (Kaplan 2002: 34).
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Technologically determinist commentators thus fail to appreciate the complex social, cultural, and economic ecologies, and the sheer resilience of the corporeal lives of people in places. They fail to see that many of these cannot be simply substituted by ICTs no matter how broadband, 3D, or immersive the substitutes: quite the reverse, in fact. For the social construction and experience of the body and space and place actually grounds and contextualizes applications and uses of new technologies. “The urban world networked by [Bill] Gates technologies strung out on the wire,” suggests cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove, “is not disconnected, abstract, inhuman; it is bound in the places and times of actual lives, into human existences that are as connected, sensuous and personal as they ever have been” (Cosgrove 1996: 1495). In fact, as ICTs diffuse more widely and become more taken for granted and ubiquitous, it is increasingly apparent, at least in richer cities, that they are being used to subtly reconfigure the place-based worlds and mobilities of everyday urban life. ICT interactions have now moved from the status of novelty to rapidly diffuse in to all walks of life. In many contexts they are now increasingly ubiquitous – even banal. In a sense, then, ICTs have now “produced the ordinary” in the sense that they are woven so completely in to the fabric of everyday urban life that they become more and more ignored (Amin and Thrift 2002: 103, emphasis original). Cities and ICTs are thus fused into “socio-technical” and “hybrid” complexes. Many examples are relevant here. Vast and unknowable domains of software now mediate an increasing proportion of people’s interactions with the city, with each other, and with all types of services. Internet sites called “virtual cities” gather local services and information to help people articulate more effectively with the places in which they live. Tiny “smart” radio-linked microchips are now being integrated into even low value products as means of controlling logistics flows, supporting surveillance, and preventing shoplifting. Countless millions of web-cams allow an extending galaxy of places to be represented and “consumed” from afar at all geographical scales in (near) real time. E-commerce sites, as well as “stretching” economic transactions to transnational scales, are being used to change the ways in which people shop for food and consume local products and services. (This reflects the fact that, even in the US – that most mobile of societies – urban economies are still overwhelmingly local and 80 percent of transactions still occur within 20 miles of people’s homes.) In addition, ICTs are being used to reconfigure local public and private transport systems (as in the electronic road pricing of city centers). They are supporting a reconfiguration of automobiles and road systems. Mobile phones are being used to remodel users’ experiences of city services and urban public spaces. New third generation mobiles (or “3G”) even mean that users can receive running commentaries on local services and spaces, as they move around cities, through what are known as “Location Based Services” (clearly this also has the potential to clog the systems with masses of unwanted spam). Technologies such as Closed Circuit TV and local radio are allowing for subtle changes in the regulation and management of specific public spaces in cities. ICTs,
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meanwhile, are facilitating radical changes in the delivery of local public services and in the organization of local democracy. The “Dot-con”: Glossy Ideologies of the “Information Age” as a Camouflage for Neoliberalism and Uneven Development The penultimate problem with end of the city scenarios is that they – at least in their utopian incarnations – tend to promote simplistic, biased, and glossy ideologies of the so-called “information age.” Many of these have been relentlessly used to improve the public relations profiles of governments and digital media and telecommunications firms. Over the past three decades, upbeat depictions of ICTs have also been commonly used to generate public funding and subsidies for media transnationals. This has been done as local, national, and transnational policy makers struggle to make their jurisdictions “competitive” and symbolically “high tech” in the “global information society.” But such utopian ICT discourses now ring decidedly hollow. The collective image of ICTs now appears ambivalent at best, and deeply problematic at worst. In the last decade the hyperbole has now been tarnished by a succession of major societal crises as ICT-mediated models of capitalist restructuring have led to severe problems. Consider the Asian financial crisis of 1998–1999 (partly induced by electronic currency speculations); the spectacular collapse of the dot-com stock market “bubble” between 2000 and 2002; the many fraud scandals that have bankrupted many of the supposed “stars” of the new telecom world since 2000; and the financial meltdown in Argentina in the same period. From the perspective of the international recession that has afflicted large parts of the world since the dot-com crunch, it is increasingly clear that the late 1990s was a period within which ICT industries, with their carefully fueled utopian discourses, perpetuated little less than a giant “Dot.con” (see Cassidy 2002). The huge speculative bubble of 1997–2001 showed powerfully how deep the connections were between utopian ideologies of ICTs and the “information age” and the accelerating swings of speculation and depression in financial and neoliberal capitalism. As Steven Poole (2003: 18) wrote of the height of the boom: how could priceline.com, a website that sold airline tickets, come to be valued more than the entire US airline industry? Why did people buy shares in webvan.com, an online grocery-delivery service that lost $35m on sales on $395,000 in its first six months? This is a telling example of how, over the years, the endlessly repeated rose-tinted tales of the use of ICTs, to sublimely and unproblematically liberate us from all the ills of industrial and urban civilization, have done little but camouflage the social, political, environmental, or economic conflicts that continuously emerge at the interplay of cities and new media within capitalism. John Cassidy (2002) argues that in the dot-com bubble of the 1990s technological utopianism allowed corporate and finance capital to fleece investors,
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generate public subsidies and political favoritism, and deflect attention from unprecedented corporate fraud, greed, and plunder. In addition, such discourses were carefully constructed to ignore stark digital divides which condition highly uneven geographical and social access to ICTs at all geographical scales. Finally, in their suggestions of an automatically egalitarian digital future based on non-stop stock-market growth, utopian ICT discourses ignored the ways in which ICTs are being structured, and used, to add power to certain groups in society, often at the direct (relative or absolute) expense of other people or other places. Urban dimensions are an important part of the construction, and perpetuation, of glossy and benign ideologies of the information age. Reifying the need for cities to somehow act as single agents so that they can “compete,” be on the “information super highway,” be “switched on,” and to be technologically modern within the “digital economy” or “information society,” is a virtually ubiquitous discourse in contemporary urban politics and planning. Such depictions provide the platform for massive financial and urban subsidies to new high-tech development spaces and infrastructures. These benefit certain interests while damaging others. The symbolic power of information infrastructures provides many opportunities for the commodification and re-branding of urban places through marketing campaigns. These invariably involve the labeling of a city, development, or urban district using the prefix “silicon . . .,” “cyber . . .,” “information . . . ,” “techno . . . ,” “E- . . . ,” “intelligent . . . ,” or “multimedia . . .” (I am sure readers can add more). Jessop and Sum (2000) call this process the “siliconization” of urban entrepreneurialism. Technical Rationality and the Denial of Politics: Leaving No Space for Social and Policy Innovation The final problem with end of city visions – and one that is particularly salient to our discussion here – is that, in their depoliticized depictions of cities being “impacted” by waves of autonomous, future technology, which seem to arrive from elsewhere, they imply that there is little or no space for policy innovation in cities, urban regions, or nations and supranational blocs. They suggest that there are few opportunities to harness ICTs, and to use policies and strategies to mediate how they articulate with individual cities, individual communities, and individual places. And they imply that the transformation of cityscapes and urban ways of life through ICTs is more a technical matter than a political one. Such effects have stunted the development of reflective ICT policy debates among media industries, urban planners, urban policy makers, developers, community development coalitions, and governance partnerships in cities. As the urban researcher Robert Warren (1989: 14) argues, “benign projections give little indication that there are significant policy issues which should be on the public agenda.” Deterministic and anti-urban ideas about telecommunications provide an extremely simplistic set of mistaken and mythical ideas. These severely hamper
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our ability to think critically about using the new technologies to support innovations in urban policies and strategy-making. The simple attractiveness of these ideas compounds the many existing problems facing policy makers at the urban level when attempting to intervene in the fast-moving and arcane world of telecommunications and ICTs. After all, this is an area where, in contrast to transportation, they have traditionally had very little power, knowledge, or experience. Above all, in failing to stress the ways in which successful ICT innovations must necessarily occur through social practice and reflexive linkages between people, organizations, practices, and machines – which need continuous work – deterministic accounts have led indirectly to countless technological failures. On numerous occasions city governments, firms, universities, and other institutions have decided to buy sparkling new ICT systems “off the shelf.” Many of these have been expected to have their miraculous, deterministic, “impacts” in and of themselves. Thus, there has often been insufficient attention to the social processes of innovation that might allow positive effects to be realized in practice. Urban Strategies in the Network Society: Understanding the Planning Challenge The insertion of telecommunications into the city makes the development of spaces more complex and introduces today a third dimension into urban and regional planning [after space and time]: that is the factor of real-time. (Lille Metropolitan Development Agency (ADUML) 1991) Despite these problems the imperatives of trying to shape ICTs to support creative policy solutions to the challenges of urban planning, community regeneration, local government restructuring, urban economic development, and social activism are so pressing that they are now leading to a range of much more mature and sophisticated urban ICT policy solutions (see, for example, Graham and Marvin 1999) A range of key questions emerges here. How can strategies and initiatives best attempt to shape the complex articulations between city spaces and digital spaces? Can they bring in positive, virtuous relationships between these mutually constituting domains, rather than tendencies toward the parallel physical and electronic withdrawal into electronic and physical cocoons and capsular systems? What can local and urban strategies do to harness new media and communications technologies to their policy goals? How can policy approaches be developed that take into account the asymmetric knowledge between urban and ICT industry partners, and which adapt to the particular histories, governance arrangements, and cultures and economies of different cities? Finally, how are urban ICT strategies being shaped by their inevitable embeddedness
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within broader transformations in the politics, and political economies, of urban governance, planning, social movements, and new media? Difficulties abound, however, in developing crosscutting urban ICT and new media strategies within public policy. The links between cities and ICTs are slippery and all-encompassing. Everything to do with cities in some way involves information flows, communications, transactions, and representations that can be mediated, at least in part, by ICTs. This means that focusing on ICTs as a policy instrument in cities brings with it an extraordinary degree of what sociologists of technology called “interpretive flexibility” (Bijker et al. 1987). Urban ICT projects can be “problematized” by technological entrepreneurs to virtually every possible stakeholder within the city because every possible aspect of urban life involves communication, information exchange, transactions, or electronic representations. This means that it is relatively easy to convince a wide range of partners to “come on board” an urban ICT initiative. But the very disparate and wide-ranging coalitions that can easily result can lead to problems caused by a lack of focus. In addition, the fact that everyone involved thinks the project addresses their needs and priorities, rather than those of other members of the coalition, can create major political conflict. As a result of these problems, coordinating and developing the sorts of crosscutting perspectives necessary to think about cities and ICTs in an integrated way is extremely difficult. Responsibilities for urban spaces and policies are usually separated institutionally, professionally, and paradigmatically from those that shape and regulate ICTs and new media. In many cases they also tend to operate at different spatial levels of governance. Finding common linguistic, conceptual, and policy frameworks to deal with the subtle interplays between urban places and ICTs, in an integrated and imaginative manner, is therefore a massive challenge. In addition, both cities and ICTs are currently being restructured as key sites within the neoliberalizing global economy. The result is that many new media and ICT infrastructures (and urban spaces) in cities are now intensively private and in the hands of ruthlessly secretive transnational companies. As a result, even finding out what a city’s ICT infrastructure actually is can be impossible for urban public policy makers. (The author knows this from his own policy experience in the UK city of Sheffield between 1989 and 1992.) The extraordinary rate of change, and the mind-bendingly esoteric language and terminology within the ICT world, makes decisive and effective urban ICT policy making even more problematic. Urban policy makers and planners are usually concerned with the visible and tangible dimensions of cities. But ICTs remain largely invisible and intangible. The explosion of digital exchange particularly challenges traditional urban planning perspectives oriented toward land use, physical form, urban design, and transportation – ways of thinking about modern, industrial-age cities that have long neglected the importance of electronic communications and technologies in urban life. Furthermore, the prevailing cultures of technological determinism often leave city policy makers with extremely unrealistic ideas that
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imply that ICTs autonomously have “impacts” on the social, economic, or cultural development of their cities. This leads to many policy failures. But because these embarrassing developments are rarely evaluated or analyzed in detail, their lessons are rarely learned or disseminated. Thus, the same traps tend to be fallen into again and again. A final set of problems surround the limits that inevitably exist on the power of even progressive and creative urban policy makers to alter the deepseated structural dynamics, which are broadly shaping the development of contemporary cities. The nature, geographies, politics, and social relations of cities and urban regions are currently being transformed so rapidly under the influences of neoliberal capitalism and the ICT technologies that are intrinsic to it. This limits the “maneuvering space” at the local level, to shift to different paths of city–ICT relations. Despite the difficulties involved in developing integrated urban–ICT strategies, the sheer strategic importance of city–ICT relationships means that there has been a rapid recent proliferation of strategies, policies, initiatives, social movements, analyses, and artists’ interventions which we could define under the term. Crucially, these attempt to treat the politics, governance, planning, or urban design of urban places and digitally mediated spaces of exchange in parallel – often for the first time. As social experiments in technological innovation that are rooted in the particularities of place, these interventions can significantly alter the cultural, social, and economic dynamics that bring together cities and ICTs, with potentially positive and negative effects. Although these strategies address the full gamut of urban and public policy imperatives – E-governance, the “digital” divide, transport planning, local economic development, infrastructural resilience, etc. – space only exists to discuss the two key policy imperatives that fall most obviously within the “heartland” of urban planning: strategic spatial planning and the integration of electronic realms into urban design. Strategic Spatial Planning for Networked City-regions First, ways of strategically planning, visualizing, and representing city-regions are being strived for, that address the ways in which multiple electronic and physical mobilities now continually, and dynamically constitute urban space. The challenge here is to move away from the essentialist, static, Euclidean, and objectoriented representations of space from above – that were key axioms in the formation of modern urban planning – to more “relational” approaches. These need to recognize how multiple mobilities and scales continually interpenetrate within contemporary city-regions (Graham and Healey 1999). Patsy Healey (2003), for example, has documented how a resurgence of interest in European Spatial Planning – partly fueled by debates surrounding the European Spatial Development Perspective (see Jensen and Richardson 2003) – are making real advances in conceptualizing and representing urban regions. In the Netherlands Fifth National Policy Document on Spatial Planning (see Hajer and Zonneveld 2000), the Regional Development Strategy for
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Northern Ireland 2025, and Greater Milan’s strategic planning discourse, Healey analyzes how the first faltering starts are being made to a rethinking of the nature of spatiality, power, scale, and place – that is, in keeping with the ways in which ICTs, and other flows, networks, and mobilities, are transforming urban regions. Such rethinking involves major political struggles. It requires key planning entrepreneurs to persistently “sell” views of space, territory, and the urban that rest on new, relational, and mobility-based axioms and vocabularies that are locally relevant. And it requires new normative geographical visions of how spatial planning might shape desired outcomes in terms of urban form and the spatialities of urban life, in particular urban regions in the mediumand long-term future (Healey 2003). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that, as yet, few strategic spatial planning discourses have genuinely made the “relational” turn in a truly convincing way. There is, as Healey (2003: 38) notes “no easy answer to developing a locally-relevant relational spatial conception and vocabulary.” Integrated Planning for Electronic and Physical Realms With the dissolution of the city into the forever-emerging metropolis our existence slides into a permanent mobility. (Lerup 2000: 77) Second, a wide range of emerging initiatives, strategies, and interventions are now emerging across the world that seek to harness new, “networked” conceptualizations of the public realm (Roberts et al. 1999), to creatively shape urban physical and electronic realms in combination. This involves, first, the “recombinant” design of buildings, public spaces, and city neighborhoods (where this term, coined by Bill Mitchell (1995), refers to the ways in which ICT technologies are creatively, and seamlessly, recombined with urban spaces). Diverse examples include community ICT centers, networked school complexes, kiosks, museums, government buildings, and multiuse, “intelligent” transport facilities; ICT-networked, neighborhood centers; the integration of ICT displays, terminals, and access points into urban neighborhoods in a coordinated way; integrating free broadband wireless Internet or “Wi-Fi” access into urban districts – as in London’s Soho – and a large number of private-sector led “networked” designs for new leisure, media, consumption, and housing environments (see Horan 2000). Second, this movement also encompasses the urban design of integrated “mobility environments” (Bertolini and Spit 1998) – multi-modal places of movement such as high-speed rail stations, airports, and auto interchanges – in ways that integrate with the high intensity of electronic mobilities within such environments. A key objective here is to generate the functional concentration, integrated electronic and physical movements, and sheer “aura” of centrality within increasingly dispersed and polynuclear networked cities. In Seoul’s
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New Media City, for example, electronic displays and signs are being integrated across huge swathes of building frontage, a literal rewriting of the physical surface of the city with ICT displays that integrate closely into the wider physical planning of urban spaces and transportation systems. The urban designer, Dennis Frenchman, has proposed a set of concepts for the space that includes: digital kiosks, large LCDs, a video wall with real-time webcam feeds from sister cities, “intelligent” street lamps, personal “transponders” with location sensitive information, and a virtual community tied to a local café. All of this is measured with visible graphs demonstrating in realtime flows of people, goods and information through the street – in essence, the street’s pulse. (Page and Phillips 2003b: 13) Finally, integrated urban and electronic design involves the integrated planning of physical and electronic spaces by artists, activists, and urban designers experimenting with ICT-based means of appropriating, or animating, urban public spaces. A key motivation here is the recognition that urban public realms now involve multiple, fluid, multiscaled, and continuous intersections of physical spaces, electronic flows, the people’s corporeal movements (see Hajer and Reijndorp 2002). For, as the sociologist Mimi Sheller (2003: 16) has argued: Publics are no longer usefully envisioned as the open spaces or free spaces in which diverse participants could gather – the democratic spaces of the street, the square, or the town hall. Nor can we simply pretend that equivalent “virtual spaces” exist in some democratic cybertopia. Instead the mechanisms for publics occurring in the context of the new infrastructures of mobility should be imagined in entirely new ways. A resulting challenge for urban designers and activists alike is to reveal and make public the usually private and individual flows of ICTs while also making them collective events experienced within urban public space. Good examples here include the display of mobile phone text messages – poetry, political reflections, etc. – on a large screen in Berlin U-bahn station in 2001 (see http://www.rude-architecture.de/) and the installation of a large array of searchlights around the main Zocalo square in Mexico City by the international artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, as part of the City’s millennial celebrations in the year 2000. These were programmed to provide a virtually infinite variety of light shows by participants from all over the world who inputted their ideas via a web site. This installation – one of many undertaken around the world by the artist – demonstrated particularly well the ways in which hybrid city–ICT interventions can be simultaneously local and global, tactile and virtual, and private and public (see www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/rlh/).
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Conclusion Urban planning, design, and strategy-making are beginning to come to terms with the ways in which the space, territory, life, and metabolism of urban places are currently being remade as a result of a proliferation of physical and electronic mobilities. This chapter has shown how this creative challenge involves a wholehearted rejection of prevailing assumptions that ICT-based mobilities involve a simple transcendence of, or substitution for, the corporeal and physical life of the city. It has also been shown that such a challenge necessitates a critical and complex reconceptualization of the nature of territoriality, urban space, social and political power, citizenship, and the opportunities for planning intervention. Finally, the need for a commitment to performance and experimentation with fused urban–ICT “hybrids” has been underlined as attempts are made to conceptualize, and shape, urban places and electronic realms in parallel. The policy imperatives here are not technical, rational, or merely to do with a creative experimentation with new technologies by a small cadre of techno-obsessed urbanists. While we must resist the “monocausal fetishization of the electronic” that remains so common in popular portrayals on new technology, we must also be conscious that ICTs are “resources for experiments with self-making in all sorts of societies, for all sorts of persons” (Appadurai 1996: 3). The relations between urban places and ICTs are, in fact, key strategic sites within a much wider set of intensively political reconfigurations and struggles. Engaging actively, and normatively, in making strategies for networked cities therefore involves struggles to: •
create a politics of technology which intersects positively with a politics of place;
•
forge a notion of citizenship and the public(s) that takes account of the inseparability of physical presence and electronic representation; and
•
ensure the emergence of a renewed commitment to the planning of urban places that celebrates democratic openness rather than the parallel closing off and splintering of both cityscapes and electronic realms into defensive, capsular worlds that so dominates experience of neoliberal restructuring. (see Graham and Marvin 2001)
While the examples of integrated urban–ICT strategies analyzed here are often modest in scale the critical challenge is to build on them; to learn from them while building up a bigger, and deeper, normative and utopian debate about strategies for network cities. This is vital so that the imaginative, multiscale, and relational knitting together of network cities can eventually emerge as a taken for granted and normal element of twenty-first-century urbanism.
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For urban planners the challenge is to remake the theoretical and practical dimensions of their work so that they emerge as central, rather than peripheral, to the emerging movements of integrated urban–ICT interventions. Without a thoroughgoing reflection on the specific ways in which urban planning can creatively shape urban–ICT interactions, however, the danger is that other groups who are more comfortable placing experimental place–ICT hybrids at the centre of their worlds – architects, artists, media professionals, and social movements – will totally dominate. This, inevitably, would lead to a further marginalization of urban planning, both as a discipline and a world of practice. Note Some parts of this text have been drawn from the introduction to Graham, S. (2003) (ed.) The Cybercities Reader: Handbook for an Urban Digital World, London: Routledge.
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CHAPTER EIGHT
The “Network City”: A New Old Way of Thinking Cities in the ICT Age Paul Drewe
Setting the Scene Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) may yet change dramatically the practices of spatial planners and related disciplines. For the moment, however, that reconstructive challenge is incomplete and immature. We are sensibly uncertain about the current and prospective impacts of the new technologies and of the conception of networks in which they are embedded. We are, however, sure that there are no simple, direct links between ICT and the spatial patterns of cities and regions. Do the new technologies encourage deconcentration of activities or intense clustering? Do they enhance social mobility or segregation? Absent a compelling narrative of those links it is difficult to persuade practitioners to alter their ordinary commitments to urban design “as they know it.” Mainstream urbanism has been dominated by zonal thinking. As expressed in the Athens Charter of 1933 (and countless zoning ordinances) cities were encouraged to concentrate functions into giant homogeneous packages. Alas, that simplistic geometry neither adequately represented nor appreciated the conditions that would sustain urbanity. There are many ways of defining urbanity. How about time-honored ones in terms of city diversity (Jacobs 1992) or, in a more complex way, by a set of patterns (Alexander et al. 1977). Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, innovators in many fields concerned with spatial planning – e.g. transportation, civil and electrical engineering, regional science, and telecommunication – developed an alternative image of cities as nodes in complex networks (and of nodes as networks). They cultivated the mathematical and graphic tools that made it possible to understand and to design such networks, and to speak of the network city. The extensive integration of communication and information processing in the last years of the twentieth
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century has played an important role in the understanding of networks and is often used as a figure of speech to represent the entire science of networks. The architects and urban designers, in dealing with cities have, by and large, neglected the vast flows of the networked world and the paradigmatic challenge of the concept of networks. They certainly have not seen the (sometimes hidden) infrastructure of cities as within their domain. The body of this chapter is addressed to my architectural colleagues, encouraging them to pay attention to the representation and design of networks. The address has five components. A design studio has been the focus of our research on the “network city.” The first three of the components have been important sources of inspiration for our work whereas the final component is about some of the results: 1
a diagrammatic exposition of network levels;
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a brief look at the Internet in terms of networks;
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rereading the classics;
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a design studio;
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directions for the future.
A Diagrammatic Exposition of Network Levels Dupuy distinguishes three, interacting levels of network operators that (re)organize the urban space as shown in Figure 8.1 (Dupuy 1991: 119). Level one involves the suppliers of technical networks. They are specialized and organized in sectors: water, energy, transport, conventional telecommunication, and the newcomer of ICT. Level one covers the technical infrastructure networks, the services offered, and the operators or actors. In the past, each infrastructure has been “bundled.” It has been a public, “monopolistic infrastructure network geared to covering an entire geographical territory with broadly equal services offered at broadly equal cost” (Graham and Marvin 2001). With privatization and/or liberalization, however, this is no longer the case. The infrastructure has become unbundled. Graham and Marvin (2001) provide a more detailed analysis of level one. The authors use the umbrella of “splintering urbanism” which covers not only the unbundling of infrastructure networks but also the fragmentation of urban space ensuing from it. On level two we find the well known functional networks of commoninterest users: production, distribution, consumption, and social contacts. Specific location factors apply to each of the functional networks. It is on level three that the users of functional networks make actual, selective use of technical networks and services for their special purposes. Each household or each company creates its own virtual city starting from the home or the company’s location. Household networks can best be measured in terms
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The networks for a new urbanism: elements of theory 3rd level operator Network/territory of the urban household
2nd level operator • Production network • Consumption network • Domestic network
1st level operator • Roads network • Common transport network • Telephone network, etc
Figure 8.1 Three Levels of Network Operators that (Re)Structure the Urban Space
of time-space budgets or action spaces. The emphasis shifts from the accessibility of activity places to reach. The latter stands for a set of activity places from which households can choose as destinations at acceptable (time) costs. Company networks, on the other hand, can be conceptualized as logistic chains by adding a spatial dimension to business logistics. The resulting networks of both households and companies represent “virtual cities.” Virtual means functionally but not formally of its kind. The virtual cities on level three tend to clash with municipal boundaries and with how planning actors usually view a desirable spatial (zonal) structure. Moreover, a time dimension is usually altogether missing in current spatial concepts. The question is whether this exposition of network levels also holds for the new networks of ICT. Does it enable us to understand the virtual space of the Internet? A Brief Look at the Internet in Terms of Networks The framework outlined in Figure 8.1 has been used to analyze the Internet. To do so, the framework has to be translated into Internet terms:
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level one reads the Internet infrastructure (the ISP backbone is chosen as the infrastructure level closest to the users);
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level two becomes the “Internet industry” (the commercial domain which is basically the functional network of production);
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level three relates to the actual traffic on the Internet (as revealed by traceroutes).
Our analysis is based on the MCI’s European transit backbone. For technical details see Drewe (2002). The position of a node (capital city) on the Internet infrastructure network depends on three aspects: the number of direct connections between cities; the capacity or bandwidth of links (measured in megabytes or even gigabytes per second); the presence of an Internet exchange point or the number of multiple paths (measured by the number of cooperating ISPs connected). In mathematical terms this infrastructure represents a power law distribution which “predicts that most nodes have only a few links, held together by a few highly connected hubs” (Barabási 2002: 71). As far as the “Internet industry” is concerned, three layers can be distinguished (according to the European Commission 1998): •
the “Information Society” including both households and established business firms using ICT products and services;
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“Information Society Industries” producing content on the net such as publishing, audiovisual, or advertising;
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“ICT industries” selling a number of clearly defined products and services.
It would be erroneous to refer to the Internet industry in terms of “new economy” as opposed to “old economy” because the old economy of established companies and the new economy of dot-coms are merging (Porter 2001). “The real legacy of the Internet is not the birth of thousands of new online companies but the transformation of existing businesses (Barabási 2002: 216). As to the actual traffic on the Internet, traceroutes have been carried out between selected broader Internet industry companies located in the nodes of MCI’s European networks in order to detect how the data flow between points of origin and destination. Traceroutes allow for measuring the performance of the Internet, which is a matter of response time, packet loss, and reachability. The framework adopted for the analysis (Figure 8.1) assumes three, interacting levels of network operators. The interactions are basically interrelations between respectively supply (level one), demand (level two), and performance (level three) (see Figure 8.2). From this one may conclude that
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Information Society Information Society Industries ICT Industries
Demand
Supply
Network Access Points National Backbone Operators Regional Network Operators Internet Service Providers
Performance
Reachability Packet loss Response time
Figure 8.2 The Internet Interrelations between Supply, Demand, and Performance
the Internet network “behaves” like a conventional network – say, a transport network. Rereading the Classics If the new networks tend to behave like the old ones, it can be useful to delve among the early, classic network thinkers. Rereading them can provide sources of inspiration with regard to the “network city.” Does not the framework shown in Figure 8.1 result from rereading the classics? There are quite a few classics among urbanists and architects that offer sources of inspiration. This does not mean that ancient concepts can simply be cut and pasted to provide a panacea for current and future urban problems. After all there is ICT, a new phenomenon to be reckoned with. Ideally, each of the classics represents a topic for Ph.D. research if urban design is to be developed into a science (Klaassen 2004). Classical network thinking has been unearthed by Dupuy (1991, 2000). The network in its modern meaning is characterized by three principal criteria: Topological Criterion. The research of direct relations without intermediary and the desire for ubiquity, produces a very specific interest in the topology of a network. Kinetic Criterion. Instantaneousness, homogeneity of speeds, the interest for rapid transfers and transits without losses of time or interruptions makes the network apt to movement and defines the kinetic criterion.
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Adaptive Criterion. As presently conceived, networks are based on a choice of connections in space and time. The connections can necessitate a permanent support, a fixed infrastructure. On the other hand, the network has to, ideally, be able to constantly adapt to the needs of new connections, when they are requested and chosen by its users (Dupuy 2000: 5). Classical network thinkers in urbanism have put different emphasis on the three criteria (Dupuy 1991). Frank Lloyd Wright, in his Broadacre City, is one of those who has fully dealt with topology, kinetics, and adaptation (Wright 1940). The plan of Broadacre City was a schematic representation of a relatively low-density, continuous urban area in which previously centralized city functions would be decentralized along a linear transportation and communications system. Although there was some mixing of these functions, similar uses of land were grouped together in five large sections (actually continuous ribbons of urban development) parallel to a superhighway and regional rail system. (Grabow 1977: 116) In fact, the “Broadacre City” has inspired Fishman (1988) to lay the foundation for the very framework of today’s network urbanism, shown in Figure 8.1. The same framework has helped us to understand the networks of the Internet. “Broadacre City” has never been built. It has remained a utopian vision of city development unlike the work of the European network thinker Cerdà which had an important impact on the development of Barcelona. Rereading Cerdà to plan today’s cities leads to three basic lessons: the failure of zoning, the role of networks, and network-based urban planning (Dupuy 2001; see also Magrinyà 2001). Rereading the classics can inspire both conceptual innovations and practice. An example of the former is given by Salingaros (2000) rereading Alexander’s pattern language. Let us recall that Alexander et al. (1977) distinguish major structures that define the city and are formed by city policies. Moreover, there are two levels of self-governing communities. The related patterns provide building stones for the larger city patterns. The list of patterns also includes some regional patterns and a lot of lower-level patterns down to buildings. Salingaros, a mathematician, has consequently redefined the task of urban planners as one of connecting the fractal city. This raises a number of fundamental questions: (i) what these fractal properties are; (ii) the intricate connectivity of the living urban fabric; (iii) methods of repairing urban space; (iv) an effective way to overlay pedestrian, automotive, and public transports; and (v) how to integrate physical connections with electronic connections. (Salingaros 2003: 1)
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As far as practice is concerned, the work of Salingaros is close to that of the Prince’s Foundation in Britain (http://www.princes-foundation.org). Our last example of rereading the classics is Lynch, perhaps best known for his “image of the city” (Lynch 1960), which has inspired Page and Phillips (2003a) in their urban design for Jersey City. According to Lynch, the image of a city depends on paths, edges, nodes, districts, landmarks, and “the sense of the whole.” Lynch at the time had also been working on Jersey City. The question is whether navigating in this city will improve thanks to the design proposed by Page and Phillips, in particular thanks to their way of treating the relationship between public and electronic space. To argue today, as Lynch did 40 years ago, that Jersey City is a disorienting, obscure urban form that is no more than its sum of fragmentary enclaves and divisive infrastructure barriers would be criticism leveled from a traditional urbanism perspective. More accurately, the city should be recognized as being rife with opportunity to explore new forms of urban expression that acknowledges the diverse and flexible interest of the information age (Page and Phillips 2003a: 93). A Design Studio As mentioned at the outset, a design studio has been the focus of our research on the “network city.” Design-oriented research in the first place aims at possible futures. The strength of design lies in the fact that it can demonstrate or visualize what could be designed with ICT. Possible futures tend to relate to the long term. In order to bridge the gap between a distant future and today’s practice, one can focus on location-specific test-beds. This is the basic philosophy of our design studio. It started as a six-year cooperation between the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment and the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology. In order to generate synergy, the studio involves staff, Ph.D. students, contract researchers, and – last but not least – undergraduate students in their final year. There are also international links to experts working in the same field (for further information go to http://www.networkcity.bk. tudelft.nl). This includes staff and student activities related to what has been referred to as test-beds (Drewe 1996): •
the future urban agglomeration;
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the “rest” of the Netherlands, beyond the “periphery”;
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the “mainport” as node of a logistic network;
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the “euroregion plus,” beyond the Dutch border.
To these four themes, architecture-related test-beds have been added, focusing on the future home suited for telework and the future office. The scope
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of the design-studio, too, has been extended to the role of ICT with regard to the spatial planning process. The student contributions address different themes with an emphasis on content or process and relate to different scales (ranging from buildings to the international level). ICT figures as a support or as an innovation. The latter is defined either as a new product (especially in architecture) or as a new approach to spatial planning. Here are a few examples of questions for which design proposals have been developed in the design studio: •
How can tele-activities in neighborhood telecenters help to improve the living conditions of the elderly?
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How do multinodal urban structures evolve and what are the appropriate urban design strategies?
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How can personal travel services be designed as part of a larger project of seamless multimodal mobility including, among others, the design of intermodal transfer points in multimodal passenger transport networks? And, focusing on the elderly, what lessons are there to be learned from their space-time behavior?
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If social exclusion from ICT (the so-called digital divide) is seen as part of the larger problem of urban vulnerability and deprivation, what revitalization strategies apply in Europe and in the Netherlands (and how about Latin American metropolises)?
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Do New Urban principles offer an alternative to present urban expansion in network cities in Europe (including a code for ICT, i.e., networks and telework)?
The answer to these and other questions can be found on the website mentioned above. It is the rise of ICT in the 1990s that has triggered our network thinking in urbanism. The work in the design studio has been inspired by the framework shown in Figure 8.1. It incorporates lessons from urban technology systems such as water, energy, and transport (their infrastructure, services, and users). Dupuy’s criteria serve to classify classical contributions to network thinking in these areas. They have not guided the studio work, but helped to understand the new technology and its implications for urban form. Where Do We Go from Here? At the end of the day, a conclusion emerges: we need integrated planning of land use and urban technology networks, in particular transport and ICT
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(see also Graham and Marvin 1998). This is not a plea for comprehensive planning as we know it from the past. Throughout the twentieth century, cities have been planned, and in doing so, networks for the transport not only of passengers and goods but also of water, energy, and information have played an ever increasing role. However, cities have seldom been (re)thought in terms of networks: their topology, nodes, connectivity, capillarity, or similarities. Because “networks have properties, hidden in their construction, that limit or enhance our ability to do things with them” (Barabási 2002: 12). What better way of demonstrating the new integrated planning than taking a closer look at the winning entry for the Millennium City competition for Orange County. Page et al. (2003) have tried to achieve smart sprawl through a networkoriented development. This is a seven-step process: •
development of a county-scale organization to stimulate the growth of e-commerce, e-business, e-government, distance education, and telemedicine;
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creation of a county-wide high capacity Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) with commercial, non-profit, and government components;
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establishment of a system of Network Stations of different sizes at dozens of strategic locations throughout the county to provide access to the MAN (including high-speed access to the Internet);
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transformation of single-function buildings into mixed-function buildings with Network Stations adding functions;
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creation of plans for adding a mix of functions to single-function districts such that housing, jobs, and services will be integrated at distances not greater than two miles (also using in-fill bricks and mortar projects as well as Network Stations for this purpose);
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creation of Neighborhood Transportation Zones around the Network Stations (mixed-vehicle streets catering to low-impact vehicles);
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beginning of reclamation of some of the land devoted to high-performance automobiles (such as housing construction on surface-parking lots in retail centers or office parks or reclamation of streets).
A similar approach has been applied to the Hudson County Cyberdistrict where Wallace Roberts & Todd (2003) have proposed design concepts such as: •
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network stations plus mixed-function buildings plus neighborhood transportation zones;
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•
mixed-use public facilities plus network neighborhood centers (or network stations);
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network neighborhoods plus various electronic initiative projects.
The European Union’s Urban Initiative provides another example. An integrated approach to the economic and social regeneration of urban areas has been adopted. It includes as priorities: mixed-use and environmentally friendly brownfield redevelopment, integrated public transport and communication, and development of the potential of the information society, among others (Commission of the European Communities 2002). Of course there is still a lot of work ahead. Since a time dimension is usually altogether missing in current spatial concepts, an urgent question to be addressed in the years to come is “What about time in urban planning and design in the ICT age?” (level three of Figure 8.1 refers). Once again, a rereading of the classics is advised. “What time is this place?” is indeed an intriguing question in the ICT age (Lynch 1972). The “network city” has been presented as a “new” old way of thinking about cities in the ICT age. This is a challenge to practitioners and urban design “as they know it.” More important, however, than attacking old dogma is the demonstration of how to design or plan with networks and, in particular, with ICT. The work of the design studio and emergent network-based concepts prove that this is possible. In passing, looking at the Internet in terms of networks shows that ICT is more than a visualization tool.
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COMMENTARY
Challenging the “Old” Urban Planning Paradigm: The Network Approach Gabriel Dupuy
Urban planning has, since its earliest beginnings, been obsessed with two overarching figures: that of the center and that of density. The city center was meant to take precedence over an urban periphery considered to be of a lower value. Density measured and regulated land use. To what extent is the Network Society challenging those universally assimilated and understood perceptions? The authors of the section “Impact of Physical Networks” suggest that the city, or rather urban society, is continuing to develop toward a high degree of differentiation and any attempt to prevent that would be futile. City centers and urban peripheries do not resemble each other; they cater to neither the same populations nor even the same activities. It does not matter if cities become multi-centered or even if the center has become peripheral to the old town. What does make a difference is the density, with densely occupied central areas or nodes contrasting with loosely controlled suburban sprawl. Some regard such spatial differentiation as a stroke of luck, others as an unavoidable evil. Either way, it is a fact of life. Networks once fueled utopian dreams of non-differentiated urban space, with neither centers nor peripheries. It would not matter where one was in the linear city (Arturo Soria y Mata’s largely unfulfilled utopian dream in Madrid) or in Broadacre City (Frank Lloyd Wright’s American utopia), or what floor one lived on in Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse. Networks would instantly provide everyone with the same services. What do we mean by networks? They are technical systems designed to supply residents conveniently with the services that have become crucial to modern urban life: running water, sanitation, power, transport, communications. They have come to be called “networks” because of their spatial structure – lines, pipes, rails, and so on, either meshed or branching depending on the case.
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Those networks, however, do not have the power they are often attributed. Nobody believes in pure technological determinism any more. Scarcely anyone still believes in Utopia. It is hard to see evidence in the transport and communication networks now innervating our cities and towns of the challenge to the political and territorial hierarchies that some had been predicting. What is reflected in the widely implemented network policies is, on the contrary, evidence of the powers, the lobbies, and territorialism. Deike Peters, referring to Peterson and Bomberg (1999), “contests a system of governance that is weakly institutionalized, resource-poor, and has no ‘government’.” Our authors regard urbanized space as being akin to a more or less wellirrigated field growing a large variety of more or less hardy plants that are more or less useful but that ultimately, when taken together, amount to a wealth of assets. The networks, in that respect, serve as the irrigators. Transport planners should not deny these differences and instabilities by pursuing generic accessibility improvements . . . They should capitalize on the distinctive accessibility features of different locations.” (Luca Bertolini) That view clearly breaks with urban planning’s formerly ambitious, selfassured, and imperious past. The views presented here, on the other hand, blend a certain evolutionism in the realm of analysis with a certain humility in the field of action; although, suggest the authors, there is no longer any room for yesterday’s methods. In the past, geometry easily distinguished the center from the peripheries. It simplified zoning and calculations of density. Notwithstanding the aesthetic qualities of Italian Renaissance plans, as in the case of Palma Nova for instance, urban planning patterns are essentially geometrical. There are good reasons for that. Geometry serves to measure real estate. Urban planning will rely on it for as long as the right to property persists, and will continue to place its projects along land-parcel boundaries. Nowadays, however, geometry is not so good at delimiting our differentiated and sprawling cities. The authors in this chapter leave no room for doubt. Links between places are crucial to the Network Society because they represent affinities and complementarities that must be taken into account by real or virtual means. Today’s complex, multiplex, multipolar, and multicentered urban environment is understood in terms not so much of distances as of rhythms and connections. Distance is less of an obstacle than a missing link in the network. New residential districts are the product of nodality as much as of concentration. The challenge here is to move away from the essentialist, static, Euclidean, and object-oriented representations of space from above – that were key axioms in the formation of modern urban planning – to more “relational” approaches. (Stephen Graham)
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All that remains is to work out how. Christopher Alexander led the way in declaring that the city was not a tree. Graph theory has enabled progress to be made in urban transport planning. The mathematical and graphic tools . . . made it possible to understand and to design such networks, and to speak of the network city. (Paul Drewe) But today the techniques have yet to be found and the progress still seems rather slow to us. Beneath the quest for new approaches, on the other hand, looms the question of scales. Urban planning design stemmed from a given scale of work. Yet the “networked city” referred to above combines scales in a bewildering way. I need to have a cinema near where I live, but I often watch films on television or on a DVD when I take the plane, and the Internet gives me access to programs and trailers. This example shows the superimposing of three scales – local, national, and global – and, as Melvin Webber suggested some decades ago, one must be able to handle all three at the same time. Similarly, the role of networks is now bringing out all the ambiguity of the concept of density. Density refers to an area with a fixed, clearly marked out perimeter. If the perimeter shifts, as in the case of a city that in many people’s eyes no longer has limits, the density fluctuates in relation to the time and the space. As such, suburban areas, just because they are peripheral, do not tend to have the same density as central areas. Their networks will be less dense than in the urban core. This situation is neither abnormal nor shocking. Nobody expects every town and village in the remote suburbs of Paris to have its own metro station. The question remains as to what is normal and what is not and why. Fractal geometry can answer that question. The fractal dimension expresses consistency in the occupation of space, according to any scale of observation. When a network is fractal in form, it serves the center and even the remotest periphery in the same way, albeit taking into account the fact that peripheries presumably cover a wider area than the urban core. As a rule, fractals provide a powerful tool for finding new ways of looking at the interrelationship between human beings and urban areas. It is just a matter of becoming accustomed to them and of accepting the fractal dimension’s implicit laws, which used to be obscured by the use of density: not all points in a given area are equal. This is very much how the authors brought together in this section now perceive urban areas.
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Organization of Space and Time: Challenges for Planning and Planners
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CHAPTER NINE
Planning as Persuasive Storytelling in the Context of “the Network Society” James A. Throgmorton
In Planning as Persuasive Storytelling (1996), I argued that planning can usefully be construed as persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the future. Three broad lines of critique have been directed against that claim. One argues that to think of planning as storytelling is to open the floodgates to fabrications. The second essentially argues that power, not stories, is what matters. And the third suggests that there is more to storytelling than first meets the eye. Furthermore, my claim was not well connected to contemporary scholarship about economic restructuring and the emergence of a globalized “network society” and the postmodern, global, or transnational city. This chapter revises my earlier argument in light of these critiques. It argues that planners’ stories about the future will necessarily have to begin from a normative position, but, to be persuasive to a wide range of readers, they will also have to make narrative and physical space for diverse, locally grounded, common urban narratives, juxtapose those narratives against one another, and enable the actual geohistorical readers of transnational places to engage in fruitful dialogue with their fellow strangers. Powerful actors will strive to eliminate or marginalize competing stories, and hence will induce some planners to devise plans (stories about the future) that are designed to persuade only the audiences that most matter to them. The Claim Restated If we understand planning to be an exercise in persuasive storytelling, or at least to incorporate and be influenced by stories and storytelling, then it might be helpful to begin by thinking of planners (and others involved in planning) as authors who write texts (plans, analyses, articles) that can be read (constructed
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and interpreted) in diverse and often conflicting ways.1 Such planner-authors have to write texts that emplot (or arrange and shape, or at a minimum seek to turn) the flow of future action. To do it well, these planner-authors have to fill that flow of action with interesting and believable characters (e.g., planners, developers, neighbors, elected officials) who act in settings (e.g., in older inner-city neighborhoods, in suburbanizing landscapes, in public hearings). These planner-authors have to build conflict, crisis, and resolution into their narratives, such that key antagonists are somehow changed or moved significantly. They have to adopt distinct points of view and draw upon the imagery and rhythm of language (including statistical models, forecasts, GIS-based maps, three-dimensional architectural renderings and virtual reality models, surveys, advisory committees, and other persuasive figures of speech and argument, or tropes) to express a preferred attitude toward the situation and its characters. Through emplotment, characterizations, descriptions of settings, and rhythm and imagery of language, such “planning stories” unavoidably shape the reader’s attention, turning it this way instead of that. The raw material of planning stories emerges from the practical world of day-to-day life, but stories cannot tell themselves. Rather, they must be transformed into narratives and then be told.2 That act of construction is necessarily selective and purposeful. One must choose to include this but exclude that, to start (and end) a story this way rather than that, to use these words rather than those, to configure the events of the story this way rather than that. These purposes, in turn, are tightly connected to emotion. We choose to tell certain stories because they matter to us, and we tell them in certain ways because those ways of telling feel right (often for reasons we are not fully conscious of). Thus planning stories are often about (or are inspired by) powerful memories, deep fears, passionate hopes, intense angers, and visionary dreams, and it is these emotions that give good stories their power. In the end, such stories shape meaning and tell readers (and listeners) what is important and what is not, what counts and what does not. Such future-oriented stories guide readers’ sense of what is possible and desirable, and, if told well, enable readers to envision desirable transformations in their cities, long for the transformations, feel inspired to act, and believe that their actions will actually have an effect. To suggest that planning can be thought of as a form of storytelling runs against the grain of conventional planning practice, which is deeply imbued with the ethics, ambitions, and sometimes the obfuscations of science. Still focused on trying to control the future of territorially-bounded representative democracies through the application of technical expertise, most practicing planners want to believe that they can be unbiased agents of the public interest and that their texts have a single literal meaning (the one planners intend) which any intelligent person can grasp.3 These beliefs notwithstanding, all planners also know that context (political pressures, funding constraints, and the like) shapes their work and that other people often respond to the planners’ texts in antagonistic ways. So planners are caught in a bind between what they want to believe and what they know is true, between espoused theory and actual
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practice. This often leads to much confusion, most importantly to the idea that planning is purely a technical activity and politics is something that takes place apart from the technical work and can only muck it up.4 Contrary to this literal view, a persuasive storytelling perspective implies that the meaning(s) of the planners’ texts depends on their contexts; that is, their meaning(s) depend(s) on the story or stories of which they are a part.5 Not all planners’ texts explicitly or intentionally engage in persuasive storytelling. In many cases, their texts act as part of some larger story. Often this larger story is presented only in cursory fashion; readers have to infer it or unearth it from other sources. In this context, the planners’ texts act as tropes that seek to turn the larger implicit story in a preferred direction. DeLeon (1992) offers a good example in his analysis of how professional planners advanced the “progrowth regime’s” story in San Francisco from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. He claims that the regime “brought order out of hyperpluralistic chaos” and that the progrowth regime “became the author of the city’s vision, architect of its plans, and source of its power to get things done” (p. 40). Those who conceptualized the progrowth regime envisaged downtown San Francisco as a commercial, financial, and administrative headquarters that would link the US to an emerging transpacific urban community. To achieve that vision, blighted areas near the downtown had to be cleared, undesirable populations had to be removed, the regional transportation system had to be improved, and high-rise office buildings had to be put in place. Moreover, achieving that vision required construction of a political coalition that would supply the strategic leadership, mobilize the resources, and coordinate actors in such a way as to guide and empower the city’s transformation. So the progrowth coalition created a series of organizations designed to articulate strategic visions, offer detailed plans and proposals, and carry out specific projects. According to DeLeon, this progrowth regime “paved a smooth road that led to a new San Francisco . . . a West Coast Manhattan, a gleaming global gateway to the Pacific Rim” (p. 43). If we treat planning as a process of constructing persuasive stories about the future of cities, where meaning depends on context, then much can be learned from the practice of literary criticism. Reader-response theory tells us that the meaning of the planners’ texts lies not just in the authors’ intent or the written documents themselves but, as suggested above, also in what the various readers bring to the texts. This notion has important implications for planning: planners cannot assume that any audience will receive the same message that elected officials or planners intend to convey. Nor can planners assume that their texts will evoke a single desired response if “read correctly.” The meaning of the text is contestable and negotiated between the author and its many readers. There is another complication to consider: in our contemporary world, multiple stories are being told simultaneously. Said differently, readers of one story frequently are also the authors of their own stories, and their stories often differ from the planners’. These diverse stories generate differing sets of argumentative claims and evaluative criteria, with judgments of quality (Is this a good plan?) being dependent on who makes the judgments. Moreover, both
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planners and readers are characters in each others’ stories, often in ways that they can scarcely recognize. Last, since the meaning of a statement, trend, or action depends on its context, the simultaneous existence of multiple stories means that any one trend, action, or place – even specific words, concepts, and statues – can have multiple and contestable meanings. (What did the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center mean?) This means that planners act in a contextual web of partial and contestable truths. Furthermore, future-oriented storytelling is not simply persuasive. It is also constitutive. The way in which planners – and others involved in the process of planning – write and talk, shapes community, character, and culture. For example, how planners (as authors) characterize (name and describe) the people who inhabit and activate their stories shapes how those characters are expected to act and relate to one another. And how planners write and talk shapes who “we” (as a temporary community of authors and readers) are and can become.6 Last, cities and their planning-related organizations can be thought of as nodes in a global-scale web of highly fluid and constantly (but often subtly) changing relationships. These relationships can, in turn, be defined as links between nodes, as paths through which goods, services, energy, capital, information, love/fear, and other social exchanges flow. To plan effectively, therefore, planners (and others) have to recognize that they are embedded in this intricate web of relationships. They have to construct understandings of the web, recognize that the point of view from which they construct their understandings depends on their locations in the web, and know that their challenge is to persuade others to consider/accept their constructions. But they also have to accept the fact that people tell diverse and often conflicting stories. That means planners must also find ways to set these contestable stories side by side, let them interact with one another, and thereby let them influence judgments about how particular nodes and links in the web should change, are likely to change, and why. In the end, the challenge for planners is “to begin planning based on the imagery of webs, nodes, and links; to find ways to construct stories that reconfigure the web in persuasive and compelling ways; and to construct new forums which enable public and democratic argumentation” (Throgmorton 1996: 257). Critical Responses to the Claim Four broad lines of critique have been directed against this basic claim. One argues that to treat planning as storytelling is to open the floodgates to fabrications; truth, not stories, is what matters. The second essentially argues that power has a rationality that rationality does not know; power, not stories, is what matters. The third is implicit. By not directly engaging the work of urban theorists such as Manuel Castells, David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, Michael Dear, John Friedmann, Edward Soja, and others, my claim appears irrelevant to major contemporary arguments about economic globalization. And the fourth
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critically analyzes the concepts of author, story, and audience in relationship to the idea of planning as persuasive storytelling. To Tell a Story is to Lie Perhaps the most fundamental objection claims that telling a story means making something up, writing fiction, telling lies. Why would planners want to associate themselves with such fabrications? The most direct response is to repeat that we (planners and others) tell stories all the time. It is unavoidable, for events cannot tell themselves. Events have to be configured in relationship to one another and then narrated in order to be told. But questioning the possible falsehood of stories raises even more important questions: How can one tell whether one story is truer than another, and what should one do in the face of lies or errors of fact? I think the questions miss the crucial point. It is completely appropriate to insist that planners and others tell the truth about the facts of a matter, while simultaneously being aware that they do not always do so. But I would suggest that, in most planning-related cases, the facts matter far less than their interpretation. It is how facts are configured relative to one another, how they are interpreted, or, in a word, what they mean that matters. (Did President Clinton have a particular sexual encounter with a young woman staff member? Evidently he did. The more important question is, what did that encounter mean?) So more fruitful questions would be: How can one determine which story is more persuasive? More persuasive to whom? And why? To ask about meaning and persuasiveness rather than truth is to shift attention from technical accuracy to a combination of accuracy and normative evaluation. It is not to deny the persuasive power of web-based technologies and 3-D simulations that Brail and Klosterman (2001) describe so well, but it is to place planning in a technical-political realm rather than an idealized world of pure technique. So let me now turn to the political critique. It is Power, not Storytelling, that Matters A related objection has been that, like other “communicative theories” of planning, persuasive storytelling privileges process over substantive issues that are grounded in actual contexts (Lauria and Whelan 1995; Yiftachel 1999), and gives too much attention to action by planners and too little to structural features that shape and limit those actions (Campbell and Fainstein 1996). And in his extensively debated case study of planning in Aalborg, Denmark, Bent Flyvbjerg (1998) has argued that power is always present and cannot be done away with by a communicatively rational process. Power creates the knowledge that is then used to determine reality; or, as he puts it in a felicitous turn of phrase, “power has a rationality that rationality does not know” (p. 234). Although some of the “communicative” literature does indeed pay too little attention to political context, this criticism misses the mark for my book and for my argument. As Patsy Healey (1997b) and Vanessa Watson (2002) both note, I clearly presented a nested set of stories about electric power planning in the Chicago area, with each story being placed in a progressively larger
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context. Moreover, stories cannot tell themselves; they must be transformed into narratives and then be told. That act of construction is necessarily selective and purposeful; that is, necessarily political. As Michael P. Smith (2001: 43) argues, this means it is important to focus attention on “representational power” and to ask, “Who has the power to give meaning to things, to name others, to construct the character of collective identities, to shape the discussion of urban politics [and to ask] . . . what are the appropriate boundaries of urban politics?” In this context, I see more similarity than difference between my work and Flyvbjerg’s. He narrates a fascinating story about planning and development, he immerses readers in the flow of action by writing in the present tense, he fills the story with interesting and believable characters, he places the action in the real-life settings of Aalborg, he persuades his readers by relying heavily on the trope of irony, and he draws on interviews and his own observations to characterize the key actors. Flyvbjerg has told a persuasive story that (necessarily) has a political purpose: to convince its readers that planning is political and that planners must learn to be more effective in the political arena. What Counts is Good Theorizing about the Network Society or the Global City, not (Mere) Storytelling These comments about context point to a third line of critique. In a 1997 review of my book, planning scholar Jeanne Wolfe suggested that the Chicago electric power case could have been more fruitfully analyzed from a neo-Marxist, post-Fordist, or postmodernist perspective. In effect, she was saying that I could have interpreted the Chicago case in the context of a better theoretical perspective. Her criticism can be restated: Why would a scholar want to focus on (mere) storytelling? Do not real scholars develop and test theories, especially ones that are deeply rooted in the neo-Marxist critique of capitalist-led globalization and urbanization? In general, Wolfe’s comments reflect the perspective of the urban theorists mentioned previously. While these theorists differ from one another in many important ways, they collectively argue that several important trends or processes (e.g., economic globalization, global communication systems, transnational migrations, complex environmental flows and cycles, and exurbanization of development in the regions of “the North”) have been producing the “global,” “postmodern,” or “transnational” city, and that these trends/processes have been transgressing, undermining, and reshaping the conventional technical, political, and epistemological boundaries that have shaped planners’ work. I think these urban theorists are right in drawing attention to these factors; they create the context that shapes local stories. Consequently, these urban theorists help us understand the complexity of planning for places in a world of mind-boggling complexity and interdependence. But why should one embrace a neo-Marxist construction of this context rather than, say, one that celebrates a right-wing populist nationalism or the now-dominant free market neoliberalism? The answer cannot be derived solely by comparing the theories’ explanatory or predictive power, or by testing the accuracy of their factual claims. The global-scale web is awash with theories, each of which purposefully
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constructs understandings of the web, restricts attention to a few phenomena, and typically ignores other theories.7 Given that, I would, like Ruth Finnegan (1998: 14–23), argue that urban theories can usefully be characterized as stories: they postulate some temporal ordering of events and emplot those events as historical change, they typically use basic narrative plots to provide coherent explanation, they position scholars as the tellers of abstract and generalizable tales, and they draw upon expected patterns of form, context, and delivery. Michael P. Smith (2001: 31) likewise argues, quite persuasively in my view, that “contemporary theories of political economy and globalization are themselves situated systems of representation, contested readings that give alternative meaning to the ‘out there’ of political economy and global restructuring.” To interpret these theoretical constructs as persuasive stories is not to deride their value. Nor is it to suggest that one should not pay attention to them. It is merely to suggest that they can be made more or less persuasive to pertinent audiences by attending to the basic principles of good storytelling. Jeanne Wolfe also said that the case I chose to analyze was not an appropriate one for “city and regional planning as we understand it” (Wolfe 1997: 527, emphasis added). Perhaps. But note that she constructs the community of planners in a particular way. Others might – in fact do – construct it differently. So I would reply that electric power planning is still planning, and that finding persuasive storytelling being practiced in such a scientific and technical institutional arena is not trivial. More important, I would argue that the case I studied took place in one of the nodes (Chicago) and pertained to one of the links (electric power) of a global-scale web of relationships. Geography-planning scholar Edward Soja (2003) has recently offered a critique of the storytelling claim that I find to be quite constructive. In his view, the narrative mode typically ignores space. Accordingly he warns: the practice of persuasive storytelling must be approached with caution, not because storytelling and the narrative form more generally are not attractive and powerful ways of understanding the world, but because they may be too powerful and compelling, silencing alternative modes of critical thinking and interpretation, especially with regard to the spatiality of time. (p. 207) Quoting art theorist John Berger, he emphasizes, “It is scarcely any longer possible to tell a straight story sequentially unfolding in time. And this is because we are too aware of what is continually traversing the story line laterally” (p. 208). On this point, I would agree with Soja. Economic globalization, transnational migrations, and global environmental systems have radically transformed the context of local action. Local planning takes place in the context of a global-scale web of relationships. To be viable and legitimate in present circumstances, persuasive storytelling must take into account the diverse ways in which stories spatialize that web. We must spatialize the storytelling imagination.
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There is More to Storytelling than First Meets the Eye The last critique comes from a scholar of English and American Studies, Barbara Eckstein (2003). Eckstein makes three important claims: first, it is not clear why readers should trust any planner’s claim to have converted “community stories” into a single persuasive story; second, the best stories – ones that produce a will to change – are ones that disrupt habits of thought and “defamiliarize” the familiar; and third, the best stories “conscript” readers who are willing to engage strangers (“geohistorical readers”) in dialogue. She substantiates these claims by focusing on three important concepts: authors, stories, and audience. With regard to authorship, Eckstein rightly observes that it is usually quite difficult to determine who the authors of plans really are. “Community storytellers” construct and tell contending community stories, but these people typically disappear in plans and in planning theories about storytelling; the planner supplants them as the storyteller, usually in ways that cannot be discerned. As a reader, she wants to know what authorizes the way planners transform those community stories into authoritative plans. In order for readers to assess and trust the planners’ claims to authority, she advises planners to think of themselves as ones who “make space” for stories to be heard. As she puts it: It is their knowledge of traditional stories and local conventions; it is their skill as narrators, as “hosts,” for stories they hear and retell; it is their demeanor, their voice, their ordering, their shaping, their ability – literally – to create an amiable narrative and physical space, that allow their telling, retelling, and thus transformation of the community’s stories to be heard. (2003: 21) With regard to stories, Eckstein observes that most people think of stories as a means of bringing order to the chaos of events. Reversing that expectation, she suggests that stories can “quite usefully disrupt the habits of thought and action that control everyday life” (p. 25). “The will to change,” she claims, has to come from an ability – a planner’s ability, an urban users’ ability – to imagine one’s self in a different skin, a different story, and a different place and then desire this new self and place that one sees. It has to come from a storyteller’s ability to make a narrative and physical space in which to juxtapose multiple, traditional stories so that they enrich, renarrate, and transform that space rather than compete for ultimate control of a single, linear, temporal history of an impermeably bounded geopolitical place. (p. 24) In this context, she draws attention to the use and importance of duration (the amount of story time) and frequency (the number of times a theme is advanced) in storytelling. Skill with duration provides the storyteller an opportunity to rivet
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the readers’ attention on events and occasions that best serve the storyteller’s intentions, whereas skill with frequency focuses readers’ attention on patterns of significance. And drawing upon Soja’s work, Eckstein observes that both the spaces made for storytelling and the spaces stories make figure in the production and apprehension of meaning. Since stories deploy different geographic scales and since their interpretation depends upon careful reading of those scales, stories that “defamiliarize” can compel audiences to shift their usual interpretive scale or spatial perspective. With regard to audience, Eckstein considers the importance of thinking about the “conscripted reader.” This notion refers to the way in which a text drafts readers, however voluntarily, to play particular roles and to embrace particular beliefs and values. But actual readers, she calls them “geohistorical readers,” negotiate with the conscription in accordance with their interpretive communities (groups determined by cultural/professional training or practice); the formative experiences of their geohistorically situated, individual lives; and their dispositions. Sometimes geohistorical readers blatantly resist being conscripted the way planner-authors desire. In the end, Eckstein concludes: The storyteller is the one who actively makes space for the story(s) to be heard. An effective story is that narrative which stands the habits of everyday life on their heads so that blood fills those brainy cavities with light. Such a story fully exploits the materials of time (duration, frequency of repetition), time-space (chronotope), and space (scale, perspective, remoteness) deliberately arranging them in unfamiliar ways so that they conscript readers who are willing to suspend their habits of being and come out in the open to engage in dialogue with strangers. (pp. 35–6) The Claim Revised These four broad lines of critique provide fruitful material upon which to revise my initial claim. Knowing that the content of a story depends on its purpose, I would begin by claiming that planners must be clear about their purpose. Planners can, of course, always claim that their purpose is simply to carry out the will of the people, as expressed by elected officials. But even those elected officials typically expect planners to provide advice on the basis of “good planning,” and it is not good enough to say that “good planning” derives from contentfree processes. Consequently, I believe that contemporary planning stories must be inspired by a normative vision. But which purpose, which vision? The answer is, of course, contestable and therefore political. In the remainder of this chapter I want to suggest how planners could help imagine and create sustainable places by making space for diverse, locally grounded common urban narratives (or community stories).
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Planning Stories should be Inspired by the Vision of Sustainable Places In the view of many people around the world, planning stories should be inspired by the normative vision of the sustainable place; that is, by the vision of creating city-regions that are ecologically healthy, economically vital, socially just, and guided by richly democratic practices (see Throgmorton 2003a, and Beauregard 2003a). According to this vision, planners should be advocates for the sustainable city; they have to tell persuasive stories about how sustainable places can and should be created. But it is also important to recognize that, in the words of planning scholar Scott Campbell: our sustainable future does not yet exist, either in reality or even in strategy. We do not yet know what it will look like; it is being socially constructed through a sustained period of conflict negotiation and resolution. This is a process of innovation, not of discovery and converting the nonbelievers. (1996: 302) Places should be Understood as Multidimensional One cannot make a “place” more sustainable without having some sense of what “place” means, and it turns out that, as literary critic Lawrence Buell (2001: 62) puts it, “[a] place may seem quite simple until you start noticing things.” Consider Louisville (Kentucky), Berlin (Germany), or any urban place you know well. What does it mean to be connected to that place? Surely it means, in part, thinking of it as home. It means feeling an emotional attachment to the house in which you live, to the familiar surroundings of your neighborhood, and – with decreasing intimacy – to your city, your region, and perhaps even larger areas. But as Buell observes, there are at least four other ways of being connected to a place (see Figure 9.1). Each of them provides, along with the first, “subject positions” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) from which stories about a place can be authored and narrated. One type of connection might be thought of as a scattergram or archipelago of locales, some quite remote from one another. “Tenticular radiations” connect your home to those other locales. Think, for example, of the electric power transmission lines that lead away from your home, of the carbon dioxide that billows from your car’s tail pipe, of products you use that are fabricated in distant places, or of goods produced in your area and transported to other parts of the world. To what extent and in what ways should stories rooted in these radiating connections, these links in the globalized web, be incorporated into “local” planning? Places also have histories and are constantly changing. These changes superimpose upon the visible surface an unseen layer of usage, memory, and significance. As historian Brian Ladd (1997: 1) writes about Berlin, “Memories often cleave to the physical settings of events. That is why buildings and places have so many stories to tell. They give form to a city’s history and identity.”
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Figure 9.1 Five Dimensions of Place-connectedness (adapted after Buell 2001)
In almost every place, some people display an acute awareness of this invisible layer. But whose unseen layer should be remembered, and how should that memory be embodied in the built environment? A fourth type of connection derives from the fact that people are constantly moving into or departing from places. Thus any one place contains its residents’ accumulated or composite memories of all places that have been significant to them over time. When Muslim Turks move to Kreuzberg in Berlin, or when migrants from Central America move to Louisville, Kentucky, they bring with them memories of those other places and the pathways leading away from them. Last, fictive or virtual places can also matter. Past imagined places such as Le Corbusier’s 1922 Contemporary City, Harland Bartholomew’s 1929 plan for Louisville, the cacatopian cityscape of the film Bladerunner, Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy about the colonization of Mars, and many others have influenced thought and action, for good and for bad. Despite the evident influence of such imagined places, advocates of contemporary free market neoliberalism have recently argued that we have come to “the end of history,” that there is no alternative to their vision of capitalist democracy, and that there is no need to imagine better places. Writing prior to 9/11 – a moment that made a terrifying joke of the “end of history” thesis – both Buell and David Harvey (2000) observed that the contemporary scholarly and literary worlds are full of explorations of “the imaginary” and of utopian possibilities. Moreover, Harvey argues, we need alternative visions now, and those visions should emerge out of
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“critical and practical engagement with the institutions, personal behaviors, and practices that now exist” (p. 186). These five dimensions combine to form complex places. To a point, their complexity can be witnessed by observing “everyday life” from Michel de Certeau’s (1984) street level perspective. Consider Berlin, Germany. The capital of a reunited Germany, the center of an increasingly integrated Europe, and a major site of global capital investment, this city of 4.2 million people has been described as “a palimpsest of past desires” (Balfour 1990: 249) and a city of “unintended ugly beauty” (Richie 1998: xvi). Walking amid the ghosts in Hackesche Markt, in the Tiergarten, along Oranienburger Strasse, in Potsdamer Platz, and along Karl-Marx-Allee one continually encounters juxtapositions of the old and the new, the renovating and the deteriorating, the ugly and the beautiful, the joyous and the horrific. One can see Ossis and Wessis (former east and west Berliners), Muslim Turks, foreign tourists, migrants from the former Soviet Union, global investors, and a range of familiar and unfamiliar strangers mixing with one another, with varying degrees of comfort and security. Even this city seems quite simple, until one starts noticing things. Places should also be Understood as Nodes in a Global-scale Web of Relationships If we think of each place as being a node in the global-scale web, with each place being linked to all other places through a highly fluid and continually changing set of relationships, then we can connect Buell’s conception of place to the urban theorists’ research concerning the global city and “the network society” (see Figure 9.2). As Michael P. Smith argues (2001: 49): there is no solid object known as the “global city” appropriate for grounding urban research, only an endless interplay of differently articulated networks, practices, and power relations best deciphered by studying the agency of local, regional, national, and transnational actors that discursively and historically construct understandings of “locality,” “transnationality,” and “globalization” in different urban settings. This means that multiple and contestable stories can be told from the subject positions provided by these nodes and links.8 These stories often follow the general contours of what Ruth Finnegan (1998) calls “common urban narratives.” Common Urban Narratives Emerge from Subject Positions Provided by the Web’s Nodes and Links Finnegan claims that common urban narratives (often expressed abstractly as urban theories) are told about cities in general, but that such narratives become locally anchored in specific urban places. Exemplifying these common urban narratives would be the oft-told story about how industrialization, urbanization,
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Figure 9.2 Place-connectedness in a Global-scale Web of Relationships
and the artificial culture of the city destroy rural and communal nature. In one variant, this story emphasizes the movement from misery to happiness, while acknowledging that losses occur along the way. In another, it focuses on the losses. In still another, it focuses on locally based social movements’ heroic efforts to resist destruction. When told by urban theorists and other scholars, these common urban narratives often seem to express a point of view (or subject position) that stands outside or above the web, construct understandings of the web that privilege class over all other relationships and identities, and tend to treat “the global” as the site of history’s dynamic flows and driving forces and “the local” as the site at which cultural meanings are produced and social movements of reaction or resistance are formed (Smith 2001). These urban theorists are, of course, irretrievably immersed in the web. Once locally grounded in specific places, these common urban narratives contain their own unique details and community stories. Focusing on the new town of Milton Keynes in England, Finnegan finds four locally anchored stories. According to one of them – the planners’ tale – planners develop and successfully carry out their “master plan.” Although not without its twists and turns, the planners’ story has a clear beginning and end, a clear plot (destiny fulfilled), and an evident hero (the Development Corporation), and it is disseminated through many media.
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This tale is consistent with planning scholar Leonie Sandercock’s (1998a) claim that modernist planning historians tell a heroic, progressive narrative, an “official story,” in which planning is the hero, “slaying the dragons of greed and irrationality and, if not always triumphing, at least always noble, on the side of angels” (p. 35). In her view, this “official story” is deeply flawed. As she puts it: The boundaries of planning history are not a given. These boundaries shift in relation to the definition of planning . . . and in relation to the historian’s purpose . . . The writing of histories is not simply a matter of holding a mirror up to the past and reporting on what is reflected back. It is always a representation, a textual reconstruction of the past rather than a direct reflection of it. (pp. 36–7) In her view, this has produced an absence of diversity and of any critical/ theoretical perspective in planning history. She argues that planning historians need to begin telling a more inclusive history of cities, ones that include what she calls “insurgent planning histories.” To do that, planners will have to develop a new kind of “multicultural literacy,” which will require familiarity with the multiple histories of urban communities.9 To use Eckstein’s (2003) language, the challenge is to make space for these diverse community stories and to juxtapose them in a way that transforms understandings and transforms relationships among diverse geohistorical readers. Finnegan then collects and narrates “storied lives”; that is, personal stories that are pinned to Milton Keynes and which are narrated with the specificities of time, place, and person. These storied lives are similar to the “practice stories” that John Forester has been writing about professional planners. His stories help us see how planners construct their understandings of their subject positions within the global-scale web of relationships. In his 1999 book, The Deliberative Practitioner, Forester claims that the “practice stories” planners tell one another about their work matter. From these stories, planners learn how to be planners and how to work with others in the messy world of planning practice. But he also describes a second type of practice story. These are “profiles” of practitioners’ work. After recounting “Kirstin’s” story, Forester concludes that planners are “reflective practitioners” who, pressed by the real-time demands of work, learn through stories about “the fluid and conflictual, deeply political and always surprising world they are in” (p. 26). From another story (the planners’ staff meeting), Forester concludes that planners are also “deliberative practitioners” who learn through engagement with others. Forester further argues that these practice stories “do work by organizing attention, practically and politically, not only to the facts at hand but to why the facts at hand matter” (p. 29). Planners do not simply present facts and express opinions and emotions; they also “reconstruct selectively what the problems at hand really are” (p. 30). Such planners do not have time to learn through
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sustained research, and they have to make value judgments and set priorities, so they must learn not just from scientific inquiry but also through a process that is akin to learning from friends. In Forester’s view, we learn from stories in the same way that we learn from friends; they speak in ways that are appropriate to the planner’s situation, they help the planner deliberate, and they help the planner see his (or her) own interests, cares, and commitments in new ways. They help the planner understand not just how the world works, but how the planner works, who the planner is, and what sorts of things matter to him (or her). Last, practice stories help the planner learn by presenting him (or her) with a world of experience and passion, of affect and emotion. They allow the planner to talk about fear, courage, outrage, resolve, hope, cynicism, and all the other political passions of planning. Persuasive Stories about Creating Sustainable Places Have to Make Space for Diverse Locally Anchored Common Urban Narratives There is much value in Finnegan’s treatment of locally anchored common urban narratives and of storied lives, especially when juxtaposed against Sandercock’s and Forester’s use of stories. But much more can be done with it, especially in terms of relating it to Buell’s five dimensions of place-connectedness and my earlier arguments about planning as persuasive storytelling in a global-scale web of relationships. I would suggest that at least five broad narratives are commonly told about urban areas in America in addition to the urban theorists’ abstract story about global capital and the planners’ “official story” about fulfilling destiny. To imagine and create sustainable places, planners have to make space for these and other locally grounded common urban narratives. One narrative constructs the city as a site of opportunity and excitement, a center for artists and other creative people. If you want to be somebody, you must – this story claims – go to the bright lights and big city. If you don’t believe me, just watch the urban imaginary proffered by Home Box Office’s wildly successful cable television show, Sex and the City. Although this story has many tellers, members of locally rooted “growth machines” (Logan and Molotch 1996) tell it with the greatest enthusiasm.10 They assert that “growth strengthens the local tax base, creates jobs, provides resources to solve existing problems, meets the housing needs caused by natural population growth, and allows the market to serve public tastes in housing, neighborhoods, and commercial development,” and that growth and its effects are aligned with “the collective good” (p. 318). In Logan and Molotch’s view, growth machine advocates want to ensure a good business climate; i.e., a place in which there is no violent class or ethnic conflict, the work force is sufficiently quiescent and healthy, and – most important – local publics favor growth and support the ideology of value-free development. According to Logan and Molotch, growth advocates use that presumed consensus and insistence on the need for a good business climate to eliminate any alternative vision for the purpose of local government or the meaning of community; that is, to eliminate or marginalize competing stories that might threaten growth.
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A second common urban narrative constructs the city as a nightmare: cities losing population, seething with drug-related criminal activity, experiencing riots such as that of Miami’s Liberty City in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1992, suffering diminished employment, facing a shrinking tax base, losing the white middle class, and watching housing and infrastructure deteriorate and be abandoned. (Flee! Flee! Migrate out! Move to another place!) This story of the city as nightmare has become deeply rooted in American culture (see Beauregard 2003b). Just think of the movies Bladerunner and Escape from New York. Better yet, walk through the heart of Detroit or St Louis and experience the combined effects of slum clearance, urban renewal, high-rise public housing, interstate highway construction, immigration, segregation, abject poverty, business disinvestment, and the abandonment and torching of buildings. A third common urban narrative – which often emerges from the black urban experience – constructs the city as a site of injustice, oppression, and exclusion (but also hope). Drawing heavily on her knowledge of Detroit, for example, June Manning Thomas (1994, 1997) argues that one cannot comprehensively understand the history of American cities, and their planning, without understanding the African-Americans’ experience. That experience began when hundreds of thousands of southern black workers migrated northwards between World Wars I and II, seeking opportunity and fleeing oppression, only to be met by racially restrictive zoning ordinances and covenants and by white riots against blacks. The black urban experience then involved having public housing, urban renewal, and interstate highway projects confine blacks within existing ghettos or displace them from land that the local growth machine wanted for other uses. Confined to ghettos and alienated by decades of racially insensitive policies, black neighborhoods exploded in violence during the 1960s decade of “civil rebellion.” And now blacks find themselves in a racially divided metropolis, living in the heart of the city as nightmare, which for them often feels like a city of oppression. According to this story, when African-Americans try to escape the city of oppression by moving to the suburbs, they are greeted with exclusionary zoning policies. Though awash in a tide of urban decline, Thomas says, many black politicians and communities strive heroically to preserve and improve their neighborhoods. Thus the city of despair and oppression can also become a city of empowerment and action. A fourth story offers the environmentalists’ interpretation. According to it, the city is a site of activities that are rapidly eroding the ecological base upon which those activities are founded. Cities, human progress, and all they entail are rapidly destroying or taming wild nature. One might call this the city of boiling frogs. In this tale, the people of a city are like the frog that has been tossed into a pot of temperate water. The frog never notices that the water is gradually heating up, eventually to the boiling point and to the frog’s death. Like the boiling frog, the people of a city gradually over-consume resources and pollute their environment until the city (and the global-scale web of life in which it is embedded) becomes no longer livable.
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And a fifth story might be called the city of ghosts. This offers a narrative of memory, of loss, of small towns drying up and blowing away, of farmland disappearing from the urban fringe, of neighborhoods being destroyed by urban renewal and interstate highway construction, of other neighborhoods being eviscerated by deindustrialization.11 In these cities of ghosts, oldtimers recall how lively and hopeful their older towns and neighborhoods used to be, and they seek to preserve what remains from any further demographic, economic, and environmental change. But the oldtimers’ story is often complicated by the fact that their towns and neighborhoods have already changed. Howell Baum (1997a) provides an example with his story about the effort of the people of Southeast Baltimore to develop a neighborhood plan. According to Baum, those neighbors believed quite strongly that all community members should have an opportunity to help envision the neighborhood’s future. But in practice they were not able to adhere to that principle. Renters, poor people, and blacks who had moved into the neighborhood over the previous twenty years either did not participate or else were not thought of as part of the community. Instead, white professional middle-class people who thought of themselves as being “goodhearted homeowners” dominated the process. The result was a conflict between the long-time residents’ “community of memory” and the actual, diverse residents’ potential “community of hope.” Thusly conflicted, the neighbors were not able to think seriously about their present and anticipated problems. Persuasive Stories about Creating Sustainable Places have to Negotiate Emotional Conflicts How can planners and others actually hear these and other locally grounded common urban narratives, and how can they make space for them in a way that enriches and transforms narratives without imposing uniformity upon them? This is a difficult question. Sociologist Joseph E. Davis (2002) points to the nub of the difficulty when he observes that stories call participants: not so much to reflect on the merits of coherent arguments or selfconsciously adopt an interpretive scheme . . . but to identify with real protagonists, to be repelled by antagonists, to enter into and feel morally involved in configurations of events that specify injustice and prefigure change. (p. 25) In other words, by dealing with emotion as well as intellect, stories question senses of identity and community. This can frighten many people and cause them to retreat behind the gated walls of old familiar tales. But from a narrative point of view, it is precisely that conflict and emotional resonance that potentially gives storytelling such importance and power. As John Kotre (1984) observes in his study of narrative psychology, stories can be generative: “If a new culture is coming into existence, that story will emerge as a prototype that
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establishes a myth capable of energizing future adherents” (p. 224). We choose to tell certain stories because they matter to us, and we tell them in certain ways because those ways of telling feel right. Good planner-storytellers will tap those emotions (joy, sadness, hope, anger, fear), drawing upon the visual arts, music, poetry, and street theater (as well as surveys, models, and all the other familiar tropes of planning) to construct and tell stories that help the people of specific places imagine desirable transformations, long for the transformations, feel inspired to act, believe that their actions will prove effective, and create a “sustainable economy of spirit” (Throgmorton 2000). Planners should tell these stories on their own authority, but the only way they can gain their diverse readers’ trust, the only way the planners’ stories can be considered legitimate, is by making space for their readers’ diverse understandings and contextualizations. Conclusion On the whole, the preceding critiques and perspectives reinforce the claim that planning can be construed as a form of persuasive and constitutive storytelling about the future. But they also suggest ways in which the initial claim should be revised. Let me conclude by summarizing those revisions and by considering their implications for the practice of persuasive storytelling (planning) in global/transnational city-regions. Planners’ stories about the future will necessarily have to begin from a contestable normative position. To be persuasive to a wide range of readers, however, the planners’ stories will have to make narrative and physical space for diverse locally grounded common urban narratives. They will have to recognize that planners and other geohistorical readers spatialize their stories in diverse ways. They will have to juxtapose those narratives against one another in ways that defamiliarize places. And they will have to enable the actual geohistorical readers of transnational places to engage in fruitful dialogue with their fellow strangers. None of this will be easy, for powerful actors will strive to eliminate or marginalize competing stories, and those powerful actors will pressure planners to devise plans that are designed to persuade only a very narrow range of potential audiences. Moreover, it is not possible for planners to know in advance where the interaction of community stories will lead. So planners need the courage to act, and they need to be inspired by the hope that their actions will prove fruitful. What kinds of knowledge, skills, and attitudes would this persuasive storytelling approach require of practicing planners, and what might it imply for the education of prospective planners? The very questions make me wish that I could point to a university-based planning program that has already been designed around the idea that planners tell persuasive stories. But, alas, I know of no such program. So I can only imagine what such a program might emphasize. With that caveat in mind, I would say first that prospective planners would still have to learn the basic knowledge and methodological skills that planning
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programs currently offer. Given that base, however, they could stretch themselves well beyond the familiar. Keeping the world of facts and interests at hand, they would enter the world of story, interpretation, and meaning. I think this could best be accomplished by having prospective planners focus intently on planning in one nearby transnational city-region, treating its complex ecology of story-plans as the collective object of study. A close reading of diverse story-plans could be spiced with particularly relevant scholarly treatments, such as Barbara Eckstein’s (2003) essay in Story and Sustainability. Focusing on one city-region, they could learn to read its plans as persuasive stories; that is, as texts that have authors who use emplotment, characterizations, descriptions of settings, and the rhythm and imagery of language (including all the familiar tropes of conventional planning practice) to shape the readers’ attention and turn their preferences this way rather than that. But equally important, they would learn how to (actively) hear and read diverse community stories. This is far more difficult than it sounds because planners and other readers interpret texts from particular subject positions and often seem compelled to read/hear only what they expect rather than what a storyteller might actually be saying. To really hear and understand a story, listeners have to give priority to what the narrator wants to tell rather than what listeners want to hear. They could learn how to read their (and other) story-plans critically. This especially entails discerning what the story-plans exclude; exploring alternative places/moments to begin and end the narratives; considering the persuasive effects of choosing specific words, examples, maps, photographs, tables, etc. over others; and exploring alternative ways of configuring facts and spatializing narratives. By learning to read story-plans critically, prospective planners could discover how some tropes prove particularly persuasive for some readers but not for others. They could learn how to write/speak in a way that escapes the narrow confines of technical expertise and makes space for diverse community stories. To do this, prospective planners could first learn how practicing planners currently transform community stories into “authoritative plans.” This would require interviewing practitioners to discover what happens inside the “black box” after planners conduct public hearings and before they issue their authoritative plans. It would also require learning how practitioners selectively organize attention, define problems, and decide whose community stories will be considered most relevant to the problem as defined. Having learned what practitioners currently do, prospective planners could interview a range of actual “geohistorical readers” to learn how those readers negotiate with a plan’s effort to conscript readers. And they could learn how to juxtapose multiple community stories in such a way as to “defamiliarize” familiar ways of thinking and acting and thereby make space for new possibilities. Advanced digital technologies (especially GIS in combination with three-dimensional simulations, videos, photographs, and music) might prove particularly fruitful for this, for these technologies might enable planners to weave together future-oriented stories that are multiple, layered, and complex.12
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Understanding that the content of a story depends on who tells it, prospective planners could, last, learn how to make space for diverse community stories by becoming more skillful negotiators, mediators, and consensusbuilders. To successfully make space for the co-creation of stories, planners would probably have to learn how to practice “activist mediation.”13 One very helpful way for prospective planners to learn how persuasive storytelling and negotiation/mediation interact is by role-playing characters who narrate diverse community stories from diverse subject positions.14 Notes 1 For other good recent treatments of storytelling in planning, see Croucher (1997), Forsyth (1999), Mandelbaum (2000), Hamin (2003), and Sandercock (2003b). For its relationship to urban modeling see Friedmann and Guhathakurta (2002). For additional insight into the role of narrative in the social sciences, especially with regard to how narratives construct memory, identity, and community, see Hinchman and Hinchman (1997). For the role of narrative in social movements, see Davis (2002). 2 Finnegan (1998: 9) considers a story to be “essentially a presentation of events or experiences which is told, typically through written or spoken words.” 3 As Denis Wood (1992) shows, even the most “objective” maps are constructed with purposes in mind. And as James C. Scott (1998) argues so persuasively, many “facts” are socially constructed, primarily through the creation of categories that are subsequently used to guide the collection of facts. 4 For a good contemporary example, see Hopkins (2001). 5 Surely we could all agree that July is a hot month. Well, not if you live in Melbourne, Australia. Context matters. 6 For insight into the constitutive nature of future-oriented storytelling, see Van Eeten and Roe (2000). 7 Dear (2000) characterizes it as “a pluralistic pastiche of plausible alternative theoretical visions” (p. 32) and “a Babel of incommensurable narratives” (p. 53). 8 According to Bruno Latour, these subject positions provide “oligopticons” that enable people to gaze in some directions but not in others, to experience localized totalities and partial orders (see Amin and Thrift 2002: 92). There are also distinct similarities between this and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus: “The agent engaged in practice knows the world,” Bourdieu (2000: 142–3) claims: but . . . [h]e knows it, in a sense, too well, without objectifying distance, takes it for granted, precisely because he is caught up in it, bound up with it; he inhabits it like a garment [un habit] or a familiar habitat. He feels at home in the world because the world is also in him, in the form of a habitus. 9 For a good complementary treatment, see Umemoto (2001). 10 Richard Florida (2002) has had enormous success in claiming that city-regions can best spur economic growth by providing a nourishing environment for “the creative class.” The fact that he presumes economic growth should be spurred explains local growth machines’ receptivity to Florida’s ideas. He is telling a story that persuades particular audiences. See also William Neill’s (2001) comments about place making, “city marketing” and establishing “brand identity.” 11 See Rotella (2003) for an analysis of nostalgic stories about “the old neighborhood” of Chicago’s South Side. These stories are closely linked to “the politics of return,” wherein some people seek to recapture a lost or threatened “homeland” (Smith 2001: 152).
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12 I understand that Leonie Sandercock is exploring these possibilities in Vancouver, British Columbia. 13 For good examples of how storytelling and activist mediation interact, see LeBaron (2002) and Dale (1999). See also Innes and Booher (1999). 14 I thank Barbara Eckstein, John Forester, John Friedmann, Seymour Mandelbaum, Leonie Sandercock, Huw Thomas, several anonymous reviewers, and participants in the 2003 Joint International Congress of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Association of European Schools of Planning for offering their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. I also thank Ben Davy and Walter Grunzweig at Dortmund University, and Linda Chapin of the Orange County, Florida, Board of Supervisors for inviting me to present much earlier renditions of it.
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CHAPTER TEN
Network Complexity and the Imaginative Power of Strategic Spatial Planning1 Patsy Healey
Introduction In the mid-twentieth century, planners assumed they could rely on the authoritative power of formal government structures of accountability and legitimacy. Their contribution was to translate broad policy objectives and value orientations into spatial strategies and design schemes for the development of cities and neighborhoods. They typically operated with mental models of integrated socio-spatial relations operating across discrete territories, typically the city region. Today, these concepts seem naive and rigid in the face of the complexity of governance structures and practices that are to be found in areas we call urban regions, and the multiplexity of the time-space relations that stretch across and intersect to create the realities of such areas. These complexities demand new ways of imagining governance and urban region dynamics. The “network” idea is a powerful force in shaping these imaginations, as stakeholder groups, planners, policy analysts, and other social scientists struggle to re-think urban regions and their governance. Governance is increasingly understood in terms of complex sets of policy communities (Rhodes 1997) or “epistemic communities” (Haas 1992), cross-cutting with attempts to build partnership and coalitions, arenas, and networks to create new policy discourses and agendas (Le Galès 2002, Hajer and Wagenaar 2003a, Hajer 2003). In such contexts, as Booher and Innes (2002) argue, authoritative power gives way to “network power.” Urban regions are similarly understood, following recent geographical work and the advocacy of Castells (1996), in terms of dynamic relational webs, replacing nested hierarchies of administrative-functional spaces with an appreciation of the diversity of networks, each with distinctive
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space-time morphologies and driving dynamics (Allen 1999, 2003; Graham and Healey 1999; Healey 1997a). In a world of such relational complexity, the endeavor of developing strategies for the spatial development of urban regions presents an ambiguous challenge. On the one hand, the very context of dynamic complexity in a globalizing environment has created a new policy discourse that calls for more attention to coherent strategies to develop the “assets” and “qualities” of urban regions (Amin et al. 2000; Amin and Thrift 2002; Cooke 2002; Wheeler 2002). On the other hand, the effort of understanding what an urban region is and drawing together a governance coalition capable of developing and maintaining an agenda focused at this scale presents, once relational complexity has been recognized, a huge intellectual and politico-organizational challenge. In this chapter, my particular concern is with the imaginations mobilized in episodes of such planning activity. By “imagination,” I mean the framing conceptions and focusing metaphors used in policy-making and planning work. What spatial conceptions do they embody and express? What notions of governance are presented through them? How do such imaginations get articulated? How do they accumulate the transformative power to frame policies, project ideas, shape the allocation of resources, and influence the exercise of regulatory power? What kinds of simplifications, syntheses, and integrations are involved in such intellectual and political work? Scott (1998) provides a powerful argument that government inherently involves the mobilization of ways of “seeing.” These then lead to actions that seek to alter ways of acting to shape the perceived terrain according to such perspectives. He calls this “seeing like a state.” He highlights the necessity of the simplifications involved in arriving at some kind of perspectival synthesis on which to base collective action, but also underlines the dangerous exclusions and oppressions that such necessary simplification can produce. What are the prospects for developing spatial and governance imaginations that release creative energies and synergies and reduce exclusions and oppressions? Is such an enterprise an “impossible venture,” destined to drop back into just the kind of oppressive and exclusionary practices for which past planning endeavors have been so much criticized? I explore these questions by reflecting on recent experiences of strategic spatial planning in Europe. The Spatial Imaginations Mobilized in Episodes of Strategic Spatial Planning Efforts in policy formation with transformative power achieve this by developing new concepts and ways of thinking that change the way resources are allocated and regulatory powers are exercised. They mobilize intellectual, relational, and political resources that command attention, develop the power to “travel” and “translate” into an array of practice arenas and transform these, rather than merely being absorbed within them. Those that accumulate substantial power to become routinized may then “sediment” down into the cultural
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ground that sustains ongoing processes and feeds into new episodes of policy formation (Hajer 1995; Healey 2004a, b). How far do the spatial imaginations being mobilized in episodes of strategic spatial planning in Europe’s urban regions have such transformative potential? I have discussed elsewhere an approach to analyzing concepts of place and space deployed in episodes of strategic spatial planning (Healey 2004c). Here, I focus on three issues relevant to the capacity to imagine territories in the context of “network complexity”: spatial consciousness, scalar consciousness, and relational dynamics. I explore the extent of the transformative potential and the creative and inclusive possibilities that these imaginations may help to release. Spatial Consciousness Despite the efforts to build a spatial planning discourse at the European level, there are still substantial differences between national planning cultures (Newman and Thornley 1996; Commission of the European Communities 1997). One expression of this is in the extent to which concepts of place, spatial organization, and territorial identity are embedded in policy cultures and political assumptions. In the mid-twentieth century, planning policy cultures were intellectually dominated by concepts of urban form and physical structure. But the capacity of these concepts to “travel” and interrelate with wider policy cultures and political assumptions varied. A spatial consciousness informed by physical planning concepts was perhaps most strongly developed in the Netherlands, underpinned by geographical and technological necessities and a strong multi-level state. Within France and Germany, notions of settlement hierarchy and regional identity were sustained by longstanding cultural recognition of local territorial identities. In Italy, urban planning discourses and practices focused on the design of cities, while in the UK, the enduring emphasis of the “planning system” was on the defense of the countryside. In both Italy and England, the cultural identities and lifestyles of elites gave support to spatial organizing concepts. The same may be said of the Scandinavian concern about the relation between built form and “nature.” These various physical planning ideas provided the intellectual resources that turned government planning systems and land use regulations into the practices that are both valued and heavily criticized today. The ideas about how to organize the urban landscape were energetically developed within a professional planning community with a strong trans-national dimension, while concepts developed “travelled well” in the particular opportunity structures of European (welfare) state-building. But since this mid-century hey-day of spatial planning, the traditional “spatial consciousness” associated with planning has been undermined by many factors. These include the force of sectoral policy development, the critique of the narrow determinism of architectural concepts of spatial organization and the growing influence of neoliberal economics in national politics and administration. Planning practices in the 1970s and 1980s moved increasingly away from plans and strategies to focus on projects and regulations. Politicians and
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other policy communities remembered the old spatial ideas and associated them with “constraints” on their own freedom of maneuver. Public financial strains recast the relations between the state and economic actors, many of whom saw little relevance in spatial organizing concepts. Traditional spatial concepts were left locked into governance processes and embedded in governance cultures, without, in many instances, a legitimizing intellectual discourse to support or refresh them. This lack of explicit spatial consciousness was particularly strong in highly fragmented states where individual property owners were privileged, as in Belgium, or in highly centralized states, such as England, where in addition public policy has been strongly shaped by the commercial and financial sectors.2 In such contexts, it has not been easy to re-awaken a spatial consciousness, despite vigorous contemporary efforts. Albrechts highlights the enormous political effort needed to create a momentum behind a capacity to “see” the Flanders region/state in spatial terms. He stresses the importance of re-awakening traditional concepts of landscape, and combining these with a new image of unity in polycentricity, in the “Flemish Diamond,” deliberately intended as a “traveling metaphor” (Albrechts 2001; Albrechts et al. 2003; Albrechts and Lievois 2004). Concerns about economic competitiveness and territorial cohesion provided the political “opportunity structure” for this planning effort. Within England, more rural areas have retained strategies for conserving landscapes and traditional settlement qualities. But, with weak and financially dependent local government, it has been much more difficult for urban areas to see beyond specific projects and sectoral policies, to develop an “integrated” and spatially differentiated view of the urban “territory.” The planning system itself has become largely a-spatial, with spatial allocation principles expressed in national policy guidance and then re-expressed in local guidance (Vigar et al. 2000). In this context, it has taken effective coalition-building initiated from outside formal government arenas to make a significant difference. In the UK as a whole, a pioneering example of the development of an explicit spatial consciousness is in Northern Ireland, where a new vocabulary of spatial concepts has been promoted in a regional development strategy that aims to challenge and displace the old, vivid, culturally embedded sectarian geography (Department for Regional Development 2002; Murray and Greer 2002; Albrechts et al. 2003; Healey 2004c). The strategy and its spatial vocabulary has been created at a moment when new politicians in a new devolved government have been interested in different ways of “seeing” their territory and developing “fair” principles to guide their decisions about investment and regulation in a politically very difficult context. Spatial strategies can in some instances mobilize a spatial consciousness to do political work in institutional contexts that do not provide much encouragement for a territorial focus. It might be thought easier to innovate new spatial imaginations in situations where a spatial consciousness has remained strong. The current struggles for “culture change” in the Netherlands suggest a different
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conclusion. Here, the efforts at national level to introduce a more relational, “network society” imagination into national spatial strategy have so far been largely “captured” by the traditional conceptions of urban form that remain dominant in the planning policy community (de Vries and Zonneveld 2001). How far these embedded discourses and practices will be able to survive a well-articulated struggle to displace them remains to be seen. Some episodes in strategic spatial planning thus involve explicitly re-discovering and re-articulating a spatial imagination. Others seek to displace what are presented as out-dated concepts of spatial organization. In many other cases, the spatial dimension is much less explicit, a by-product of other concerns, such as providing land supply for demographic projections of new households (a strong emphasis in English planning) or coordinating infrastructure and development (as in concepts of development “corridors”). These hardly reflect the contemporary understanding of the relational complexity of urban regions. Do more complex recognitions lie in the way scale and relational dynamics in urban areas are conceptualized? Scalar Consciousness By this term, I refer to the way in which an “area” or “territory” is imagined, both in relation to its external positioning and its internal differentiation. Many traditional development plans and planning schemes positioned themselves in a hierarchy of plans, approached their strategies within contained borders (usually legal-administrative) and sought to provide comprehensive detail over a narrow range of issues, primarily the allocation of sites to land uses. The force behind many of the new sub-regional strategies reflects the recognition that these borders no longer “contain” the relational reach of significant living and working patterns, let alone that of production and distribution chains. This has led to attempts to find territorial foci and boundaries that encompass expanding metropolitan areas and “city and countryside.” The search for boundaries encourages a treatment of territory as a container, widening the dimensioning of the container to capture the most significant relationships rather than working with concepts of discontiguous space and the multiple spatial “reach” of different networks transecting a territory. Many of the current exercises in spatial planning continue to focus largely within defined borders, concentrating attention on the intra-territorial distribution of major infrastructure and development investments. Others are more oriented toward external spaces but tend to treat their territories as a homogeneous entity to be moved around a European and global map. Driven in particular by concerns for economic competitiveness, these approaches emphasize re-positioning an urban area in global or European space (Healey 1998b). Such “container” and “positioning” treatments contrast with the focus on fluidity, openness, and multiple time-space relations emphasized by relational complexity ideas. In contrast, the Netherlands Fifth National Policy Document (NPD) in its presentations eschews defining political borders, locating the Dutch economy
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and society in a diffuse, “polycentric,” borderless European growth zone (VROM 2001). Internally, however, traditional divisions live on in concepts of settlement hierarchies and clear divisions between town and country. The Dutch debates are important because of the uneasy attempt to combine a geography of places with particular qualities and a geography of flows (of water and transport in particular). This is expressed in the Fifth NPD in terms of interrelating “layers/strata,” each of which is driven by different forces operating at different timescales. Implicitly, each is connected to relations with a different scalar reach, though this is not so clearly expressed (de Vries and Zonneveld 2001; Healey 2004c; Priemus and Zonneveld 2004). A spatial vocabulary of nodes and corridors is common in other European spatial strategies, often indicating how the corridors connect into some adjacent territory. Few strategies explicitly develop the spatial implications of the co-existence in places of multiple relations, each with their own network morphologies and scalar reach, which lies at the heart of the relational complexity understandings. In many strategies, “scale” is primarily understood in terms of levels of government jurisdiction, which again tends to treat territory as a hard-edged container. As a result, there is little pressure to displace traditional concepts, with their focus on boundedness and the internal cohesion of a narrowly understood range of territorial relations. This leads to a weak intellectual basis for spatial strategies, which makes them easy to challenge and demolish. Relational Dynamics This “thin” conception of scalar relations reflects the intellectual challenge of articulating and expressing multi-relational urban and regional dynamics in spatial terms. The importance of such an understanding is increasingly stressed in the introduction to strategies, often calling up sociological and geographical literature in support. But the ambition narrows down as strategies get developed into more traditional vocabularies of urban form and infrastructure networks. The Netherlands Fifth NPD is a prime example (de Vries and Zonneveld 2001). In the Northern Ireland Regional Development Strategy, too, a new discourse wraps around an old one (Healey 2004c). In conclusion, and despite frequent use of the “network society” as a metaphor, current episodes in strategic spatial planning are having difficulty translating relational complexity concepts into a multiplex, relational spatial imagination (Healey 2004c). Instead, there is a strong tendency to revert back to traditional physicalist concepts about spatial order. These help in the traditional land use regulation tasks of allocating sites for development and developing criteria for guiding changes to local environments. But they fail to capture the dynamics and tensions of relations with very different driving forces and scalar relations as these co-exist in particular places and flow through shared channels. They provide little guidance on “reading” the evolving dynamics of land and property markets, or the changing ways people are moving around and using metropolitan regions, or the signs of new social conjunctions that could
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either release creative energy or produce oppressive or violent confrontations. Despite often invoked rhetorics of broadly based consultation and inclusive ambitions, many relations are ignored or inadequately considered because those taking the lead in strategy formation are unable to “see” the relations in question. This limits perceptions of diversity and makes deliberate exclusion all too easy to hide behind the mask of inclusionary rhetorics. The result of such a weakly articulated relational spatial imagination is that either a narrow set of relations dominates the development of strategy, typically that of “economic competitiveness,” or strategies call into play narrow and static concepts of territorial cohesion and “integrated area development,” focused on stabilizing and retaining old identities in the face of external challenges. In these latter situations, there is a tendency for old myths, in which territory and community are somehow merged together in a mono-vocal concept of “heim” (Jay 1998), to suppress the recognition of vibrant, conflictual cosmopolitan, and inclusive “urbanity” (Sandercock 1998b). My conclusion is that the transformative power of many episodes of strategic spatial planning discourses is currently undermined by serious imaginative weaknesses in addressing the concepts of relational complexity and translating them into their consequences for the spatiality of urban regions. As a result, either the strategies develop in a mono-vocal way, or multiple voices and discourses co-exist but do not co-encounter each other in the strategies. This may lead to further narrowing as the ideas in a spatial strategy “travel” differentially to arenas that shape resource allocation and regulatory practices, while a confused spatial imagination may also limit the “traveling capacity” of a strategy. Thus, just as the lack of arenas for collective actor formation that could develop debates about how to “see,” “hear,” “feel,” and “read” an urban territory inhibits the development of new spatial imaginations, so the lack of development into policy terms of a relational spatial imagination inhibits the emergence of government arenas that could “see, hear, feel, and read” the placerelevant dimensions of relational complexity. The Governance Imaginations Reflected in Episodes of Strategic Spatial Planning All collective action embodies in discourses and practices some conception of how governance is and should be performed. How do actors in arenas of governance “see” their organization and capacities and the institutional landscape in which they operate? Within Europe, there has been vigorous debate in recent years on the transformation of the formal institutions and procedures of all levels of government, fueled by diverse objectives, from promoting more “competitive” local economies to reducing the “gap” between citizens, business, and the state, and diminishing so-called “democratic deficits.” Government is criticized as inefficient, bureaucratic, remote, and self-seeking. These often contradictory debates have resulted in all kinds of transformation and
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“modernization” initiatives – at the local level, in different countries and by the European Union. As a consequence, strategic spatial planning endeavors are often caught up in a whirl of ongoing institutional changes, reflecting a variety of conceptions and criticisms of governance purposes and modes. These endeavors are typically not only struggling to articulate a different conception of the appropriate territory and territorial dynamics around which policy initiatives should focus. They are also affected by, and sometimes constitutive of, attempts to create both new arenas of governance organization and new foci of governance attention. Here, I explore three dimensions of these governance dynamics: the way in which the relations between government and society are imagined; how the relations between sectoral and territorial principles of organization are considered; and conceptions of how governance change happens. Once again, I am interested in particular in the inclusivity of governance imaginations and in the potential for transformative effects.3 The story of imaginations of governance in European debates is a rich and highly complex one that I cannot enter into here. It involves consideration of how authority and legitimacy for collective action are established, the various modalities and rationalities of governance processes, how citizens and states are constituted and related to territories, the dynamics of the relations between the state and economic activity, and the relation of states to citizens. Most recent efforts in strategic spatial planning reflect a challenge to the view of the state as a separate, autonomous sphere within society, operating by the principles of nested hierarchy. Instead, their practices emphasize a deliberate effort to draw not only a range of government organizations but also representatives of economic activity and “civil society” into deliberations about strategy formation and implementation. If power relations are more diverse and diffused than in the past, then, so the argument goes, new ways of mobilizing governance attention need to be found. Government and Society Relations Three concepts run through recent discussions of urban and regional governance and into strategic spatial planning episodes: multi-level government, partnership, and participation. The multi-level government concept challenges hierarchical models of the organization of the nation state, which emphasizes policy development at national level and implementation at local levels (Hooghe 1996; Gualini 2001). Instead, the interdependency of levels and jurisdictions of government is stressed, with levels working together in “partnership.” Most episodes in strategic spatial planning display such multi-government characteristics, as formal arenas rarely exist with a specific jurisdiction for an urban region of a territory bigger than a city and smaller than a large region. Mobilization force has to be accumulated by the participation of those who control resources and regulatory powers at higher and lower tiers. The multi-government partnerships that underpin many strategic spatial planning episodes, although centered within state organizations, may affect economic actors and citizens by altering the geometry of institutional spaces and the flows of influence and accountability.
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Transforming the relations between state, economy, and civil society may also be an explicit target of episodes in strategic spatial planning, driven by ideas of governance in “partnership” between the state, economic actors, and citizens (Elander and Blanc 2000; Pierre 1998). Such partnership, harnessing in particular those actors and social groups likely to have an interest in territorial promotion and in creating a “voice” for place, is partly justified by key actors in terms of spreading ownership of a strategy among those with a role in investment and regulation. In these contexts, government actors may approach building new kinds of relations in an instrumentalist way. A “partnership” or “multi-stakeholder” approach may also be justified as a way of tapping into the knowledge of local actors, to make a strategy more robust. For state actors concerned to build up collective actor power around a focus on territorial qualities, partnerships may also help to accumulate sufficient power to challenge other centers of power within the arenas of formal government. Critical issues, however, surround the question of who gets invited in or is able to push their way into membership of such partnerships. In some cases, vigorous lobbying leads to involvement. In other cases, government actors incorporate the “critical voices” they need to respond to. In these circumstances, partnerships often draw in obvious actors (the “usual suspects”) in well-established policy arenas. In some other cases, there have been deeply committed attempts at broadbased involvement in policy formation, drawing in quite new participants. The Northern Ireland Regional Development Strategy drew on academic experts in collaborative planning processes to develop an approach to discussing the strategy with a wide range of societal groups at many different levels. In this case, the motivation was not just to develop support for the strategy. It also aimed to begin the process of developing a different kind of politics (McEldowney and Sterrett 2001; Healey 2004c). These efforts at “coalition-building” and at accumulating legitimacy through consultative and collaborative practices have become characteristic of European episodes in strategic spatial planning (Albrechts 2001; Albrechts and Lievois 2004; Salet et al. 2003). Such efforts could be seen as an organizational response to the multi-vocal characteristic of the complex, diverse networks that co-exist in urban regions. These not only raise a diversity of demands in a range of different ways. The time-space “reach” of the relations that transect a space also challenge traditional notions of a unitary form of “territorial citizenship.” Those who legally are citizens of a particular territory may have diverse notions of what citizenship means to them and diverse territories with which they associate, while many others outside a territory may have a stake in it. Some episodes of strategic spatial planning are underpinned by an acute, if often unstated, awareness of the interaction between this multi-vocality and its institutional expression in networks of power and authority (see Albrechts 2001 on the Flanders case and Rosa Pires 2001 on initiatives in Portugal). In Northern Ireland, the emphasis on multi-vocality was explicit, as a challenge to the traditional sectarian vocality that has dominated political discourse and practice for so long. In other cases, the awareness of multiple voices beyond those at the
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core of the mobilization effort is noticeably absent. As a result, the inclusionary rhetorics of partnership may mask all kinds of exclusionary practices. The potential for such exclusion raises concerns about the authority and legitimacy of strategic spatial planning endeavors, which is why the formal procedures for plan-making embodied in planning systems are typically part of the processes of establishing such legitimacy. However, such a legitimation strategy may mean that the discourses and practices opened up to articulate strategies may be narrowed down, distorted and “captured,” as a strategy “travels” through these procedures. Territory versus Sector The struggle for establishing a territorial focus in a government landscape traditionally organized around functional “sectors” concerned with the delivery of services to people and firms lies at the core of strategic spatial planning endeavors in Europe. For policy communities in specific sectors, territory may be conceived merely as a container in which their particular claims and projects are located. In many examples, commentators report the difficulty faced by actors from, for example, the different infrastructure “communities,” or from service communities such as health and education, in grasping what it means to focus on an area, place, or territory, and to attempt to “integrate” one sector’s concerns with others (see, for example, Harris and Hooper 2004). In effect, the search for “territorial” or “area” “integration” means a “disintegration” from sector priorities, in order to be able to “see” an issue from the angle of the interrelation of activities in particular places. Such a “territorially-integrated” governance imagination seems to develop most effectively in governance contexts where financial and regulatory resources are already strongly concentrated at local or sub-regional level (see the Stuttgart case (Heeg 2003) and the Hanover case (Albrechts et al. 2003)); or where there are strong local actors with good national connections, as with French and Italian mayors (Le Galès 2002; Magnier 2004; Nigro and Bianchi 2003; Novarina 2003). But it can be very difficult in situations such as England, where, traditionally, investment resources and regulatory powers are concentrated at the national level. In the Cambridge area, a sub-regional partnership was constructed between elite business, university, and local state interests with a city and regional focus in order to promote a more balanced approach to a strong local growth dynamic, but they still had to lobby “up the scale” to national government to press for locally relevant investments, using their formal and informal elite networks to do so (While et al. 2004). The Northern Ireland Regional Development Strategy, for all its participatory efforts, lacked local government bodies that could deliver the strategy’s ambitions, even though at the level of the Province government, there was considerable cross-department support for the strategy (Healey 2004c). With weak formal arenas and powers and entrenched sectoral policy communities, episodes of strategic spatial planning typically require a major institutional effort to have long-term effects (Salet et al. 2003; Albrechts et al.
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2001, 2003). This situation is often described as the challenge of overcoming “fragmentation.” There are, of course, real dangers in fragmentation, as are all too obvious in the field of urban policy and area regeneration (Taylor 2003; Cars et al. 2002). Intellectual resources, practical skill, and relational capacity may be lost. Weaker groups may lose hard-won protection and voice. The disorganization of fragmentation may lead to major inefficiencies in resource use. And the re-combinations that arise may be narrow and exclusive in focus. Yet if vertical, sectoral relations are strongly embedded and if these no longer effectively serve the demands of citizens and firms, then institutional change strategies that have a fragmenting effect may be a necessary first step to create the institutional fluidity within which new combinations can arise. In Milan, a recent initiative provides an interesting approach in a context where there is little political or official support for a metropolitan region strategy. Its primary intent is to “destabilize” established understandings of the core city, and encourage a perception of the significance of a wider perspective. This is done not by any kind of comprehensive approach, but by a spatial image of a core infrastructure and development alignment and by developing a new technical approach to the apparently limited task of land use regulation. The advocates of this, much criticized, approach hope that this will help to grow a strategic perception that will then create an institutional ground on which a more developed strategy can grow (Comune di Milano 2000; Balducci 2001; Gualini 2003; Mazza 2003; Pomilio 2003; Healey 2004c). How Governance Change Happens This raises the question of how those involved in strategic spatial planning episodes imagine that institutional changes will come about. The idea that a plan, once articulated, acts as the prime mover of change has been largely discredited, along with the dominance of public sector resources in urban and regional development trajectories, which supported this conception. Recent European episodes in strategic spatial planning more usually assume that the power to change governance modes will come from the development of the interactive practices of collaborative partnerships of some kind. These range from consultations around a strategy articulated by government officials or by consultants, to enlisting local elite actors into involvement in analysis and policy formation, and complex interactions with diverse social groups. Evidence from these interactions certainly indicates that these experiences lead to substantial changes in perceptions. Those involved find themselves re-assessing and re-aligning their interests and re-articulating their values. Even actors with very particular business interests may find they have a moral, or emotive, attachment to some wider value such as promoting the qualities of an area, protecting the environment, or seeking greater social justice. Such interactive episodes of strategic spatial planning can develop the awareness that there are different ways of doing governance than formal bureaucracy, technical rationality, or machiavellian power-seeking, as in the Northern Ireland and Portuguese cases. But many also become aware that the mechanisms for
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transferring this learning into other arenas are ill-developed. The political dynamics within which a strategic planning effort is located and which some participants may seek to change is often left as an “unarticulated reality” that some slowly grasp and others do not appreciate. Inevitably, this undermines the development of the relational resources with which existing practices can be challenged. There are other ideas about how governance change happens. One is the image of a strong “leader,” encapsulated in the perceived power of mayors (Le Galès 2002; Magnier 2004; Taylor 2003). Another is the power of changing the rules of formal law, leading often to projects to “transform” the legislation in planning systems and arrangements for sub-national governance. Many countries by 2000 were proposing “fundamental” changes to their planning and land use regulation laws. Another change model has been taken from the “new public management” with its focus on targets and outputs (Kickert 2003). This produces attempts to force changes in modes of governance at lower levels by the criteria governing financial allocations and by the articulation of regulatory rules. The result as it is emerging in the UK appears to be increased confusion and fragmentation, as new initiatives of this kind layer over and contradict each other. These “models” of how governance transforms seem to reflect an attempt to narrow down the exploding complexity of urban and regional governance dynamics, rather than facing into their emergent qualities. Strategic spatial planning efforts therefore challenge not only established divisions of government and the cultures embedded within them. They are also likely to bring different models of governance and governance change into encounters with each other. The collaborative model being promoted in many examples of strategic spatial planning emphasizes the social learning and invention that can occur in these encounters (Albrechts 2004). This assumes that transformative potential lies in the very multiplicity of tensions and stresses of the relational complexity of governance processes, creating all kinds of “fissures” and “cracks” which can be opened up to create and enlarge “moments of opportunity” for new ideas (Tarrow 1994; Healey 1997b). However, this last approach is uncertainly developed. If it is to link more explicitly to contemporary notions of relational complexity, it might be helpful to make it more explicit. Such an approach might involve developing an understanding of the fluidities as well as the fixities of governance dynamics, as strategic planning efforts generate all kinds of reactions and learning that may both de-stabilize established discourses and practices and “sediment” into governance cultures before governance processes themselves change. This suggests that more attention is needed to developing a dynamic relational understanding of the processes that are involved in the governance of “place” and what this means for conceptions of citizen and stakeholder legitimacy and accountability. This could then lead to more consideration of the circumstances in which a “spatial imagination” for an area or territory would be likely to have sufficient cohesive force to accumulate power, while sustaining creative energies, promoting diversity, and socially just inclusivity as qualities in a place.
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Relational Complexity and Territorial Governance: An Intellectual and Institutional Challenge In conclusion, I consider three issues. How far, in the spatial and governance imaginations found in recent European experiences of strategic spatial planning, are conceptions that recognize relational complexity emerging? How far do these have the potential to be more inclusive of multiple stakeholders than previous conceptions? What needs to be sustained in spatial and governance imaginations to encourage more inclusive strategies that have the potential to release multiple creative energies rather than suppressing them? The spatial and governance imaginations, expressed and mobilized in recent strategic spatial planning efforts in city regions in Europe, show some signs of an appreciation of the relational complexity of urban and regional dynamics. There is widespread recognition that what produces the socio-spatial patterning of an urban region is the product of multiple webs of relations, each with its own space-time dimensions. Governance interventions in this dynamic, fluid, and open relational diversity commonly involve an attempt to build some kind of collective actor consciousness and mobilization force to enlarge the synergies, reduce the conflicts, and turn co-existence into some kind of identification with the place of the urban region. In this way, these strategic spatial planning endeavors seek to create intellectual, social, and political capital around some concept of an urban region, its identity, qualities, and challenges (Innes and Gruber 2001). But these efforts are nevertheless limited in their imaginations, by the embedded power of alternative imaginations and practices and by competing imaginations of policy agendas and models of governance transformation. As a result, the rhetorics of “network” relations, of multi-vocality, participation, and multi-stakeholder engagement often “wrap around” the recycling of established discourses and practices. The result may produce an uncertain strategic voice, which limits the persuasive power and diffusion potential of strategic ideas. Or a dominant voice may take over, typically the discourse of “economic competitiveness” and the political and business elites who express it. There are thus persistent tendencies to narrow down agendas to the perspectives and interests of a few dominant actors. I do not conclude, however, that efforts to create persuasive strategies that are more inclusive and multi-vocal, and which are grounded in a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics of urban and regional relations, are necessarily “impossible ventures.” Developing new spatial imaginations and evolving new governance processes takes time – to explore, to think, to learn, to struggle, to diffuse. Transformative change rarely occurs in instant revolutions. Changes evolve in many small ways through time, building a ground of understanding and experiences that eventually come together in what history may then describe as a “transformative moment.” The challenge for academic and policy communities who see the emergent possibilities for a new way of thinking about urban regions and a new way of governance for complex,
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multi-network, and multi-vocal constituencies, is to push the concept of relational complexity further. A relational complexity approach to urban region governance means eschewing notions of inherent territorial coherence or “integration,” and univocal concepts of territorial identity. It demands a dynamic sensibility that recognizes the complex interrelation between place qualities and multiple space-time relational dynamics rather than relapsing into a focus on traditional analyses of, for example, territorially contained housing markets, labor markets, and land use and transport interactions. It requires a recognition of multiple and fluid identities associated with places, and a realization that attachment to the place of an urban region is only one of the identities that people living and working in a place may have, while many others who do not live and work in an area may have a “stake” in a place. However developed, it demands a broad and multiple conception of “citizens” and “stakeholders,” avoiding a relapse into narrow discourses and relational webs. These qualities are even more important if the ambition is to promote more socially just and inclusive modes of governance centered around qualities of place. Above all, strategy-making with an appreciation of relational complexity demands a capacity to “see,” “hear,” “feel,” and “read” the multiple relational dynamics of a place in a way that can identify just those issues that need collective attention through a focus on place quality and enhancing the relational richness and vitality within a territory. Such strategy-making should have the capacity to grasp which interventions are likely to reduce openness and stifle creativity and which have the opposite effect. Similarly, if exclusion arises in complex relational ways, interventions that aim to promote more socially just and inclusive life situations for people and stakeholders in places need to find some way to grasp the specific power dynamics of relational interactions and co-locations not just in an urban region, but in all the particular locales within it. This does not imply a comprehensive analysis. Rather, it means being able to appreciate the significance of the fine-grain of interactions and the particularity of experiences in the shaping of more systemic relations, the detail in the strategy and the strategy in detail. Finally, recognizing the complex relational dynamics of urban regions and the inherent simplifications of any kind of strategic initiative demands a strong ethical sensibility among those involved. “Seeing into complexity” means an awareness of the damage that strategic simplification can produce as well as the beneficial synergies that may be sustained and enlarged. The image of “network” can be used to cover all kinds of relations, both well-established and emergent. If used in more traditional ways, for example, to refer to infrastructure networks, this may undermine the development of discourses and practices sensitive to the multi-vocal and multi-valent realities of place relations that the concepts of relational complexity seek to capture. Instead of narrowing, strategic images need to have the capacity to “carry” a situated and multivalent richness of understanding in ways that can release the imaginations of arenas of practice. In short, strategic spatial planning endeavors informed
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by relational complexity concepts which then accumulate sufficient power to “travel” effectively and have enduring material and mental effects, should be judged in the long-term by their capacity to enrich the imaginative resources, creative energies, and governance cultures through which the quality of life and experience of diverse citizens and other stakeholders in particular places are likely to be enhanced. Notes 1
2 3
My thanks to Alex Alexander, John Friedmann, Louis Albrechts, and Seymour Mandelbaum for insightful comments and criticisms on the version of this chapter written for the Leuven Congress, July 2003. A much revised and expanded version of this paper will be published in European Planning Studies. Traditionally, commercial and financial business interests have been less interested in integrated territorial development than industrialists (see Harvey 1985; Healey 1983). The terms “government” and “governance” are much contested in current European debates. For some, governance is an alternative mode of governing to government. For others, governance is a broader view of an institutional landscape in which formal government organisations are located. See Cars et al. (2002); Hajer and Wagenaar (2003a); Jessop (2000a); John (2001); Le Galès (2002); Stoker (2000). I use governance in its wider sense (see Le Galès 2002).
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COMMENTARY
Imagining Urban Transformation Leonie Sandercock
Planners and reformers since Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes have desired to make the city an object of knowledge and thus a governable, and even a perfectible space. Ways of seeing and understanding the city inevitably inform ways of acting on the space of the city, with consequences that, in turn, produce a modified city that is again seen, understood, and acted on. The city is both an empirical reality and an imagined environment. Images and metaphors (the city as machine, as organism, as laboratory, as network . . .) have shaped not only the fabric but also the experience of the city. In the development of modern cities, symbolic constructs deserve a place of equal importance alongside the emergence and institution of certain governmental rationalities. If these are two ends of a spectrum of ways of seeing the city, then we might place Healey at one end, Throgmorton at the other: Healey with her focus on institutions and governance, Throgmorton’s on story and storytelling (or representation, if you like). Yet each, in these chapters, is grappling with an emergent or perhaps newly dominant metaphor for the city in the context of globalization, that of the network: the city embedded in the network society. Both authors here extend their earlier work on planning as a communicative activity, by locating it in a larger frame, that of the global political economy with its space of flows. Yet neither loses sight of more local “economies” of relational networks, attachments to specific places, and even “a sustainable economy of spirit” (Throgmorton). What the two chapters have in common is their core concern with “transformation.” Each comes at this in radically different ways. Healey’s subject of analysis is strategic spatial planning, Throgmorton’s is the power of stories. Healey seeks to imagine the institutions through which more inclusive and socially just cities might be brought into being. Throgmorton wants to suggest how planners can imagine and create sustainable places by making space for community stories. Both are trying to free up and shift our
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ways of thinking about and “seeing” city-regions. For Healey, the challenge is to develop new kinds of spatial and governance imaginations that are more attuned to the realities of the network society. For Throgmorton, the challenge is to see planning as a form of persuasive storytelling about the future, but now recognizing that planners are embedded in an intricate, global-scale web of relationships. In the end, the challenge for planners is to begin planning based on the imagery of webs, nodes, and links; to find ways to construct stories that reconfigure the web in persuasive and compelling ways; and to construct new forums which enable public and democratic argumentation. In order to grasp significant differences, as well as what is shared between these two important contributors to planning theory, we might ask: what theories of transformation, of knowledge, and of power are embedded in each author’s work? Patsy Healey, arguably the most well-read scholar in the planning community, and also one of the most widely informed about a range of planning cultures, here draws on case studies of the Netherlands (Amsterdam) and UK (Cambridge) city-regions in order to think and theorize about the network complexity of contemporary urban areas. (By network complexity, Healey means recognizing that what produces the socio-spatial patterning of an urban region is the result of multiple webs of relations, each with its own space-time dimensions.) In these and other European cases of strategic spatial planning episodes of the past decade, Healey is interested in the spatial and governance imaginations that are mobilized, asking to what extent these recent experiences reflect a positive engagement with “network complexity.” Theoretically, she argues (after Amin and Thrift 2002) that in the present period, the urban region is a key locale in which new ways of integrating the concerns of a multiplicity of webs of relations provide a ground on which a multi-vocal and multi-relational conception of place and territory can be built. Acknowledging that both countries have developed a rich repertoire of spatial strategies/imaginations in the past fifty years, Healey foregrounds the governance cultures in each place as presenting quite different obstacles and opportunities. In practice, however, both case studies reveal limited adaptations/evolutions toward more network-oriented spatial and governance imaginations: each case is limited, in her own words, “by their own imaginations, by the embedded power of alternative imaginations and practices and by competing imaginations of policy agendas and models of governance transformation.” In spite of the limited achievements of her chosen episodes of strategic spatial planning, Healey does not conclude that efforts to create persuasive strategies that are more inclusive, multi-vocal, and grounded in a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics of urban and regional relations are “impossible ventures.” She goes on to speculate about the transformative potential and the creative and inclusive possibilities that network-oriented spatial and governance
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imaginations may help to release. She posits a theory of transformation that goes like this. Developing new spatial imaginations and governance processes takes time (to explore, to learn, to think, to struggle, to diffuse). Changes evolve in many small ways, through time, eventually coming together in transformative moments. The challenge for academic and policy communities is to push the concept of network complexity further. Here we see a Foucauldian understanding of knowledge and power sitting in tension alongside a modernist one. This is a curious argumentative strategy, insofar as it appears to be theorizing from practice, but actually develops a normative/prescriptive turn when the case studies fail to yield sufficiently positive examples of transformation. However, what the reader gains is more understanding than has hitherto been articulated in the planning literature regarding the dynamic sensibility involved in a network complexity approach to urban region governance. This is a valuable contribution precisely for this head-on engagement with and elaboration of the concept of network complexity. Throgmorton, unlike Healey, begins with a normative argument about the power of story to create sustainable places, and does not allow himself to be sidetracked by pesky case studies. His is a different argumentative strategy. He both restates and revises his argument from Planning as Persuasive Storytelling (1996), responding to various critics before expanding his original argument. What is new here is his attention to diverse, locally anchored common urban narratives (five of them are described) and his relating of these to Buell’s five dimensions of place-connectedness (Buell 2001) and to his own arguments about planning as persuasive storytelling in a global scale web of relationships. Also important is the attention Throgmorton gives to negotiating the emotional conflicts that are often at the heart of resistance to change. What I find troubling in Throgmorton’s (implicit) theory of transformation is the apparent assumption that telling persuasive stories is enough. In spite of his nuanced discussion of the “planner as author” and his recognition of the need for multiple stories to be told, we are left with questions about assumed receptive listeners, and about the institutional arrangements through which multiple stories might manage to get told. His theories of knowledge and power remain unstated, leaving this reader queasy on two matters: how the “good stories” of sustainability and justice will be heard above the din of the “bad old stories” about profit, progress, fear of the other, and so on; and the unresolved contradiction between the (modernist) planner as bearer of stories of sustainability and the (postmodern) planner as the creator of spaces for diverse community stories to be heard. Who adjudicates these diverse and conflicting stories? Who gives which stories the power to matter? This “political economy” of story is as yet the missing piece of the puzzle. Throgmorton appears to have missed the real point of the political economy critique of his work. Misreading it as an ideological attack (a neo-Marxist perspective is better than a communicative one), he dismisses what is really an important body of work that maps the shifting and multiple scales and spaces of economic and migration flows, of ideas and innovations. In so doing, the
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understanding of the network society that he mobilizes is inevitably a restricted one, and is not fully translated into a planning issue. Throgmorton attempts to engage with the relational challenges of the network society but, unlike Healey, he does not really engage with the intellectual or political challenges. He eschews thinking about new ways of seeing planning (beyond the advocacy of story as a new tool, and spatializing the storytelling imagination), and he eschews discussion of governance and institutions, remaining firmly in the communicative realm. Within this realm, however, Throgmorton has gone further than most planning scholars in articulating the power of story to imagine desirable transformations in our cities, to inspire citizens to act, and to believe that their actions will have effects. In this way, his work is a powerful contribution to what he calls “a sustainable economy of spirit.”
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PART III
Policy Networks and Governance
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Local Networks and Capital Building
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CHAPTER ELEVEN
Why Liberal Planning Cannot Manage the Network Society: Lessons from Community Action Howell S. Baum
Optimistic portraits of the “network society” emphasize two potentials. More people can connect to more people, to obtain goods, services, and information. And people can use these links to organize for social, economic, and political benefits. The domestication of the Internet has encouraged hundreds of millions of people to see themselves as able to participate in networks (Wellman 1999). Yet, against such democratizing images, two types of “digital divide” present cautions. The poor, who have fewer social ties than others better off, have fewer resources to extend their relations electronically (Mossberger et al. 2003; Norris 2001; Saegert et al. 2001; Wilson 1996). And, although the Internet improves ordinary people’s ability to organize, few can match the political and economic power with which large corporations and governments make and exploit international ties. These latter conditions, in reinforcing economic and political inequality, pose one risk of an unregulated network society. A second risk is dissipation of civil society. Sociologist Charles Cooley presciently saw this danger in the early twentieth-century growth of a national American economy: Although the individual, in a merely mechanical sense, is part of a wider whole than ever before, he has often lost that conscious membership in the whole upon which his human breadth depends: unless the larger life is a moral life, he gains nothing in this regard, and may lose. (1929: 385 cited in Sandel 1996: 206–7) People experience and attach themselves to a larger society through intermediate entities such as communities and associations (Gutmann 1998;
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Putnam 2000; Sandel 1996; Smith 1997). It is uncertain that an electronically linked “network society” offers individuals social bonds and psychological anchors necessary for personal identity or loyal participation. Both risks point to the importance of communities. As mediating institutions, they can attach individuals to a larger network society. As means of organization, they can modify social inequities that limit personal development and participation in the network society. Planners may play a role in developing these community capacities insofar as they can engage in “network-thinking.” In general, this entails conceptualizing people and their current or potential relations in terms of social and political connections and purposes. In particular, it means recognizing and developing strategies for the social development of community. This chapter presents a case study of community action with two purposes. First, although the community organization does not directly participate in an electronically mediated network society, the story shows how efforts to develop community are embedded in extensive networks that constrain as well as facilitate action. Second, the case offers an example of the “network-thinking” that planners must master to influence the shape of a network society, while illustrating challenges in developing this thinking. Following the case, the chapter suggests that most American planners would find network-thinking foreign, and would be unable to engage a network society, because of the liberal philosophical premises that have shaped American planning and pervade American society. The second part of the chapter elaborates these assumptions. The final section identifies directions for change. Networks and Community Action: A Case Study The Setting Baltimore, Maryland, was once a magnet for European immigration and an industrial center. However, the growth of post-World War II suburbs and the gradual departure of manufacturing from the cities drew away many of the city’s most resourceful residents. Those who left not only had more money than those who remained, but they had more extensive networks – with employers, lending institutions, civic associations, and suburban residents. The number of jobs in Canton, the city’s industrial center, declined by 50 percent during the 1980s (Baum 1997a). The city’s population declined from a 1950 peak of 950,000 to just over 600,000 in 2003. Canton is part of Southeast Baltimore, the setting for the case. Southeast was the place of first settlement for many immigrants and the city’s industrial center. But it has fallen with the city. In 1970, 94,000 people lived in Southeast; the population dropped to 77,000 by 1990 and 68,000 in 2000. As more resourceful families left, communities’ economic conditions declined. In 1990, shortly before the events of the case, 16 of 26 Southeast census tracts had
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median household incomes below the city median of $24,045, and seven were under $20,000 (Baltimore City Department of Planning 1992). Unemployment, vacant houses, and vacant stores increased together. The area changed racially as white families moved out. In 1970, Southeast was 88 percent white; in 1990, it was 72 percent white; in 2000, 55 percent of residents were white, 37 percent African-American, and the rest American Indian, Asian, or Hispanic (Baltimore City Department of Planning 1992; Truelove 1977; United States Bureau of the Census 2001). Moreover, because relatively few white families had young children and because some of them went to Catholic schools, African-Americans in the area’s 11 public elementary schools, four middle schools, and one high school constituted 60 percent of 11,000 students in 1990 and 70 percent of 10,000 in 2000 (Baltimore City Public School System 2000; Southeast Education Task Force 1999). In the early 1990s, activists conducted a community planning process to revitalize the area (Baum 1997a; Southeast Planning Council 1993). Recommendations on housing, economic development, services, and transportation gave attention to two types of organizing. One was internal – organizing residents, building up voluntary associations, and strengthening families. The other, more prominent, was external – connecting residents and organizations to outside actors and institutions: business firms, foundations, legislators, nonprofit organizations, service programs, government agencies, and homebuyers. Although recommendations emphasized getting financial resources, the plan aimed to embed Southeast Baltimore in a network of organizational and informational support as well. The challenge was to give others incentives to join. Activists saw this network as essential for renewal: unless the community could connect residents to something meaningful and valuable, few with choices would consider staying or moving in. Late in a planning process focused on physical and economic development, participants concluded that school improvement was central to their effort. They had hesitated to say anything about education because they knew little about it and because neighborhoods had no control over schools. But they recognized that good schools were crucial to holding and attracting middle-class families with children. They saw the challenge as one of drawing the school system into a network with community institutions. The case here involves the Southeast Education Task Force, a community organization established in 1995 to work with the school system to improve schools. Participants floundered for two years, struggling to identify their expertise, define a community role in education, and find people in the school system interested in working with them. They eventually decided to concentrate on building ties between parents and community groups and the schools, leaving curriculum and pedagogy to professional educators. The Task Force developed a community plan on education and a capital improvements plan for school facilities. It participated in a network that influenced the city’s Empowerment Zone education initiative. It successfully lobbied the school system to build a
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new school to relieve overcrowding, and, when state construction funding dried up, worked with the system to rezone schools (Baum 2004a). This case focuses on an initiative to organize parents and another to bring health and social services to students at a school. Both projects aimed to build networks. Each succeeded in some ways but also encountered constraints in existing networks. Organizing Parents The Task Force wanted to organize parents so they could act knowledgeably on issues at their children’s schools. In the longer term, parent groups might connect across Southeast Baltimore. In this context, organizing had two aims. One was to encourage and enable parents to organize to identify issues and act to address them, alone or, if possible, in cooperation with school staff. A second was to train parents for leadership: to teach them how to organize, conduct meetings, and negotiate. Seven organizers worked with parents at 11 schools. Two successes could be described as textbook community organizing. William Paca Elementary School was severely overcrowded. It had a capacity of 474 students and an enrollment of 920 in fall, 1997; the building was designed without walls separating classrooms. The school system proposed redrawing school zones to reduce overcrowding to “only” 161 percent after five years. The principal wanted an addition built on the playground. The Task Force sent an organizer to the school. With the principal’s support, he recruited parents to the school’s parent–teacher organization. The group invited elected officials and school officials to meetings, where, at last, the school facilities officer agreed to build an addition. General Wolfe Elementary School was a small, crowded school with many children of Latin American immigrants. The principal wanted to organize parents. In fall, 1999, a Task Force organizer started working with the principal, the school’s parent liaison, and a Latino community organization. She got interpreters for school meetings, translation of school notices, and an English class for parents. She worked with parents, community leaders, and school staff to lobby the school system to put a portable building on the playground. The school board concluded that the space was too small for a portable and decided to reduce overcrowding, instead, by requiring students who lived outside the school’s zone to leave and go to their proper neighborhood schools. Some parents were disgruntled, but most believed the school received a fair hearing. There was more to the Paca story. The addition was built, and overcrowding was reduced. However, the organizer’s funding expired, and he left. Later, another organizer approached the principal about continuing the work, but the principal said she had no interest in organizing parents. She wanted to control the school. This was one of several instances where principals, even if they had requested an organizer, resisted efforts to activate parents to do anything but help school staff. Fears that parents would present problems, create disorder, or just take time deterred school staff from connecting with parents or
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community groups. At the same time, parents had difficulties engaging in the activities necessary to create networks with schools. Work schedules and family affairs left many parents little time for organizing. Many lacked confidence to approach school staff – because they had themselves done poorly as students, because they were self-conscious about their language or appearance, because they doubted they knew much about issues, or because they were unsure about participating in meetings, speaking in public, or making decisions. The second section helps consider lessons for network-building. Developing a Full-service Community School Some educators say they could teach more effectively if family and community conditions did not hinder students’ learning. Some parents do not raise their children well or get them to school ready for learning. Single parents are overextended. Abuse, violence, and drugs harm children or worry them to distraction. Low-income families have difficulty getting children health care. One response has been “full-service schools,” where health and social services and adult education are located in schools or made easily available to students and families (Dryfoos 1994). The Task Force offered to assist Tench Tilghman Elementary School in becoming a full-service community school. The Task Force chair directed the Julie Community Center, a neighborhood family service center, and in this role contributed several programs to the school. She arranged for nursing students to work with families; they conducted home visits, offered training, and made referrals. She assigned someone to help parents with housing, utility, food, and clothing problems. The Task Force got funding for a program for parents to get the equivalent of a high school diploma. A grant paid for a staff member to do casework with troubled families. A program offered parents training in helping their children academically. The Task Force worked with a health care provider to develop groups for children of parents with drug problems. The provider gave the school a nurse and connected families to its medical center. The Task Force contributed a coordinator for these activities. The aid had obvious benefits to the school. It offered resources that could ease teachers’ work. Some programs have shown short-term effects on attendance and student behavior (English 2003). The principal was extraordinary in being entrepreneurial and in recognizing the value of health and social service programs in education. With her support, the Task Force built a network including the school, the Julie Community Center, two universities, a health care provider, funders, school staff, parents, community members, and Task Force members. The principal’s openness was a key to the network-building success. So, too, was the initiative of the Task Force chair in pursuing and providing resources. Challenges of Community Network-building and Network-thinking Both the full-service school and parent organizing produced results that benefited students. The community school could be considered a greater networking success: it involved more actors and sustained a growing number of
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participants. However, the networks’ purposes differed: the community school aimed to deliver services, whereas organizing aimed to mobilize parents. Thus, while organizing sought to involve parents in networks as activists, the fullservice school included them just as clients. Indeed, the fact that the latter network did not challenge school policies made it acceptable to the principal. Moreover, many of the service providers participated only because they received funding. In general, it is possible to create networks because there is vast empty space between individuals and organizations. However, no network is created in a total vacuum. People always have attachments, which make claims on time and loyalty, make it hard for some to muster the effort to build new networks, and lead others actively to resist new networks. School administrators’ indifference or hostility to parent activism, exemplifying these constraints, points up challenges in connecting community members to key social institutions. The organizing case highlights obstacles to low-income adults’ involvement in education (and other) networks: limited skills, confidence, and time. These constraints can be seen as the result of the parents’ isolation from societal networks. They have low incomes because they have little or no connection to the labor market, limited access to public transportation, poor or no links to adult education or job training, little or no connection to child care, and limited access to health care. Marginal attachments to these networks may result from prior limited connection to good schooling, housing, employment, and public policy making. These disjunctions affect teaching and learning. Children who have no informational, social, or economic links through parents or other adults to the world of success have difficulty seeing a path to success or believing school offers a way. When their perception discourages them from investing in formal education, they act in ways that persuade teachers not to invest in them, and teachers and students loosen ties to one another. Thus poverty can be understood in terms of a paucity of connections between families and social institutions. Although the remedy is to construct linkages, representatives of institutions are tied into ongoing networks, and lowincome families have few resources for moving beyond the connections that help them cope with daily exigencies. Thus existing networks contribute to community problems. The poor have little power to access these networks, much less build new ones. These facts point to the limitations of the full-service community school project. Although it has linked numerous institutions in ways that probably benefit families, there is much that it is unlikely to do. Many of the institutions that affect parents and children, such as the labor market, housing market, and explicit or tacit transportation, medical, and racial policies, elude the grasp of community activists. Small-scale partnerships do not change the course of institutions. Most proponents of community action recognize that projects must be both significant and feasible, so that neither residents nor funders become
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disillusioned or cynical after expecting communities to do what they cannot. This case shows the delicacy of judgments about what is realistic for community action – in particular, what types of network-building should be the goal. At the same time, the case points up challenges to network-thinking. On the one hand, Southeast activists recognized that residents’ problems resulted from their isolation – from others in the area and the outside world. They organized planning to assemble local thinking and strategize to build networks. In education, they imagined a largely unprecedented organization – a grassroots organization focused on building relations with schools, the school system administration, universities, businesses, nonprofit organizations, government officials, and funders to improve neighborhood schools. The Task Force established connections with these actors (see also Baum 2003). On the other hand, Task Force members’ sense of urgency about education and their desire to do something for children led them to seek “do-able” shortterm projects. Their humble, sometimes discouraged sense that they did not know enough about education to plan a broad, long-range initiative reinforced this tendency. They found it hard to think about distant institutions and the extended and complicated connections necessary for a network that would include more powerful influences on the education of children they cared about. They could not readily think about what they could not affect (or what, such as free-market biases in housing and employment or racial discrimination, was tacit or covert). Planners, the Network Challenge, and Liberalism What Would Planners Do? The Southeast Education Task Force offers an (imperfect) example of networkthinking. Activists looked at residents and the historic community through a prism of social relations. They diagnosed problems and prescribed remedies in terms of where connections were lacking or necessary. After leaders of the planning process explicitly excluded education from the agenda, participants concluded that school improvement was essential to community development, because good schools provide unique links to families, homebuyers, employers, incomes, investments, and, generally, people and resources likely to create and continue a vital community. In this context, the Task Force saw organizing as intrinsic to planning and central to getting schools’ attention and involving them in projects. How would American planners think about conditions like these, and what would they do about them? It is hard to answer this question outside a specific context without stereotyping planners or setting up straw men. However, although some would think and act as the activists here, probably many, even those in community development, would not. To begin with, substantively, many would take the position that schools are outside their expertise and, hence, their concern. Planning, after all, focuses on land use and the physical environment,
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with secondary attention to economic development. Education and “social” issues are the domain of other professionals. This way of thinking forms a prism that admits only a partial view of what goes on in communities. Procedurally, even in mainstream planning fields, few planners work with community members. Part of the explanation is that few have the training or skills for this work. Part is that few planning jobs require or allow much community interaction. As a result, few planners are sufficiently involved with community groups to understand their perspective. Further, crucially, few are required to think about, identify, and try to work with the intricate networks that influence communities. Most planners who do work with community members take a narrow view of their responsibilities that limits planning’s authority and effectiveness. They are likely to work with readily available individuals, rather than try to recruit others to get representation from many communities, organizations, and institutions. When they do consider involving institutions, they focus on those nearby, even if others have greater influence on problems or solutions. Part of the explanation is planners’ training. Much reflects the limited expectations, or expected limits, of formal planning roles. Most planners think narrowly about the networks in which communities are implicated, and few take an active role to expand the networks involved in defining problems or developing solutions. Because participants represent only a fragment of networks that matter, planning lacks legitimacy and the power to change much. Few planners are required to think in network terms or engage and build networks in defining problems and developing solutions. Much of the explanation involves the history of the American planning profession. The result is not simply that few planners think or act in network terms but that the socialization, training, and recruitment of planners produce practitioners who have difficulty doing so. A prime cause is American liberalism, the public philosophy that has shaped planning. American City Planning Network-thinking is basic social scientific inquiry: an effort to understand the linkages in social systems and political interests in influencing those systems (Healey 1997a). However, the roots of American city planning work against the inquiry and strategizing central to the challenge. American planning took shape in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury programs of urban reform. Concerns about diversity and disorder in rapidly growing cities produced engineering, architectural, social, aesthetic, and managerial initiatives (Krueckeberg 1983; Scott 1971). Groups of reformers, following the American pattern of professionalization, divided urban problems into discrete bundles and asserted expertise in specific areas (Freidson 1970, 1994; Hoch 1994; Larson 1977; Schön 1983). City planners claimed the physical city, and zoning and comprehensive plans became their stock-in-trade. In leaving the “social” and “political” city to others such as social workers, public administrators, educators, and public health workers, planners gave far more attention to land use than to land users – the people and organizations whose
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activities affected patterns of city life. Although the reform movement reflected disquiet with the effects of markets, few reformers challenged the principle of private enterprise, and few planners were among them. Most planners aimed to encourage, shape, and, to a limited extent, regulate the activities of entrepreneurs and homebuyers, but not to chart a path for activist government. The state was never more than a houser of last resort. Except during the Depression, few Americans expected government to employ people for any reason besides governing. Although planning might have followed other courses, the mainstream took a path delineated by American liberalism. The division of society into discrete issues or problems reflected a liberal disposition toward fragmentary analysis, fixating on parts of systems to the neglect of the whole. In the absence of direct engagement with groups and organizations, planners operated on liberalism’s atomistic perspective, conceptualizing society as composed of autonomous individuals, rather than collectivities or institutions. Planners’ passive acceptance of dominant institutions, such as the market, was encouraged by liberalism’s resistance to public intervention, restricting government mainly to facilitating private market activity. These premises make it unlikely that planners are interested in community action or that they think in network terms about communities. They inhibit planners from network-thinking even in relation to mainstream planning issues. The three premises limit planning in reinforcing ways (see also Baum 2004b). Fragmentary Analysis The norms of professionalization that set city planners apart from social workers, public administrators, educators, and others represent a distinctive approach to understanding society, based on the assumption that issues can be neatly bounded and addressed with narrow tactical interventions. This way of thinking, not peculiar to planners, is part of American liberalism (Barber 1984; Hoch 1994). It can be contrasted with holistic thinking, which aims to comprehend a network or system as a whole, seeing relations among parts and between a network and its environment. Fragmentary thinking concentrates on isolated pieces as if they were the whole and gives little attention to their connections to other entities. This perspective makes conventional professional language seem reasonable, as when, for instance, specialized planners disavow interest in such educational issues as those described here. Some examples indicate how arbitrary, and self-defeating, these boundaries are. Land use affects education. The racial and economic character of residential patterns influences student body composition, teaching and learning challenges, and public support for education. At the same time, schooling influences land use. The racial and economic composition of schools affects families’ and firms’ decisions about where to locate and whether to move. In the longer run, schools’ efficacy influences adults’ occupational preferences and earnings, where they want to work, their residential preferences, and what housing they can afford. There is no empirical, scientific, reason for separating land use and schooling.
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Drawing boundaries between land use and education is one example of many ways that planners break the world into isolated pieces. For example, despite talk of “comprehensive” planning, planners differentiate society – and the possibility of action – into discrete fields, from land use and transportation to housing and health to employment, education, and social welfare, even though activities in these fields are linked. In this way, planners not only focus on land use but treat it as if it were only about land, even though land use, rather than a characteristic of territory, is a human activity, subject to normal social, economic, political, and psychological influences on people’s behavior. The wall between land and the social activities on it produces plans that resemble moonscapes: they have physical features, but no human beings. Another, familiar way of dividing the world is geographic. Perhaps especially because planners are interested in land use, they extend their attention only to neighborhood, city, or geopolitical boundaries, even though social, economic, cultural, and political influences on land use recognize no jurisdiction. Neighborhood plans, for example, say little about how city, regional, or national actors affect residents, and rarely do they propose interventions outside the neighborhood to improve conditions within. Planners also fragment the world temporally. Regardless of substantive or geographic focus, planning is an intervention in time, interceding in a stream of events between past and future. Although planners recognize time when they talk about the future, most fix their attention on present conditions without looking for past actions that produced them, even when those actions still influence the present and must be countered to create a divergent future. Historic patterns of neighborhood discrimination in infrastructure investment and mortgage lending are examples. By relegating such actions to a past cut off from the present, planners take conditions for granted and give up the possibility of changing them. The same is true for what is set outside substantive and geographical boundaries. In these various ways, fragmentary analysis hinders seeing the networks that influence land use or any other conditions, as well as organizing networks to improve affairs. Fragmentary thinking encourages and is reinforced by a second liberal premise, an atomistic view of society. Atomistic View of Society Network-thinking about the education conditions in the case here would include attention to how communities influence parents’ expectations of schools and teachers’ attitudes toward students, how housing markets contribute to families’ mobility and students’ ties to schools, how labor markets affect parents’ ability to care for children and their children’s assumptions about schooling’s value, and how a national political culture emphasizing private enterprise disadvantages low-income families and children. Most planners would be unlikely to think in these ways, whether the subject is education, housing, growth management, or anything else.
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A central explanation is that planners look through a prism that sees society as made up of individuals. The dominant liberal public philosophy portrays American society as a product of individual effort. As Lockean contractors, individuals have invented the society and can still do so. Individuals are free to make choices constrained by little more than brute necessity, scarcity, and minimal requirements of social order. Communities and institutions do not exist and hence neither create nor constrain individuals. This is a world of, at worst, imperfect competition. Although markets structure choices, they do not influence preferences or constrain options. Individuals may form groups to promote their interests, but if they do, they retain their individual identities and wants and are not influenced in any fundamental way by those entities. In this view, a race or community, for example, is a collection of individuals, perhaps an interest group that serves members, but nothing so coherent that it constitutes their identity or shapes their interests (Arieli 1964; Barber 1984; Lukes 1973; Sandel 1996, 1998; Smith 1997). One manifestation of mainstream planners’ view that society is constituted of individuals is a confusion between “community participation” and “citizen participation.” Community participation involves participation of whole communities, acting in their entirety or somehow represented, in public decision making. In contrast, citizen participation involves participation of individuals, who may represent communities but may just as well act only for themselves (Baum 2001). Although planners use the terms imprecisely, those interested in residents are more likely to think and practice in the latter, individualistic terms. Generally, planners have difficulty seeing units larger than individuals. Few recognize communities held together by strong social, cultural, and emotional ties. Few talk about racial groups. Planners are unlikely to speak concretely of the identity or interests of a city or region as a whole. Although planners’ antipathy to “politics” has several meanings, one aspect is a resistance to recognizing the legitimacy of group and community ties. Most planners conceptualize any common interest as merely an agglomeration of separate individual interests, rather than the expression of a shared identity. Rarely do planners examine the state, markets, or other institutions; implicitly, they, too, simply reflect an aggregation of individual preferences. Atomism can justify fragmented analysis in that, if society consists of self-sufficient individuals, there are no systems requiring holistic thinking. Conversely, fragmented analysis serves atomism by revealing a society consisting mainly of individuals. This assumption that individuals are primary does not require an interest in networks or any other group or collectivity. Insofar as planners with this perspective think about networks, they are more likely to regard them as links among individuals, rather than actions of groups, communities, or institutions. If these planners think about building networks for strategic purposes, the fragmented analysis that surveys only a small piece of the world limits these networks to narrow alliances, more likely to involve individuals than communities, groups, organizations, or institutions.
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Finally, atomism, by putting individuals central to society, does not call for big or active government and, indeed, favors small government so as not to limit individual autonomy. Avoidance of Public Intervention A lesson from the case is that building networks that could change community conditions depends on significant government action. For example, enabling and supporting community action to begin with, as well as improving schooling, requires changing national education, transportation, and social welfare policies; coordinating education, manpower, and housing policy; and intervening in conventionally private domains, such as employment and housing. Similar observations can be made about mainstream planning fields. For instance, housing demand depends on adults’ education and employment, each of which is contingent on public and private policies regarding education, employment, and transportation, as well as housing policy, and strong public intervention is necessary to change housing demand significantly. A good example of an activist planner is Norman Krumholz, who directed Cleveland’s Planning Department from 1969 to 1979. Krumholz examined how the Cleveland region influenced conditions and developed strategies to get public and private institutions to assist neighborhoods. He recognized the effects of national policies and drafted proposals for changes in housing policy. He spent considerable time building networks including community groups, public agencies, the mayor, other elected officials, the media, private firms, foundations, lawyers, engineers, and suburban actors. Although he did not always succeed, he saw the importance of looking and acting beyond the traditionally limited role of a planning department. The alternative, he argued, was that planners would be powerless and irrelevant to community concerns (Krumholz and Forester 1990). However, Krumholz was exceptional. He saw most planners taking narrow roles, and he chided them as timid. Whatever the accuracy of that characterization, one explanation for planners’ restraint is how American liberal public philosophy has molded planning agencies and the profession. From its Lockean roots, it cautions against government infringement on individual choices and gives primacy to the market (Barber 1984; Lowi 1969; Sandel 1996; Smith 1997; Wolin 1960). Planning departments are expected to facilitate private investment and development. They make plans but leave implementation to the private sector. They may publish city or regional visions, but they do little to carry them out, because they support, encourage, and wait for private enterprise. Even housing and community development departments, which can be local government’s “action arms,” do little development and leave the initiative to firms, households, and individuals. Departments offer incentives for private development and regulate private efforts when they occur but take little action directly affecting land use or other aspects of the physical city. In this way, planning agencies administer local land use policy without challenging its premises. They focus on what can be done in land use without
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questioning other policies or practices that shape and constrain options, locally, at a higher governmental level, or in the private sector. Urban planning departments, for example, rarely join forces with city school systems, health departments, social service agencies, foundations, the media, or corporate leaders, much less suburban entities. Part of the explanation is that local government is set up in a fragmented way that discourages cooperation. Part is that the planning profession, taking a fragmented view of things, has a hard time seeing the necessity or value of collaboration. Consequently, most government planners take a circumscribed view of their role and do little to build networks necessary for understanding and changing community conditions. Planning and the Network Challenge The education case study has two purposes. It illustrates the importance of community development as a means of providing people with social, political, and emotional ties and security in a network society. In addition, it offers an example of the thinking and acting necessary to understand existing networks, envision potential networks, and strategize to build networks to improve conditions. In these respects, the school case has counterparts in many planning fields. Most American planners are unlikely to think and act in ways necessary to support communities because liberalism has shaped how they view society, examine causes of problems and their remedies, and interpret their government roles. Rather than look at society as a whole and think in terms of networks, planners are likely to focus on fragments and think in terms of individuals. In any case, they believe they have little authority to take initiatives. The problem is not that planners have chosen ways of seeing society that are inaccurate, so much as that they, as many other Americans, are misguided by a dominant public philosophy. Hence changes necessary to enable planners to serve community interests in the network society are neither simple nor quick. Two domains within planners’ influence are the orientation of the profession and the content of planning education. Planning students should engage social science that enables them to comprehend the complexity of cities, including the influences of race, class, gender, community, markets, government, and other institutions. Because the language of “markets” and “choice” suggests that society is, and should be, an aggregation of individuals, students must understand the influence of markets as institutions and ideas about how to organize society and be able to consider alternatives. Students should become familiar with a range of physical, economic, and social policy domains. Curriculum should emphasize the indivisibility of these fields and enable students to analyze premises underlying prevailing and alternative policies.
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Programs should use studios and internships to put students in roles where they encounter communities and must think holistically, systemically, and as activists to make sense of problems and formulate proposals that engage community members and their conditions. These experiences should come before “technical” courses persuade students that analysis of secondary data is all they need to understand or influence society (see Baum 1997b). Because some people are more adept than others at thinking in these ways, planning programs should recruit students who give signs of aptitude at network-thinking. Incorporating this thinking into professional practice requires that planners take more active roles in analyzing issues and trying to do something about them. Planners need to join forces with others who have stakes in issues, knowledge about them, and the ability to make change. These brief suggestions do not reflect the complexity of their implementation. Moreover, it may be easier to change university curriculum than government roles. However, if talk of the “network society” describes real changes, then planners have no alternative if they want to matter. Note I want to thank Mickey Lauria, Seymour Mandelbaum, and Louis Albrechts for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
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CHAPTER TWELVE
ICT-enforced Community Networks for Sustainable Development and Social Inclusion Klaus Frey
Introduction In Brazil, urban management has usually concentrated on planning the physical and territorial development of the city and the provision of a basic technical and social infrastructure in order to attain a reasonable quality of life in the growing cities and, above all, to guarantee progress and economic development. However, the rural exodus and immense population growth obstructed efforts to attend efficiently to the demands of the increasing number of urban poor. Thus, the democratization process of the last two decades had been accompanied by social and economic stagnation, uncontrolled and disordered city development, deterioration of the urban environment, aggravation of social inequalities, and an increase in criminality and violence in the big urban agglomerations of the country. An enhanced urban agenda and the growing complexity of local decision-making processes revealed difficulties of local political and administrative institutions in dealing with these new policy challenges. In view of the growing perception concerning a supposed systemic incapacity of the public sector to cope with the negative side effects of globalization, free markets, and weakened social security systems, the “community option in urban policy” (Clavel et al. 1997), and new forms of participative or collaborative planning are gaining ground as possible alternatives to state-centered development strategies on the local level. In this chapter, we try to investigate the perspective of local communities as possible agents of urban development in the context of today’s information or network society, taking into account the conditions of local governance in developing countries such as Brazil.
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The starting point of our reflections is Manuel Castells’ notion of modern society as characterized, essentially, by network organizations (Castells 1996, 2000). Apparently, the most powerful social groups are quite well adapted to the particular conditions of information society. Exploring the new potentialities of the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), they are able to enhance interconnectivity, consolidate group identities, and strengthen their capacity to act in an increasingly interdependent world. This situation, however, contrasts with the tendency of increased fragmentation and segmentation that used to occur on the community level. In the Brazilian context of widespread social and digital exclusion, the rise of the network society seems to reinforce social, political, and economic exclusion, to weaken social bonds on community level, and to jeopardize the idea of democracy itself. Therefore, several important questions arise: Could the community option be an appropriate strategy to overcome social exclusion and marginalization in developing countries? What are the necessary conditions to turn communities vital and able to act collectively in favor of social development? And finally, how and to what extent can new forms of ICT-enabled public participation contribute to strengthen local communities and improve public policy making and urban planning processes? In this chapter the theoretical concepts of social capital, social networks, and community are analyzed regarding their relevance to the comprehension of the role of community networks in public planning processes, including the potentialities of ICT and online communities for the development of such networks. The suitability of the approach for participative urban planning will be addressed, as well as the main challenges and dilemmas with regard to the Internet as a tool of social inclusion, community empowerment, and sustainable local development in the rising network society. Social Capital The concept of social capital has gained much attention in the international development debate since the publication of Robert Putnam’s book Making Democracy Work (1993). In this study on the fundaments of Italian democracy, Putnam pointed out the high density of associations and the existence of relations of reciprocity and trustworthiness as the main conditions of effective democracy and civic engagement. According to his empirical research, these factors not only ensure the society’s civil and democratic character, but determine the performance of local governmental and planning institutions, as well as contribute to the economic growth and prosperity of local communities, regions, or nations. Putnam’s basic assumption is that members of associations tend to be more politically and socially active and more supportive to democratic norms. Thus, the density of all kinds of associations in a given society represents its stock of trust and reciprocity, that is, its stock of social capital. As a consequence, Putnam assumes that social capital can be measured by citizens’ membership
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in associations. In his recent study on the transformation of social capital in American society (Putnam 2000), the empirical data, based on such quantitative measurements and statistical analysis, indicated a general decline of civic and political engagement in contemporary America. The objections to the Putnam concept are manifold (Grix 2001; Mayer 2003; Frey 2003). In the following, only some aspects of these critiques are highlighted, which seem particularly relevant from the point of view of the developing countries, characterized by huge social inequalities and specific cultural conditions. The first point is related to Putnam’s quantitative approach, making in fact no significant distinctions regarding the contribution of different kinds of associations to the stock of a nation’s or region’s social capital. Yet, being a member of a sports club or a bowling league is certainly something very different from being a member of a political party or neighborhood association, above all in terms of citizenship effectiveness. There is a fairly important difference between associations whose objectives are restricted to the practice of leisure activities or religious rites, and associations engaged in the solution of public issues. A second critical point refers to Putnam’s implicit assumption that formal membership means as well effective membership. Passive church membership, however, is a well-known fact in Western society. In developing countries such as Brazil, on the other side, we often find the opposite situation: people, engaged in community or religious groups, but without having formal membership status in such organizations. That is why this kind of quantitative analysis, already critical in the context of consolidated industrial societies, is becoming still more questionable in developing countries with less developed traditions of formalized associationalism. Therefore, a quantitative approach seems hardly suitable to shed light upon the conditions of civic engagement in such countries. As a third point, it has to be taken into account that associational activism is more commonly found among the higher educated middle class. In general, such traditional middle-class organizations are more conservative, capable of sustaining the existing social order, but hardly willing to contribute to social transformation. In developing countries, traditional civil associations frequently contribute to solidify existing inequalities, paternalistic and hierarchical structures and patterns, as well as social privileges. With his emphasis on traditional civil associations, Putnam contributes in fact to the conservative variant of communitarian thinking insofar as such organizations and associations, which, in accordance with Putnam, are most suitable for fostering community spirit, are exactly those that tend to be more exclusive, defend and preserve existing order and privileges, and promote the privatization of public spaces and issues in their own favor. The fundamental role of more conflictive and non-collaborative movements in sustaining a democratic and vital democracy and in promoting social transformation is however ignored, revealing, according to Mayer (2003), the instrumental use of the social capital discourse in favor of the neoliberal approach of the minimal state and its subordination to the principle of economic usefulness.
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It is not a matter of contesting, in principle, the beneficial effects of civil organization activism for the consolidation of civic attitudes and the experimentation of social and democratic behavior. However, very often processes of social capital formation involve only like-minded people who share common interests and worldviews. These kinds of associations do not necessarily contribute to tolerance and a better understanding of others and difference, so urgently needed in our increasingly complex, diversified, and unjust world. Above all, in developing countries, characterized by an asymmetric structure of dominance and power and a very unequal distribution of access to public benefits, inward looking “bonding” among homogeneous group members seems a much more frequent trait of social capital building than outward looking “bridging” across groups and diverse social cleavages (Putnam 2000: 22). In the Brazilian context, traditional civil organizations are not seen as very promising actors in such “bridging” processes, whereas expectations are generally directed to social movements, which played a fundamental role in the process of democratic transition; this relates to the argument of trust and democracy enhancing effects of vital protest milieus (Mayer 2003: 118). However, one of the arguments against social movements as a principal source of social capital is that ties and obligations that bind members of these movements together seem weaker than in traditional organizations. According to Putnam, what holds societies together is social life, not political activism in social movements, membership in tertiary associations, collaboration in non-profit organizations, or involvement in support groups. His empirical data did not show any “evidence that actual participation in grassroots social movements has grown in the past few decades to offset the massive declines in more conventional forms of social and political participation” (Putnam 2000: 166). For Putnam, these kinds of groups fail with regard to their most important task: the enhancement of social trust. From the Brazilian point of view, there have to be made at least two objections. First, non-governmental organizations such as the “Pastoral da Criança,” supported by the Brazilian Catholic Church, and popular movements such as the base ecclesial communities, inspired by the theology of liberation, as well as the movement for land reform (Movimento Sem Terra – MST) are in fact not disconnected from their social basis, as Putnam supposes. Although adversarial and contesting movements such as the MST used to be avoided by mainstream social capitalists, they could be interpreted as emerging new forms of social life and political engagement able not only to renew social community bonds, but, also, to transform social and political conditions and practice. Second, the shrinking of conventional civil organizations must not necessarily be interpreted as a simple decline in civic engagement. In an increasingly pluralistic and complex society, it might reflect the recognition of the necessity of new forms of civic activism and involvement paving the way for a new understanding of civic engagement and new patterns of collective action: from rational choice behavior to new forms of social coordination based on solidarity and cooperation. Instead of narrow-minded interest groups, defending
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limited self or group interests and promoting, simultaneously, conditions of social cohesion and exclusion, the challenge at stake might be how to achieve new patterns of socio-political organization and action able to promote tolerance, dialog, mutual understanding, and bridges between different social groups, as well as, if necessary, pressure, contestation, and struggle to overcome situations of existing injustice in contemporary society. Putnam’s view seems very fatalistic as the historical and cultural roots are overestimated, whereas government’s possibilities of promoting social capital through institutional and intentional measures gain little attention. According to Lowndes and Wilson (2001: 629), Putnam’s analysis is “too society-centered, undervaluing state agency and associated political factors.” Only if we admit the possibility to influence actively the development of social capital by governmental action, “it may be possible to break out of ‘uncivic’ vicious circles and actively promote the ‘virtuous’ combination of civic engagement and good governance” (Lowndes and Wilson 2001: 631). The sheer existence of civil organizations does not say anything about the degree of their autonomy from governmental institutions. A crucial condition for the building of relationships of trust is inclusive horizontal systems of interchange and interpersonal communication, as well as systems of political participation. The question is whether a consolidated and active civil society is, in fact, a precondition for the flourishing of civic participation; or, the other way round, whether incentives for the promotion of civic and political participation are an appropriate way to contribute to the strengthening of civil organizations and social movements. This question is crucial above all in the case of young democracies, characterized by asymmetric power structures and the dominance of informal political practices. In these cases, very often the argument of a weak civil society is alleged to justify authoritarian political practices. In the following section we try to show the potential of the network approach to provide a framework, on the one hand, to understand ongoing processes of social capital development and, on the other hand, to become aware of the possibilities and limits to influence positively the social capital in favor of the common good. Social Networks and Local Communities As already mentioned in the introduction, the dominant processes in modern society are increasingly organized around networks: “Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experiences, power, and culture” (Castells 1996: 469). For Castells, the new paradigm of information technologies can be considered the material basis for the penetrating expansion of networks into the whole social structure of modern society. Yet, before going further in the analysis about the role of ICT
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for sustaining network structures, some basic features of social networks are discussed from the perspective of community development. Initially, it is worth distinguishing networks from other types of social coordination, particularly the market and (bureaucratic) organizations. Networks seem to provide results that normally only the market and hierarchies are able to produce. Within networks there can occur all kinds of exchanges without their members being exposed to the uncertainties and risks of market transactions. On the other hand, networks facilitate coordinated behavior, without having to accept the rigidity of inflexible, bureaucratic organizations. Therefore, networks seem to be the only form of action able to fulfill two basic functions: first, the strategic function to reduce uncertainty with regard to the behavior of other actors such as competitors or partners; and second, the instrumental function of performance improvement. Moreover, they seem to preserve the partners’ autonomy and augment their learning capacity. In this sense, networks can be understood as an independent form of coordination of social interactions. Its core feature is trustworthy cooperation between autonomous, but interdependent actors, who work together for a limited period of time, taking into consideration the interests of their partners, and being aware that this form of coordination is the best way to attain their own particular objectives. It is because of this aggregative capacity that networks tend to engender learning processes and foster processes of social capital building (Weyer 2000). With respect to territorial communities, the network approach has only recently been discovered insofar as the technological dimension has become the focus of attention and new forms of collaborative governance are being discussed. ICT has been identified not only as relevant to understand recent organizational transformation but also as a possible tool to reinvent social organization and collective practices at community level. Nevertheless, in view of segmentation and fragmentation processes that characterize communities at the local level, what could communities be like in modern society, above all in developing countries? To what extent could the network structure serve as reference for new patterns of community action? Empirical community studies have shown that very often “communities are not very community-like. They are as rife with interest, power, and division as any market, corporation, or city government” (Brint 2001: 6). In practice, the contacts between community members are not necessarily more intensive than those with people outside the community. Often communities are characterized by social stratification, and relevant decisions are taken by the dominant status groups. Nor are communities necessarily based on any particularly intense or highly focused social ties. Due to a growing contestation of “the image of warm and mutually supportive community relations” (ibid.) by empirical studies, the framework of social network gained ground in the social development debate. The network concept highlights much more the advantages in terms of practical, material benefits conferred to members, and less the idea of common beliefs and a unifying moral order, or even a kind of “natural will” inherent to communities. An important contribution to this discussion comes from studies
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of elective communities. As Brint points out, communities of choice are based upon common interests and mutual support. Interactions between their members turn out to be much more intensive and effective than those within communities defined purely by physical propinquity. On the other side, this orientation in favor of communities of choice might be laboring under a certain misapprehension, particularly if seen from the point of view of poor neighborhoods and their necessities to overcome situations of social risk. As Brint puts it: “The current tendency to focus on short-term interaction rituals linked to social network structures risks distorting (and effacing) the reality of those gemeinschaft-like structures that continue to exist” (2001: 8). Particularly in the context of developing countries with their extremely insufficient social security systems, local community structures continue to play an important role in people’s daily struggle for survival. Given that today the most important decisions that affect local communities are taken by entrepreneurial elites, in private spaces or global networks, communities all over the world are increasingly exposed to general uncertainty. In the last decades of New Liberalism, based on state strategies of deregulation, privatization of social welfare and security, there resulted a kind of system of organized social uncertainty. The emerging general climate of fear and affliction has fostered individualistic attitudes and survival strategies. Collective action has increasingly been undermined and social bonds, which used to hold communities together, weakened. Apathy and conformism of local communities have become more and more common features of modern society. Whereas the informational elite discusses its interests and worries in exclusive private circles of negotiation, having at its disposal appropriate means to enforce its concerns, the general mass lacks such private/public spaces where its particular problems could be discussed and turned public. According to Zygmunt Bauman, the possibility to promote effective change “hangs on the agora – the space neither private nor public, but more exactly private and public at the same time . . . where such ideas may be born and take shape as ‘public good,’ the ‘just society’ or ‘shared values’” (Bauman 1999: 3–4). That means that effective reinvention of politics able to overcome political apathy requires both renewed forms of social collaboration and new channels of democratic participation in decision-making processes. From the social capital perspective, the community option is confronted with two main challenges, apparently in conflict: on the one hand, to learn from the entrepreneurial elite’s network strategy, which had contributed to the enhancement of its capacity of collective action and cooperation by promoting trust and reciprocity between network members (“bonding”); on the other hand, to ensure inclusiveness and democratic procedures and practices, based on interactive and reflexive deliberation, in a way that comprehensive cooperation that goes beyond group identities becomes possible (“bridging”). In Brazil, politics has always been a matter of the social and political elite. Taking as analytical framework the above mentioned coordination typology, we may even come to the conclusion that social processes in Brazil are much more
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in line with the network model than with the market or the organizational model of social coordination. In fact, the market rationale usually stands in sharp contrast to the networks of interests, often based on strong ties of friendship or family relations that prevail in Brazilian society. Frequently, these kinds of networks work in favor of the annulment of free market principles. Accordingly, rules and norms that, in compliance with the model of hierarchy, ought to define access to organizations are also habitually overruled by dominant social forces. Traditional network relations usually undermine the genuine functions of markets and organizations. In general, small but powerful elites explore the advantages of network relations in their own interest, and to the detriment of society as a whole. On the other side, existing social networks at neighborhood or community level, particularly in poor neighborhoods, also often based on family connections and ties of friendship, prove little opposition against these dominant power networks. Either they appear as an attempt to avoid or limit social degradation, that is, as part of personal survival strategies, or they form new focuses of power concentration, frequently related to crime and drug trafficking in Brazilian cities. In the former case, such networks most often are dependent on their capacity to establish effective relationships with the dominant local power networks, usually based on paternalistic and clientelistic patterns. Yet, the latter form of network represents a menace to the traditional elite and the established social order. As a consequence, alliances between networks of crime and drug trafficking, on the one hand, and networks of the traditional political and social elite, on the other, are, more and more, a common trait of the Brazilian model of domination. For the time being, we can state that networks do not represent a panacea for the problems that communities are challenging in developing countries. As in the Brazilian case, they may sustain a system of domination and control incompatible with the principles of democracy and political participation. An apparently democratic concept is likely to be transformed in a power reinforcing tool, if no explicit efforts are made to overcome institutional and cultural impediments. ICT and Community Networks In his analysis of the community concept, Brint states that the integrative mechanisms of communities are strongly connected to frequent face-to-face interaction and monitoring for conformity, whereas “a realm of autonomous equals bound to a framework of common moral norms is possible only in a world in which members are rarely, if ever, copresent” (Brint 2001: 20). These are exactly the conditions that can be observed in virtual communities of interest, where the members might never meet each other, and interactions are frequently limited to specific topics, which motivated the creation of the community (Blanchard and Horan 1998: 295). Brint is hopeful that these more loosely connected and activity-based groups, which characterize increasingly
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social organization in contemporary industrial societies, will bring “some of the virtues of community to the modern world, while at the same time avoiding its characteristic vices and its purely mythical connotations” (Brint 2001: 20). From this point of view, communities of choice emerge as a promising form of organization adapted to the dynamism of social life in the contemporary world, enabling people to act in pursuit of their collective interests, without being tied to a canon of ethical and moral norms of traditional communities. However, virtual communities and communities of interest can also become exclusionary and elitist. Such groups usually comprise like-minded people; “bonding” instead of “bridging” might become the dominant characteristic of technology-mediated social relations. Such communities are prone to discuss always the same issues, reinforce existing opinions and convictions, and ignore the plurality of issues and opinions that exist in society. This becomes more striking in what Robert Bellah called “lifestyle enclaves,” “which celebrate the ‘narcissism of similarity’ through the common lifestyles of their members” (Doheny-Farina 1996: 50). The new opportunities in terms of interest-guided community building on the Internet may strengthen intolerance and consumerism, foster withdrawal from the public sphere, disenchantment with politics, and even dissemination of fundamentalism. As we have at our disposal new technologies that enable us to select only the more “useful” information that we want and need to access, and as these technologies provide the liberty to choose the people to whom we want to talk, our perception of reality tends to become increasingly narrow-minded. We might increasingly feel comfortable and understood in our groups of choice, but insecure and threatened out of them. However, society depends upon a kind of solidarity that goes beyond the engagement in favor of the like-minded. That is why the community option in cyberspace could get into opposition to the idea of society itself, reducing communication and comprehension among groups in a society more and more marked by difference and conflict. Virtual communities may cultivate another critical trend: as issues of choice determine the attention of people and can be satisfied broadly through technological tools, interest and disposition to engage in favor of local communities of place might diminish. As we suggested, local communities of place continue playing an important role, especially in conditions of wide-ranging social risks. Thus, from the point of view of developing countries, some crucial questions are emerging. Can we really expect that such loosely connected communities of interest will contribute to the improvement of living conditions on the neighborhood level? Are there possibilities to make the advantages of the more loosely connected communities of interest work in favor of the intensification of social interaction and co-operation in communities of place? How should online communities be organized and structured to nurture long-distance relationships and – at the same time – local ties (Horrigan 2001)? What about the role of governmental institutions to promote or support openness and democratic practices in such communities?
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A general look at recent developments of cyberspace is discouraging. The well-known processes of exclusion and increased power concentration seems to be reinforced, both in the economic and the political realm. The new emerging networks not only distribute power, but make possible the dissemination of new and different forms of domination. In his theory of the “space of flows,” Manuel Castells lays emphasis not only on the economic and political but also on the cultural dimension of such segmentation processes based on socio-technical structures. His interpretation of the social dynamics of network society reveals important insights about ICT-induced social transformations and, as a result, we might come to a better understanding of the perspectives of community networks and the potentialities of the use of ICT in favor of sustainable community development. According to Castells’ conceptual framework, the spatial articulation of the dominant functions in the network society takes place within networks of interaction. As these networks of flows are increasingly based on telecommunication infrastructure, large segments of society tend to be excluded from the benefits of informational society: Under the new, dominant logic of the space of flows, areas that are nonvaluable from the perspective of informational capitalism, and that do not have significant political interest for the powers that be, are bypassed by flows of wealth and information, and ultimately deprived of the basic technological infrastructure that allows us to communicate, innovate, produce, consume, and even live, in today’s world. (Castells, quoted in Wilhelm 2000: 113) The relevant processes of articulation are dominated by the social and economic elite, and go hand-in-hand with the segmentation and disorganization of the masses. The space of power and wealth accumulation is increasingly projected onto the whole world and characterized by ahistorical flows, whereas the experiences of the local people continue to be rooted in their specific, locally generated culture and history. It follows a structural schizophrenia between two spatial logics that threatens to break down communication channels in society. The dominant tendency is toward a horizon of networked, ahistorical space of flows, aiming at imposing its logic over scattered, segmented places, increasingly unrelated to each other, less and less able to share cultural codes. (Castells 1996: 428) The so-called digital divide can therefore be seen not only as a problem of unequal distribution of access to still another innovative technological tool that provides new social and economic opportunities, but it represents “the separation of humanity into two different spheres of existence” (Rifkin 2001: 14).
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Whereas in Castells’ analysis the ambivalence of this paradigmatic transformation is addressed, enthusiasts of the new virtual world are convinced that the global networks of communication infrastructure, explored by private actors, will be decisive instruments to promote democracy, development, and solidarity, and to solve the big social inequalities on the planet (see Sfez 2000: 51). And, indeed, the emerging fluid organizational structures, sustained by telecommunication technology, seem more in line with the network structures that characterize social and political processes in modern democratic societies. There is no doubt that electronic networks transform the dimension of time and space. Information is transferred in real time and contact can be established immediately, independent from spatial distance. That is why locality and physical proximity lose importance for sustaining social networks. The specific democratic potential of the Internet lies, however, in its non-hierarchic, cybernetic structure that, at least in principle, favors interactivity. Discrimination due to age, sex, color, and race tends to lose relevance for engaging in virtual communities (Sfez 2000: 52). Finally, e-mail communication reduces the risks of personal exposure that characterizes traditional face-to-face communication or debates in public arenas (Graham, G. 1999: 68). Therefore, there is cause for hope that citizens, who normally avoid public debate, could become involved in electronic networks and political participation processes. Thus, the democratic relevance of the Internet seems first of all related to its characteristics to promote decentralized and interactive communication between governmental institutions, civil society organizations, and the electorate. Moreover, the Internet provides new possibilities of informal processes of political deliberation. In traditional mass media, information and opinions are only distributed unilaterally, based on one-way communication. Usually, only opinion leaders conduct public debate, without allowing any active participation of ordinary citizens. On the Internet, however, especially due to the dissolution of space as condition for communication, a new interactive virtual public sphere, a kind of “electronic agora,” seems to be possible. From the perspective of local communities, the promises of ICT are twofold. First, they represent a potential new channel through which citizens and communities can be involved in political decision-making processes, and through which a local public sphere can be sustained as well as a local democracy strengthened. In addition to these expectations concerning the improvement of government-to-citizen relations, citizen-to-citizen and community relations could also be strengthened insofar as the social use of ICT becomes a central element of strategies of social capital mobilization. In fact, ICT-enabled public governance and planning will only work well if embedded and sustained by strong and articulated social networks. The experiences in Brazilian municipalities show that there is still little effort in the use of ICT for sustaining social networks and new forms of political participation. As in most other parts of the world the focus of e-governance is primarily on electronic service delivery. On the other side, more and more projects of digital inclusion are on the way, some of them promoted by local
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governments, others by civil society initiatives. These initiatives gain their strength from the central argument that access to these technologies paves the way to economic opportunities. The emphasis is primarily on enhancing human capital, increasingly on fostering social capital, whereas the possibilities of promoting public participation are widely ignored. Nevertheless, in recent years a growing number of telecenters have been created by local authorities that ensure access to these technologies, especially for poor people in the most deprived areas. Some municipalities, such as Porto Alegre, experiment with the Internet as an additional participative tool enabling citizens to contribute by electronic means to the participative budgeting process. A highly successful experience of a non-governmental organization has been put forward, since 1995, by the Committee for Democratization of Information Technology (CDI). Information Technology and Citizens’ Rights Schools have been created in 35 Brazilian cities and 20 states and in 10 other countries in several parts of the world. The objective is not only to provide access for the poor to these technological tools, but also to extend the exercise of citizenship and to help improve social organization and action. Conclusion In spite of the dominant trend of an increasingly privatized and commercialized cyberspace and a market- and business-oriented development of the communication and telecommunication sector, early initiatives of ICT-enabled civic networks and participation processes might give us some cause for hope that cyberspace could become a space of democratic experimentation capable of sustaining new forms of social networks, participative planning, and decision making. If, as Castells pointed out, “the state in the information age is a network state, a state made out of a complex web of power-sharing, and negotiated decision making between international, multinational, national, regional, local, and non-governmental, political institutions” (Castells 2000: 14), then people have to be prepared for this new form and practice of social coordination. Whereas liberal representative democracies seem to work best in the context of a civic culture, in which the citizen is not necessarily rational and active, but “can combine some measure of competence, involvement, and activity with passivity and noninvolvement” (Almond and Verba 1963: 487), in the rising network society people either are part of the network and able to explore the new opportunities offered by the new technologies and the network model, or are condemned to stay at the margin of social and political processes. The former conception seems more adapted to the model of the welfare state, in which a relatively strong state assumes social responsibilities for the delivering of public services and the settling of social conflicts, whereas the latter seems more in line with the currently dominant neoliberal model of a minimal state in an interdependent globalized world, which has at its disposal fewer necessary mechanisms to respond to growing social demands.
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The encouragement and fostering of civic networks, like the social capital discourse, is frequently seen as an important option within the new model of an enabling or empowering state aiming to prepare citizens to take charge of their own fate. As the focus of attention is on the individual and the development of his personal capacities, as well as on the improvement of the conditions for collective action, by strengthening processes of social capital formation, the concept has also, in principle, a strong emancipatory variable, making citizens more autonomous toward state agencies. However, this model has its limits in developing countries due to extreme inequalities in the prevailing opportunity structure. Many people may fall by the wayside in this competitive struggle for autonomy and emancipation. That is why the state in these countries, without any doubt, continues to play a fundamental role in delivering basic services and satisfying basic social needs. On the other side, massive efforts are needed to encourage local communities and civil society in their search for locally appropriated strategies to overcome social problems. Here, network strategies seem indispensable to mobilize social capital and make collective action more effective. A second option has to do with the necessity of democratic renewal. In view of the incapacity of traditional political and administrative institutions to resolve the problems that affect local people, liberal democracies demonstrate difficulties in maintaining political legitimacy. Alternative forms of political participation, in accordance with the necessities and expectations of citizens and civil society organizations, are needed. In the future, such emerging governance arenas may play a much more important role for political legitimacy, as does the electoral process in purely traditional representative systems. Political participation through the Internet may become an important additional channel within a variety of new forms of civic engagement and democratic participation. E-democracy will certainly not substitute traditional policy making, but may complement it in a way such that new democratic patterns can emerge, extending public involvement in democratic deliberation and planning processes. Thus, community networks, sustained by virtual spaces of interaction and public deliberation, might contribute to the building of social capital. In a network society it is not the sheer density of civil organizations that determines the capacity of collective action. Much more important is the effectiveness of the network structure that links these organizations together. Institutional arrangements that offer possibilities of civic engagement and political participation are crucial to make sure that such civic networks can attain social and political effectiveness. If accompanied with measures to ensure transparency and open access, as well as democratic participation, virtual communities and community networks must not necessarily suffer the dangers of becoming exclusionary and elitist. However, this requires, above all in poor neighborhoods, efforts of local governments to ensure access and adequate qualification of the population, so that citizens can effectively benefit from the new promises of the digital age.
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Furthermore, disadvantages caused by an uneven opportunity and power structure can only be kept within reasonable limits, if a strong mediation function can be established, which at best is exercised by the civil society itself. In developing countries with their weak civil societies, however, progress in this direction depends still upon local governments and, increasingly, non-governmental organizations willing to promote the emancipation of local communities and citizens. As the experience of global social and environmental movements revealed, the network strategy can become a relevant tool of resistance and contestation against dominant forces in today’s network society. The proliferation of community networks might therefore represent people’s aspiration for a renewed way of social life, based on trust and reciprocity, able to challenge dominant global processes engendered by the still hegemonic transnational networks of the economic elite. Under such circumstances, the community option may, in fact, become a realistic alternative in the search for a sustainable mode of development and social life.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Recovery from Disasters: Challenges for Low-income Communities in the Americas William J. Siembieda
Introduction Disasters appear in newspaper headlines all too frequently. They are physical, political, economic, and social events to be mitigated, managed, and learned from. This chapter weaves the multi-colored threads of different community experiences into a tapestry that tells the story of how networks are utilized in pre- and post-disaster events, and which networks provide benefit at the community level. We seek to understand what utility the “networked society” concept has in the context of less developed or developing societies struggling to provide for their people’s basic needs. In the generic recovery model, a series of linked actions are programmed, ending with a return to normalcy (Siembieda and Baird 2001).1 This is an accepted paradigm used to organize and manage nearly all disaster recovery efforts. In South and Central America a second paradigm is emerging that views disaster recovery as a social transformation mechanism at many levels; but predominantly local and regional. The network concept is used as an analytic tool in understanding the way social transformation may or may not occur after a disaster event. The working hypothesis is that the ability of a community to sustain any improvement over time is a function of both its internal capacity (the degree of horizontal integration of its social and non-social capital) and its external capacity (the degree of vertical integration with others such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and state run organizations). It is within these internal and external capacities that networks are formed, utilized, and reformed.
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This type of analysis reflects Castells’ (1996) notion of communications code formation between the nodes forming the networks. Networks, in the context of disaster recovery and mitigation, take a variety of forms. For example, vertical networks link national-level organizations, such as civil protection ministries, to more local units such as municipalities and neighborhood committees that operate early warning systems. This requires overcoming spatial distance as well as cultural distance (non-shared meanings and values). A potential for network formation also exists between external units (such as international assistance groups) and internal units (community associations, neighborhood councils, and local governments). To be useful as a network the participants need to identify and focus on those shared values that allow them to bridge the local versus global contradiction. A variety of network activities in a set of urban and rural communities (neighborhoods and villages) in four countries (Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua) provide the field observations for this chapter. Each community has differing levels of involvement, coordination, and participation on the part of national and international aid agencies, and government emergency service agencies, including the military. All communities are low-income or working class. Conceptual Framework The general field work model is an elaboration of work done by other researchers on the concepts of vulnerability, assets, claims, and access to recovery and rehabilitation resources following disasters (Vasta and Krimgold 2000; Blaikie et al. 1994). Vulnerability is primarily a function of a household’s or a community’s asset endowment, in response to a disaster impact. That is, given the occurrence of a disaster event how much impact does it have on the ability of a household or community to return to pre-disaster status? If the return to pre-disaster status is quick and accomplished with minimal disruption, then vulnerability is low. This vulnerability definition is slightly different from more conventional conceptualizations (Organization of American States 1990) that focus on the extent of harm or damage that occurs. This chapter recasts the OAS approach by considering capacity to recover as a core definition component. Assets represent the stock of wealth such as land, capital, savings, or such intangible assets as social capital, health, education facilities, and the internal empowerment to accomplish concrete tasks. The relative value of the assets may change from country to country, but all communities do possess assets that can be ordered and identified. Claims can be defined as a legal right to resources (such as insurance), or a perceived right to an external resource such as government assistance to help rebuild the community (subject to various conditions). Claims are potential assets. If claims become assets when the community needs them most, then vulnerability decreases. For example, disaster insurance must be paid (become
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a monetary asset) in a timely fashion if it is to be useful in community rebuilding. Claims however, by themselves, may not be of value if they are not processed when required. This leads to the concept of access. Access is the ability to obtain the use of assets in the mitigation or recovery process and to lower household and community vulnerability. It is not what you have, but what you can use at a given moment that is important. This creates a need to establish ways in which networks communicate effectively with these other networks in order to provide access at the correct point in time. A network can be an asset in and of itself. It can also provide access to claims or other resources depending on the context. Limiting Factors The disaster recovery and rehabilitation process, although commonly thought of as occurring in phases, is not linear. The initial emergency phase may last for some time, and depends on many factors including event severity, physical location, local infrastructure conditions, and timing of emergency agency response. For example, in 1999 Hurricane Mitch was so severe in Honduras that it damaged all of the country’s bridges and no emergency assistance was available to municipalities for a period of three days. The recovery phase and then the rehabilitation phase, coinciding with the mitigation phase, generate the need for different types of networks to be established or be put in place, and to operate. The need for adaptive network behavior is based on the different objectives being pursued in each phase. Sometimes there are setbacks when networks fail to function and a community regresses to prior conditions or struggles to simply maintain itself. The communities studied experienced varying degrees of recovery due in part to an inability to sustain effort over time. There are significant differences between the Mexican and Central American experiences in terms of international cooperation and the role of NGOs. In Central America, international cooperation and aid is the norm during the recovery phase. This is not true in Mexico, where only in the Mexico City case was international aid used for a short period of time. In Central America, international aid is a major factor in the reconstruction process. Community disaster recovery does not occur in a vacuum, but always in a political context. From the study communities, it is clear that centralized systems (Mexico) exhibit different behavior than less centralized systems (e.g., Central American countries in general). In all of the Central American countries there has been a continuous, though uneven, movement to bring communities into the disaster prevention and recovery process and to provide more local control, especially in community rehabilitation. This effort requires the building of networks that reach from the neighborhood scale to levels of the microregion. It requires that distances between networks become smaller. Communities are impacted by what is happening at a larger spatial level, thus limiting the extent of local self-determination. They need access to larger
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resource bases. For example, in Colonia Morelos, in the state of Puebla, Mexico, the community could not redirect an altered river flood plain by itself. This was the task of a central government agency whose charge it is to take a regional view on river routing even at the expense of depriving local farmers of their productive croplands. Access to regional networks is difficult for individual Mexican communities due to the centralized nature of the national system and its traditional reliance on patronage relations. This is not the case in Central America where there is more devolution of responsibility to the municipal level. Community Sample The methods used in this study include: (a) comparative analysis, (b) historical/ political analysis, (c) informant interviews, and (d) country field surveys.2 The communities presented in Table 13.1 form the comparative analysis base. The communities include rural and urban settings, and a range of disaster events (earthquakes, floods, mudslides, and hurricanes). All communities are, and remain, working class, with low, and at times subsistence income levels being a constant. The general economic base for rural communities is farming and ranching; and services and factory work for the urban communities. To gather information and score the assessment factors, a survey instrument was administered in each community. Two hundred and sixteen field interviews were conducted for three different groups; local residents (87), local leaders (83), and external organizations/agents (46). Table 13.1 Community Sample Country
Community Name and Type: Urban (U) or Rural (R)
Disaster Descriptor
Mexico
Colonia Guererro (U) Francisco I. Madero (R) Colonia Morelos (R) La Junta de Arroyo Zarco (R)
Earthquake Landslides Flooding Flooding
El Salvador
José Cecilio del Valle (U) San Carlos Lempa (R) Maria Ostuma (U)
Earthquake Flooding Flooding
Honduras
Colonia Lempira (R) Cuaca (R) Armenia (R) La Joya (U) Isletas Central (R) Col. Nueva Esperanza (U)
Hurricane Hurricane Hurricane Hurricane Hurricane Hurricane
Nicaragua
Tipitapa (U) Ocotal (U)
Hurricane Hurricane
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The Importance of Access Being able to access resources when needed is important in lowering vulnerability. Timing is an indicator of how efficiently a network operates to benefits its participants. Community leaders reported on when various types of assistance (emergency, rehabilitation, reconstruction, and development) were received based on the last disaster experience. Emergency assistance arrives within one week for two-thirds of the respondents; while rehabilitation began within two months for more than one half of the respondents. Reconstruction assistance was reported by 58 percent of the respondents to have begun from two months to one year after the disaster, while 18 percent reported that this began after one year. Respondents ranked development as either not occurring at all (27 percent) or beginning more than one year following the disaster (45 percent). Large time lags impede progress for poor communities because they must survive on a daily basis before they can improve their lives. During the emergency and initial rehabilitation phases, local government and national and international NGOs played the strongest role. Over time, local government and international assistance continue to be the most important forms of support through all the disaster cycle phases. The national government support rapidly declines after the emergency phase. Respondents’ perceptions of organizational involvement over the phases that have time parameters are shown in Table 13.2. Churches play an important role in emergency response as well as during the reconstruction phase. The longer term vertical networks are those created with local governments and international NGOs. This implies that communities need to consistently rely on their own internal networks to achieve positive transformation, even with long-term external assistance. Table 13.2 Organizational and Institutional Involvement Time Period
Immediate Emergency
Short-term Mid-term Long-term Rehabilitation Reconstruction Development
% Yes % No % Yes % No % Yes % No
% Yes % No
National government
43
57
37
63
37
63
22
78
Local government
68
32
49
51
50
50
42
58
International NGOs
67
31
40
60
51
49
40
60
National NGOs
61
39
42
58
39
61
32
68
Churches
67
33
35
65
54
46
23
77
Universities
29
71
17
83
10
90
11
89
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External Agents To gauge perception of outside assistance contributions, community leaders were asked about the type of support offered to the local community by external agents. The type of support was divided into six categories: land; goods (food, equipment); services (labor, technical support); funds; aptitude, ability, and experience; and contacts (access to information). These reflect assets available to the communities. Services, which consisted primarily of labor and technical advice, were the most important contribution (94 percent) following the disaster. Half of the leaders noted that the donation of land (52 percent), the ability and aptitude of the population (54 percent), as well as contacts (54 percent), were important contributions to their communities. Direct support through funds or grants was not widely available, although a third of the Mexican and 40 percent of the Nicaraguan respondents said such assistance was provided. The leaders were asked to rank the levels of cooperation in terms of importance. International cooperation was ranked the highest by 50 percent of the respondents followed by local (34 percent) and national (16 percent). Honduras (70 percent) and El Salvador (64 percent) placed the most importance on international cooperation, while Mexico gave it less importance (11 percent). The “external agents” were asked which types of assistance benefited the local community most. The categories of assistance were divided into the following: housing, health, education, employment, public services, vital infrastructure, mitigation projects, community risk management, and environmental recovery. The responses carry a bias that either reflects their organization mission or their personal in-country perspective. Housing (89 percent response) was the leading assistance category. This is not surprising given the high damage rates of Hurricane Mitch in Central America and the floods in Mexico. Health assistance (57 percent response) ranked high except in Nicaragua. Employment assistance (15 percent response) received the lowest support. This is due to the focus on emergency response and not on long-term recovery. In Mexico and Nicaragua environmental recovery was not a supported activity at all, but it did receive some attention in El Salvador and Honduras. Honduras had the highest number of responses for both environmental recovery and community risk management. This can be explained by the risk management training that has been an important part of the community recovery process in the Aguan Valley where the majority of the study communities are located. Cases and Countries Selected communities in three countries are analyzed in this section.3 Each country has a long history of addressing wide-ranging disasters, including civil war.
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Honduras Honduras, a country of about 6.2 million people, land area 112,090 sq km, is bordered on the north by Guatemala, the west by El Salvador, the south by Nicaragua, and the east by the Caribbean Sea. The communities presented reflect the general progress of post-Hurricane Mitch recovery mainly in the Aguan Valley near the northeast Caribbean coast. Each had (and has) major long-term recovery and risk reduction needs that were not fully met in the first three years following Hurricane Mitch. However, their overall vulnerability decreased during this period. The most valued networks are those formed at the village level or with the local employers. Due to tradition, development history, and general attitudes about disasters, these communities have undergone a subtle transformation based on existing internal linkages rather than new external linkages. That is, they have chosen to rely on local network building and focus on stronger horizontal relations (internal to the community). Conservative by nature, and with a tendency to view outside linkages as transient, each community accepted, utilized and then separated itself from major external cooperation (national and international), preferring local to regional or national relationships in the long term. In the Aguan river valley communities there is a local emergency planning committee (CODEL) that consists of people elected by community vote and appointed by the community councils (patronatos). The CODEL focus is on how the community operations centers operate during disasters and operations of the early flood warning system. They sponsor drills and exercises that build people’s trust in the ability of the CODEL to meet their needs. The CODELs also serve as links to higher levels of networks that represent municipalities and possibly regional agencies, and provide the basis for building communication and shared values toward disaster prevention and mitigation. They provide community-based training in three specific areas: installing and maintaining an early flood alert system, organizing for future emergency operations, and the rebuilding of lost housing units. All of these are practical endeavors that the local people understand and benefit from. The early warning system operation itself is a type of network because it involves trust to install the water level gauges, to monitor them, and then to sound an alert when the river rises to danger levels. CODEL training was conducted by a network of various NGOs. A variety of NGOs and donor organizations engaged in this training including the US Peace Corps, the Association of Flood Planning Managers, ANED Consultores, a nationally based service provider, and the Municipal Alert and Warning System (PROMSTAT). Training established a network between the communities and the external actors in terms of information flow, shared communication, and linkages to global knowledge. The national government did not play an active role at the community level. Training in the housing sector was provided through Samaritan’s Purse (a faith-based international aid organization) that utilizes a model of materials
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donation and self-help construction. Construction teams under a Samaritan’s Purse foreman build one house and then move to another. Team members rotate learning specialty areas, developing a labor pool for building and maintenance in each community in which the team operates. In these communities the progress included materials technology improvement by replacing adobe-based construction with that of block. The community benefits in physical terms and builds social capital through construction training. The important skills gained from the network relationships are those of self-diagnosis and external collaboration. Self-diagnosis skills include hazard vulnerability analysis, knowledge of flooding types, awareness of existing community resources, and developing recovery organization in each community. In Honduras, regional damages to Standard Fruit Company’s banana plantations following 1999 Hurricane Mitch impacted the structure of local municipally recognized community councils (patronatos) in communities such as Isletas Central where unemployment forced many leaders to take jobs outside the area. This weakened traditional networks and created new ones with greater participation by women. Nicaragua Nearly half of Nicaragua’s 5 million people are exposed to some degree of risk. Bordered by Costa Rica on the south and Honduras on the north, Nicaragua (land area 129,494 sq km) has experienced a series of disasters resulting in extreme loss of life and property. The two communities studied are: Tipitapa (population 109,000) a suburb of Managua, the country’s largest metropolitan area and Ocotal (population 31,000) located in the rural northern region. In terms of assets and investments, both communities have acquired land, housing, and services for the relocation of the families affected by Hurricane Mitch. Their strategies for recovery however, are different. Tipitapa – The Suburban Settlement Three new settlements (Lomas de Esquipulas, Juan Pablo II, and San Francisco) were developed in Tipitapa to house people displaced by the disaster (los damificados). These settlements occurred at different times with distinct models of intervention and construction. Lomas de Esquipulas was established by using public lands, while Juan Pablo II utilized previously illegally occupied land. San Francisco de Tipitapa was developed by HABITAR, a national NGO. A favorable aspect of management in Tipitapa is the link between local and national government that provided flexibility in the meeting of needs during the emergency and rehabilitation phases. Vertical integration of effort between networks operated well in this instance. In early 2001, the new government administration in Tipitapa initiated the formation of the local disaster attention plan committee (PMAD) using the framework encouraged by the national government. That same year it created the Community Attention Management Directive, which aims to strengthen citizen organization and participation in the municipality through direct proposals and providing technical support to community organizations.
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Ocotal – Northern Small Town In Ocotal, the municipal government (alcaldia) managed the disaster recovery and rehabilitation process. Strict financial control of the international aid was kept and the alcaldia managed the execution of immediate attention proposals for the victims. This entity headed the urban planning process and the construction of homes and basic infrastructure, promoting the Pueblos Unidos project, where 230 families have resettled. In Ocotal, the attention to housing reconstruction needs was facilitated by the strategic use of local materials (adobe), thus lowering costs and enabling the acquisition of more spacious and comfortable land lots. The municipality made an investment in an adobe and a tile factory that produced materials and employment. A key mechanism enabling the construction was the relationship between the municipality and the decentralized international cooperation network that existed prior to Hurricane Mitch. Local organizations managed the aid received themselves, establishing their own networks to distribute the donations provided for the hurricane and flood victims. From the point of view of Ocotal’s participants, the instructions and orders given by the central government arrived late. When the central government finally responded, it assigned and authorized the Catholic Church as the distribution center for emergency and recovery matters. This delayed decision required incorporating local Catholic authorities into previously adopted tasks, causing some communications issues. Local organizations provided their specialized means of aid, by either becoming a part of the organizational structures or assuming part of the responsibility for the recovery process. For example, the Human Development Institute (INPRHU) was responsible for 17 of the 33 shelters in Ocotal, the administration of the Emergency Committee’s supply storeroom, aiding in the construction of 130 houses in Ocotal, and assisting the children who were left homeless. A network linked to the Emergency Committee was organized under the country’s new national disaster and response legislation, and the Municipal Prevention, Mitigation, and Disaster Attention Committee was named. With the assistance of external organizations, training in disaster matters, participating in the development of community diagnosis, risk mapping, and the creation of the Preparation and Disaster Attention Plan and the Prevention, Mitigation, and Disaster Attention Plan (PMAD) for the Municipality of Ocotal was possible. Comparison of Ocotal and Tipitapa Ocotal’s local leaders placed a high value on local cooperation and efforts over projects to be executed and managed by national and international NGOs or donor organizations. This is in contrast to Tipitapa where national and international aid was valued and utilized more than local assistance. This demonstrates the importance of a foresighted investment in local training in order to strengthen their management capacities, activate social capital, and form internal and vertical alliances to request major national and international assistance.
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These communities held dual views regarding the causes of disaster. Forty-nine percent and 44 percent of the opinions obtained from Ocotal’s and Tipitapa’s citizens, respectively, stated that the causes of disaster were related to local programs and policies (absence of prevention, urban growth problems, and lack of resources). At the same time, in both cases, 41 percent and 42 percent stated the main causes were natural. This duality of opinion demonstrates the growing recognition of disasters as socially constructed events (Quarantelli 1998). When asked which would be the best plan for the community to follow for disaster preparation, building trust and confidence in local and municipal leaders was named first. The use of the resource enforced by the PMAD National System’s law, the declaration of a state of emergency, came second. In Ocotal, the international organizations worked to strengthen the relationship established with the local government before the disaster, in the form of solidarity and decentralized cooperation, especially with the fraternity of the European countries, Spain and Germany. Tipitapa obtained direct assistance from various international organizations. The International Migration Organization (OIM) provided technical assistance to the local government during the post-disaster period (first six months after the disaster) and provided training for the community leaders in emotional recovery aspects. The Canadian Red Cross and United Nations Urban Development Unit (PNUD)/OIM undertook the housing construction efforts. This direct implementation strategy on the part of the international aid organizations has been questioned by national NGOs since they weaken the capacity of such organizations to execute projects on their own. Mexico Mexico, a country of 105 million people (1,972,552 sq km), is bordered on the north by the US, the south by Guatemala, the west by the Pacific Ocean, and the east by the Caribbean Sea. It is subject to many natural hazards including earthquakes, floods, mudslides, deforestation, and hurricanes. Its physical size makes national networking without the use of modern technology nearly impossible. Because the communities studied are from central Mexico, some caution must be taken in making countrywide generalizations from these experiences. Colonia Guerrero – The Urban Case Mexico City, the country’s largest urban area, experienced its worst natural disaster event with the earthquake in September 1985, principally in the central area of the Federal District (DF). The central city neighborhood of Colonia Guerrero is the urban case. Colonia Guerrero’s status, as an urban community, has been a defining recovery factor. The area began to be settled in the 1850s and by the end of the nineteenth century was fully settled as a provider of low-cost rental housing. Created in 1976, Colonia Guerrero Neighborhood Organization (UVCG)
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promoted residents’ rights to remain in the neighborhood and to have decent housing. The effort to force landlords to make building improvements in structural integrity and roofing upkeep in its rental units, which were quite old and in bad repair, was successful in upgrading, or at least improving buildings to a point of making them more stable and less vulnerable to flooding from rainstorms. When the 1985 earthquake hit the area, 34 people died, 29 of them in a single building where old and weathered propane tanks exploded. The earthquake caused damage to some 700 single-room occupancy units. In 1985, the UVCG’s organizational structure facilitated the immediate response to the community needs. The UVCG became part of the Mexico City Union of Neighborhoods and its work commissions: Technical Commission, Judiciary Commission, and the Communications Commission. These Commissions depended upon a Political Coordination that acted as the link with other urban organizations. There was a work scheme for each zone, where the leaders and representatives of each sector knew the exact location of damaged premises (inhabited or uninhabited) susceptible to collapsing. This organizational process produced exceptional results. Three hours after the 1985 earthquake, Colonia Guerrero had a preliminary diagnosis of the emerging damages and began to gather the resources necessary to care for its people. Influencing the community’s rapid and efficient mobilization was UVCG’s participation in two renowned organizations: the national coordination of popular movements (Coordinadora Nacional del Movimiento Urbano Popular) known as CONAMUP; and the Coordination of Renters in the Valley of Mexico (Coordinadora Inquilinaria del Valle de Mexico). These “networked” organizations provided the UVCG with immediate support and constant supplies of water, food, and clothing, as well as human resources to manage the work brigades. The post-earthquake experience in Colonia Guerrero was excellent in the short term. Over time however, the community changed. After 10 years difficult economic times created loss of community leaders leaving to seek work in the US. In the mid-1990s gangs and drugs became neighborhood problems. Families who previously were outward looking and worked collectively became inward, and less participatory. The families focused on their internal issues of violence and drug addiction. This has led to a slowdown in post-disaster reconstruction, and difficulties in network maintenance. There continues to be collective work on new apartments for local residents, but not at the pace of construction or resident occupation that occurred in the late 1980s, and there is less leadership in local organizations. The networks of 1970–1980 have weakened as social capital assets can no longer be accessed when needed. Veracruz The community of Francisco I. Madero is located in the town of Papantla in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz which borders the Caribbean. This mountainous small farm region, populated in great part by indigenous people, was devastated by landslides and floods in 1999 that isolated it from aid for
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many days. Networks in this community rely on traditional practices. A farmer’s organization exists with community traditions of indigenous origin (Totonaco). The community is linked through the community council (Comisariado Ejidal) to other state authorities and municipalities. The council leaders report to the communities’ assemblies. Traditional cultural ways are valued, and communication with outside people is limited. When faced with a disaster, the population organizes itself to carry out different tasks, such as the clearing of roads, and collective construction through the community council. Physical and cultural isolation took its toll in Francisco I. Madero. Four days after the 1999 disaster, they were forced to ration food with preference given to the children first. Some families left to find relocation elsewhere and some left the region altogether for work in the north. Although they were given offers to relocate to new housing programs financed by the National Disaster Fund (FONDEN), only a few families accepted. The majority remained as they believed the government housing proposal (to build 22-square meter houses) would not satisfy rural family needs. Networking outside the community, in terms of a vertical network, does not exist in any functional sense. The clash between the traditional and the modern is clear. The distances, in Castells’ (1997) terms, between the network of the ejido and that of the federal and state governments are vast. In Mexico, the emergency, recovery, and disaster reconstruction efforts are centralized, relying on national level agencies that provide resources to state counterparts and then distribute these down to the local level. Overall, this provides a larger base of resources to draw upon. It also requires that there be very good vertical integration of communications and delivery of support mechanisms from the center to the periphery (from the top, down). Mexico’s disaster response and recovery system has not seen, or used, disaster events as opportunities for transformation. The national government’s effort is emergency based, not mitigation or prevention based. Such a “one solution” approach to use with all situations does not promote or support networks. This emergency response and recovery policy creates greater distances between networks at different levels because the foci change and the resource needs change (e.g., from food and medical services to jobs and education). The networks that are created are between the federal agencies and the state agencies in a top-down fashion. The state agencies are controlled by the governors and support the governors’ policies in relation to the distribution of assistance funds. The case studies tend to tell us that being out of political favor means recovery delays and increased vulnerability. Summary Discussion It is difficult to sustain disaster recovery improvements over time if fundamental social and economic development factors (e.g., consistent wages and maintenance of family units) are not part of the overall effort. Comparing Mexico
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to Central America, we find the centralized Mexican model does not encourage linkages between networks. In Central America, political boundaries are also present, but are played out more in terms of local practice. The regional and sub-regional control over projects as is being practiced in Central America appears to provide more effective results. Communities demonstrating greater recovery success are those that simply focus on both immediate and mid-term needs and create the networks most useful for them regardless of legal or formal requirements. These communities appear to have the ability to utilize resources provided to make disaster mitigation plans and to act on these plans in quite rational ways. That is, they access alternatives and choose those that lower their household and community vulnerability. Communities doing this well require broad and deep involvement of local people. In addition to material resources they also utilize NGO assistance to increase their knowledge and skills bases. This means they raise their social capital asset levels, and this gives them greater effectiveness. Networking with NGOs is not without its downside, as NGOs do carry their own ideology and thus are subject to forming some level of local dependency. With that said NGOs do represent a type of networking that can be transnational for a community. NGOs have become a form of institutionalized networking in Central America. Disaster mitigation and recovery as a process presents new policy challenges in providing proper guidance for the future. This study shows a great deal of variation in approaches to understanding the process and in providing meaningful tools that help communities to recover and, possibly, to lower their vulnerability. To be effective, planning needs to provide support for activities that maintain community progress over the long term and that continually monitor changes in vulnerability. In this study, Castells’ (1996) notion of networks as open structures able to expand with limits is not well supported. There is great variation in networks’ capacities and rural communities seem less likely to embrace openness than urban communities do. Traditional networks remain highly valued and less likely to engage in vertical integration of activities. The challenge is to support continuity over time to maintain networks as they adapt; and to empower communities to establish a voice that helps them acquire long-term development advancements after a disaster event. Strengthening the system of claims to assets would provide overall improvement to disaster recovery and transformation. The experiences in Nicaragua and El Salvador show progress because they can integrate resources quickly at the local level. Effective claims processes need to be designed to respond to broad-based needs, meaning that flexibility is a key component of an effective claim system. Claims, however, rely on vertical network relations because they call for external resources provided by actors outside the localized disaster area. The quicker the claim resources are delivered, the more they become operational assets that communities can control and benefit from. This is clearly the case for Ocotal in Nicaragua, which used claim resources to invest in a local brick factory, which provided needed employment and reconstruction
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materials. Integrating claims processing systems into disaster preparedness activities should be part of any future development strategy. Vulnerability remains a difficult issue to address. Because vulnerability, in reality, is not a static condition, the variables that measure vulnerability change over time. What we learn from these communities is supporting collective activity leads to lower vulnerability. In network terms this indicates that vertical networks should be designed to encourage collective local actions. Vertical networks under these conditions would provide resources in a variety of ways, and avoid the single solution approach that tends to be designed at the central level. Vertical networks involve actors from many agencies and organizations and they have broad-based missions that are subject to change. Some type of time-based feedback mechanism is required to adjust the network responsiveness to community level vulnerability. Thinking about the ability to respond and to engage in transformative actions using the asset and access model provides new insight in assessing community capacity. Many of the assets identified in this study could not be maintained over the long term. This is disturbing in terms of development planning. It tells us that when assets are identified, supporting systems need to be put in place to maintain them and to strengthen them. We also learn that single objective approaches to disaster recovery (e.g., house damage replacement only) are not adequate responses. More tailoring of assistance to the local and microregional setting is called for. The use of assets, access, and time as evaluative and predictive variables provide the basis for a dynamic model that is useful as an applied methodology in disaster mitigation assessment and in the policy formation process. Notes 1 2 3
The actions in this model are: emergency response, reconstruction, mitigation, and preparedness. The fieldwork for each country was conducted by a country coordinator: Paulina Chaverri for Nicaragua; Bruce Beard for Honduras; Daniel Rodriguez for Mexico; and Mario Lungo for El Salvador. The El Salvador cases are not included in this chapter due to space constraints. For the past two decades El Salvador has been moving to a more decentralized mixed system of relations between the central government, international cooperation organizations, and local communities.
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Multicultural City in the Age of Networks Xavier de Souza Briggs
This chapter will, to a great extent, involve looking backward into the future. I focus here on the problems and opportunity in social diversity. There are, without a doubt, new ways to think about diversity in the contemporary terms of a network society. But diversity, whether welcome or unwelcome, is an ageold theme for cities. In the sense that urban settlements first arose and still develop fastest at the junctures and crossroads, cities were born of differences – both the complementarities and the tensions that difference adds to the human experience. My principal aim here is to consider what it will mean to accommodate increased diversity in cities in an age of networks. Each of those parts – diversity, cities, networks – is crucial to my scope. I will preview each before outlining two main arguments. On a final prefatory note, I write from the vantage point of a changing United States but address the wider globe. Scope First, under diversity, I focus on the opportunities and challenges that confront us, now and in the decades ahead, on a scale that actually merits the label “millennial.” Diversity and sustainability are perhaps the twin, millennial challenges of many cities in the global North now, particularly immigrant gateway cities, and economic inequality reflects both of these. The scale is enormous if we focus on the increase in diversity in purely demographic terms – i.e., in the volume and range of ethnic, religious, and other identity-group differences that changing urban communities now accommodate. But the magnitude is also great if we focus on expectations: of respect for autonomous cultural space, enfranchisement in civic life, and extension of economic opportunity, whether through work, investment, or the social safety net.
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Consider the demographics. Eleven million immigrants came to the US in the past decade alone, most from Asia and Latin America. Seventy-five percent went to just six established gateway cities, but the most rapid and unprecedented changes are being felt in emerging immigrant gateways – cities such as Charlotte, NC, and Des Moines, IA – that are socially and politically defined as the heartland, not the cosmopolitan vanguard, of American life (Singer and Suro 2002). To underline this point, a single high school in suburban Virginia is home to over 70 ethnic groups and dozens of language groups. Hispanics, the largest immigrant ethnic group in our country at over 38 million, now comprise the largest minority group. More than ever, discussions of diversity that have traditionally made the experiences of native-born African-Americans the primary reference point will need to accommodate a wider panorama of experiences, hopes, and fears, including a significant diversity within and across large immigrant groups. This need not lead to a displacement of the black experience, but it does mean that the terms and parameters of the diversity debate in the US are more up for grabs than ever before. Depending on who counts and who is counted, an estimated 12–15 million immigrants from developing nations now live in the European Union (EU), most of them Turks and Kurds, Arabs, South and Southeast Asians, sub-Saharan Africans, Caribbeans, and Latin Americans. The foreign-born share of population in Sweden, at 12 percent, is larger than that in the US now, and Germany’s is not far behind (Haug 2002). Millions of Muslim immigrants on both continents are working, whether with or in spite of government, to create an organized Islamic civil society that has no precedent in the modern West.1 The strains in this, though too often the stuff of media hyperbole since 9/11, do present our societies with what one of my colleagues would call “a real opportunity for learning.” He is a psychiatrist, so he employs that word learning with a certain therapeutic glee – it is a learning that emerges by walking a twisting and sometimes uphill road. As in North America, these national statistics on immigration – both arrivals and the higher rates of natural increase among immigrant groups than the native-born – understate the huge shifts seen in particular European cities. In other words, on both continents, the national figures obscure the enclaves and of course the range of local encounters among groups, as well as attempts at accommodation or exclusion. Comparing diversity debates across regions of the wealthy North of the world, then, we are not drawing the lines in identical ways, but we are grappling with strikingly similar questions about social, political, and economic borders within our societies and about how those borders should be managed. Second in this preview, the focus on cities is also crucial to my scope, since an enormous amount of commentary on the benefits and burdens of diversity dwells on the macro-level of the nation-state or supra-national regions, such as the expanding EU – either that or the micro-level of small groups or residential neighborhoods. It is not always clear where the intellectual or practical “in between” space for cities or city-regions lies in that conversation.
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Society-at-large relies on some fairly rudimentary ideas about what is urban or, if appropriate, metropolitan in this diversity picture. Cities are treated as the front lines – and sometimes as the battlegrounds – in a process of confronting change, but cities are rendered as little more than that. Scholars who do not “think urban” for a living are not much better equipped. Cities are the local canvasses on which national and global forces draw the lines and add the color, or the performance spaces in which a variety of “narratives” and culturally encoded styles are performed, where small-group experiences – diversity in the observable everyday – aggregate up. At best, it seems, much scholarship about social diversity depicts the city as adding texture to ideas and events set in motion at the more micro- or macro-levels. There are more powerful, expansive, and realistic ways to think about the role of urban communities in making diversity work, and these ways have to do with creating inclusive citywide institutions, both public and private, and inclusive urban identities beyond fervent national ones. I do not question for a moment the fact that cities are embedded in, or penetrated by, larger systems and larger flows, and do not want to encourage localism for its own sake. But I believe the wider options, as we will see in a moment, give us practical leverage on improving our societies, not just conceptual purchase on elusive problems. Finally, networks are central to my scope and to this volume. Our theme – the network society – presents an opportunity to connect the millennial challenge of diversity to that of connectedness, to the functions and dysfunctions, the power and the limits, of networks specifically. Defining the concept of a network society should not entail a retreat into the abstruse. We should clarify and defend (or reject) specific meanings and – hopefully – meanings that resist the seductiveness of the network model. It is a seduction that seems to operate on the imaginations of the academic community and the general public alike. Network models and metaphors offer a quick way to convince oneself that there is an order or even a simple determinism to the world that often is not there. Take Stanley Milgram’s famous small-world experiment, its findings now part of the popular lexicon in the phrase “six degrees of separation.” The fact that very large networks may connect me, via a small handful of distinct social ties, to a head of state or a peasant farmer across the globe does not mean that I can do much to understand, meaningfully exchange with, or influence either of those people. The world is both small in some dimensions and steadfastly huge in others. Furthermore, networks do act very often as invisible conduits of ideas and influence, but as researchers at our conference explored, the very invisibility of networks typically makes them less salient as sources of identity than established ethnic, religious, and other identities – each of which, in turn, tends to delimit our networks. This delimiting is what the birds-of-a-feather-flocktogether saying very accurately acknowledges. Finally, too much formal network analysis (a booming field) is about networks rather than networking – i.e., about the structures that might be connected to action, rather than the action itself or
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the consequences of action. As Duncan Watts (2003: 50) reminds us in his aptly titled book Six Degrees: Instead of thinking of networks as entities that evolve under the influence of social forces, network analysts have tended to treat them . . . as the frozen embodiment of those forces. And instead of regarding networks as . . . the conduits through which influence propagates according to its own rules, the networks themselves were taken as direct representation of influence. Whether one wants to understand networks that broker urban labor markets or policy networks that handle environment challenges, whether production networks of firms or terrorist networks that depend on and also threaten the vitality of cities, regardless of one’s subject, a key danger in using network concepts is presuming a causality and even a determinism that has not been demonstrated. These are some of the risks that preoccupy me as I consider what networks have to do with the project of making diversity work in cities – these and the perennial risk of selecting on the positive effects of networks (access, information, and cooperation that may better society) while ignoring the negatives (parochialism, patronage, and downward leveling by peers) (review in Putnam 2000). Two Arguments First, when it comes to understanding the meaning of increased diversity in cities and informing useful action to make that diversity work, we do not yet have the theories we need. We cannot explain nearly enough. This is not a criticism of any one body of research or any one researcher. But what we have are raw materials and, perhaps predictably, an excess of intellectual specialization. Coherent, up-to-date theories that encompass cities as systems and provide a compelling basis for action are all but non-existent. In fact, to call the available literature a “patchwork” would be too generous, for it would imply that someone had stitched together the patches. What we have, rather, is a pile of patches, a rich but largely disconnected set of partial theories and commentaries. There are: theories of the political incorporation of minority groups, theories of how shifting ethnic identity-group boundaries, along with gender and other identities, are “navigated” in everyday life (whether with or without attention to local context), theories of inter-group relations focused on prejudice and discrimination (again) primarily in everyday encounters, theories of the benefits of network diversity and conversely of the costs of insular networks, theories of status attainment and spatial assimilation – or conversely, of urban spatial segregation, both enclaves and ghettos – as defined by racial or
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ethnic differences, and theories of urban space marked by cultural hierarchies.2 In addition, there are provocative, utopian commentaries on the city as a contested, constantly evolving “carnival” in which varied worldviews and meanings can bump up against each other – the very thing that residents of gated communities seem to be worried about – together with critiques of the cultural biases in high-modernist planning (Sandercock 1998a). Finally, there are documented cases – ripe for theory-building but not yet very built up as such – of accommodating diversity, at least in specific domains: residential neighborhoods, urban labor markets, urban political mobilization, and more (e.g., Horton 1995). Beyond being disconnected one from the other, these theories, for now, yield limited, and in some cases contradictory, policy prescriptions – for example, both for and against greater residential integration (to reduce inequality or preserve cultures, respectively), for and against greater public regulation of market behavior (to reduce segregation or enable new economic identities to flourish without excessive social engineering). Put differently, these theories and commentaries generate a wide variety of policy objectives, some of which compete with or contradict each other. To be fair, one could make the same evaluation of any varied set of social research traditions tackling a complex, multi-faceted real-world phenomenon, but if the question, “How do we make increased diversity work in cities?” is the socially urgent question, the state of theory leaves much to be desired. I will briefly explore why this is so, as well as what we can do about it. Second among these main arguments, networks have probably been oversold as mechanisms for making diversity work. This reflects some of that wishfulness in how networks are portrayed and used as causal props. But beyond the turn, in recent years, toward relationships as intrinsically good for people and good for scientific explanation, this over-selling reflects a turn away from formal institutions, including hierarchical public ones, and away from the role of the state, in our celebration of civil society. I do not imagine this to be a universal trend by any means. But the trend is significant, and it is particularly problematic for my question since, as I noted above, quite a few partial theories of making diversity work focus rather exclusively on the informal, the smallscale, the private, the everyday, not the collective, institutionalized, or city-scaled, let alone the larger and more challenging governance space of city-regions. Not only does larger, organized politics recede in the dominant view, but so too does the importance of universalist institutions and publicly defined and promoted rules that govern behavior in markets and civil society. Harnessing network concepts for the diversity project must include some restoration of the balance, and this means paying more attention to how formal and informal institutions interact and, in particular, how each promotes productivity and accountability in the other – an interdependence sometimes described as synergy. Some of the most balanced and critical ideas about making diversity work, and about leveraging networks appropriately in that project, emerge indirectly, in the analysis of state–society synergy as a tool for promoting human welfare.
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Peter Evans (1996) has distinguished synergy’s forms as complementarity, which implies mostly separate but parallel play by the state and civil society, and embeddedness, in which direct linkages among the state, civil society, and in some cases markets, make collective gains possible. Embeddedness often includes varied networks. In this view, the distinctive potential of the state, civil society, and the market is recognized, none is put on a pedestal beyond reproach, and the work of understanding and improving the synergies is given high priority. Politics and power become central concerns, not after-thoughts, and power, in my view, should include productive capability – i.e., the potential for social impact – and not just influence on the symbols and frames, the issue agendas and decisions that we commonly define as constituting politics. Below, I develop each of these arguments briefly, beginning with the state of theory. Theory in Many Parts What is striking about the inventory of theories of diversity in cities is how selective our attention has been. One reason that we cannot offer more to planners and decision-makers is that we do not try to account for very much in any one of the intellectual specialties, which yield predictably partial theories. There is often great depth in them but too little peripheral vision, and like a team of engineers given excessive latitude to work on his or her part of a larger problem, we find the bundling together of solutions and de-bugging of the whole a daunting prospect. Here are some realities that I think more encompassing theories can and should address. On the broadest level, three factors define, and indeed have historically defined, the management of ethnic, religious, and other group identity differences – the diversities most deeply and consistently felt – in shared places. I will label these factors boundary shift, tolerance, and cross-cutting loyalties (Briggs 2004). None is a strictly positive elixir – and Sandercock (2003a) suggests, in fact, that the “mercy of tolerance” has had decidedly negative effects on co-existence and social inclusion – but the evidence is that all three have been important historically. That is, assessing the significance of the three tools, alone and in combination, is essential, whether or not we wish to endorse any of them. Boundary shift refers to the most basic social tool for dealing with differences: make them go away. While this may conjure up violent images of forced re-settlement or even that awful euphemism, “cleansing,” as in making the people who are different go away, this is not at all what I mean. Rather, confronted with the need and the opportunity to share specific places, to make local life possible whatever the more global influences, human communities have, for millennia now, shifted boundaries, most notably through assimilation – i.e., by turning outsiders into insiders, by making the most salient identity differences between people go away. Differences no longer matter when no
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salient difference is there to be recognized, and this was the Chicago School’s prescription for the project of accommodating newcomers to the city (Alba and Nee 2003). In American history, the classic example of this is in expanding the high-status category “white” beyond a Northern European class culture to include a wide variety of Southern and Central European ethnic and ethno-religious groups, the so-called “white ethnics” that came to the booming industrial city of a century ago, largely as laborers and tenement dwellers.3 As for how this first tool is employed, public policies clearly matter – policies that shape citizenship, cultural autonomy, language use, property ownership, shared civic symbols, and more (Collins 2001; Nobles 2000) – but boundary shift is not entirely amenable to ordering or planning. And on the whole, assimilation per se is distinctly less acceptable now than it used to be – or, I should say, not acceptable in the ethnocentric form most practiced to date. Again, it is not just demography that has changed but expectations. The expectation of access with pluralism – the multicultural ideal – is part of the global marketplace of high-currency ideas. Having acknowledged that, one explanatory task for more encompassing theories is to track and make sense of shifts in the boundaries that define groups. This calls for something more ambitious and more difficult, though, than tracking “the play of identity” in everyday social interactions, divorced from the public sphere – i.e., as a kind of civil society artifact. Rather, it means linking the everyday, observable indicators of identity to that wider sphere, examining mobilization, encounter, competition, and cooperation as tracking group lines in many instances and, perhaps, shifting them at the same time. There is a natural conversation, not yet had, between those who analyze political behavior at a city-wide scale (but do not tell us much about individuals making choices in those big arenas) and those who ask immigrants how they define their identities, including their political ones (but do not link very personal perceptions to organized political behavior over time). One reason that cities are much more than canvasses – on which national and global forces do the painting – is that cities are cradles of innovation, including innovative ways to exclude. Cities are generative. They generate distinctive responses to diversity “problems” that are fundamentally local (scaled to live-work geographies), not national, though they may be experienced in communities throughout a nation: for example, how to ensure cheap labor while keeping unwanted people out of your schools or social clubs or tax-and-service districts. This is a problem that presumes the lower-status group must remain local enough to labor. The great comparative question facing us, as we face each other across the Atlantic, may be defined by the differences in our histories. On one hand, North America, a continent of settler states, may be less wedded to conceptions of citizenship rooted in ancestral ethnic stock – for example, being historically and ethnically German or French or Swedish. On the other hand, Western European nations, by confronting their first great waves of immigration – particularly immigration from the global South – a century later than
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North America (on average), will surely resist the extremes of racial and ethnic exclusion for which America’s own legal apartheid was so famous. Urban researchers are well placed to analyze these dynamics, and make use of these possible path dependencies, at the local level, particularly since rates of immigrant arrival and local spatial patterns (enclaves and more) differ so widely within and across European nations. Tolerance is the second, and far more widely recognized, social tool for making diversity work. Its significance and its limits become clearer when it is viewed alongside the first factor. In place of shift, tolerance means living with differences that persist. It encompasses attitudes and behaviors that allow co-existence, at a minimum, and where possible, active inclusion, curiosity, and signals of respect for the Other (or “out-group”). Tolerance, like networks, can become a magical explanatory variable and lead to tautologies: where the cauldron of groups does not boil over, there must have been tolerance. Beyond mis-estimating the impact of tolerance, it seems to me that we have fairly weak theories about what enables or undermines it, how it co-evolves with institutions in labor, electoral politics, or other arenas, or how resilient local tolerance is in the face of national backlash. For their part, researchers of for-profit organizations have provided a compelling framework of graduated steps: managing diversity, they tell us, is first limited to compliance with non-discrimination requirements (tolerance as a matter of law, in hiring or contracting, for example), second a matter of tapping new specialty markets – for “ethnic” products typically – and third a matter of embracing new worldviews and new frames for business and organizational life. That last step is beyond compliance and beyond enlightened self-interest in tapping new markets (Thomas and Ely 1996). The third step can transform identity and interests as well. It redefines what it means to be in a common enterprise. It will be important to know if cities, notwithstanding the internal heterogeneity and decentralized authority structures that tend to distinguish cities from firms, can ever be characterized by attitudinal and behavioral shifts that resemble such steps. Finally, cross-cutting loyalties define the third tool for making diversity work, and this tool is a by-product of the first two. It explains decisions to cooperate that are not a simple function of tolerance but of multiple group identities and loyalties that hold each other in check. It was the great European sociologist Georg Simmel who taught us that holding multiple group memberships and multiple loyalties is a defining trait of modern life and of networks.4 He should have known: as an intellectual, he was an insider, but as a Jew an outsider, in German university life a century ago. Cross-cutting loyalties, and the cross-cutting networks associated with them, are part of the glue that defuses conflict in diverse communities. Ethnographer John Horton has shown it in his longitudinal research on Monterey Park, California, the so-called “first Chinese-American suburb,” where cross-cutting ethnic and class ties link middle-class, property-owning Asians and AsianAmericans to middle-class, property-owning whites. Ashutosh Varshney (2002)
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has asserted the same in careful comparative research on Muslim and Hindu ties in Indian cities. Cross-cutting social networks and bridging associations, many of them rooted in commercial cooperation that has clear mutual benefits, are circuit breakers of ethnic and religious conflict, he finds. Where these ties are missing, ethnic violence is much more likely to erupt. Fear and anxiety overwhelm the perceived benefits of diversity.5 In the end, cross-cutting ties are not a simple product of local design or decision making, of course, but they are amenable to local organizing efforts. National symbols and national policy decisions help provide raw material for identity, but specific decisions to associate with others – including decisions to bridge on one dimension of identity, such as ethnicity, while bonding on another, such as occupation or property ownership or political party affiliation – are rooted closer to home. Our evolving theories can and should deal with these factors – boundary shift, tolerance, and cross-cutting loyalties – and offer comparative accounts where possible. Cities have unique, path-dependent trajectories within countries, and countries path-dependent ones within the community of nations, and these facts together suggest many possibilities for innovative study. Networks Oversold? My second and final argument is that networks have probably been oversold as mechanisms for making diversity work. It is not that they are unimportant in that project – I have just argued, in fact, that cross-cutting networks are demonstrably valuable – but, rather, that we have re-imagined networks (a) as consistently positive (while their effects are much more mixed) and (b) as remedying failures of the state (while networks are also superb devices for parochial sabotage). The public challenge in leveraging networks, then, is threefold (Evans 1996; Woolcock and Narayan 2000): •
guarding against their abuses, particularly since networks are inherently exclusionary on some level – even bridging networks primarily confer benefits on members – and because they are deliberate instruments of exclusion in some cases;
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compensating for the limitations of networks – not turning social networks or other sources of self-help social capital into mere “shock absorbers” for social problems, for which the networks are vastly underequipped; and
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extending their benefits without micro-managing them – i.e., without trampling on the very flexibility that allows people to benefit from cooperating informally with each other, often by “bonding” along ethnic and class lines.
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As researchers, we should be on the lookout for anti-civic social capital that offers to manage diversity in ways that are inconsistent with democratic values, not just the pro-civic, pro-inclusion, “Kumbaya” communitarian variety of connectedness. Furthermore, we should be typing, comparing, and critiquing efforts to create synergies across state, market, and civil society organizations and networks. On this latter score, it will undoubtedly be important to offer in-depth analyses of synergy at work in specific dimensions of urban life – such as housing markets, labor markets, electoral politics and policy advocacy, and more – but systemic views, more risky and ambitious though they may be, are sorely needed too. It is not that I wish to impose a grand design, an intentionality or comprehensive roadmap for social inclusion, that does not really exist. But I would like to keep the city-as-system and, as part of that, the role of government, more squarely in view. Finally, key discussions of the politics of creating synergy have focused on whether and how the power of elite classes is held in check, for example by popular mobilization, but in cities where economic opportunity policy is racialized or triggers ethnic identity boundaries, it will be important to understand whether those identities feed or starve the kinds of broad coalitions that broad recipes of social inclusion will probably require. Direct evidence on the role of bonding and bridging networks in these formations, rather than inferences made through circumstantial evidence, is sorely needed. Conclusion We are more interested in networks now and perhaps are seduced by their strengths and by the comfort they give us that there is some order at a time of rapid social and technological change, some structure in a fluid and more borderless world. In empirical terms, flatter, more distributed structures, many of them informal and non-governmental, have gained in importance relative to formal hierarchies, including those of the state. But there is little to suggest that the network society because of networks offers either a future of perpetual enclaving in cities – what the Chicago School called a “mosaic of little worlds that touch but not interpenetrate” – or the opposite extreme, a convivial, networked cosmopolis. Boundary shift, tolerance, and cross-cutting loyalties will still matter as we respond to increased social diversity in many cities. And the forces that shape those will interact in ways that are hard for us to follow. Network patterns will be implicated. They will lie among the causes and effects of key changes we experience. Having weighed in earlier on the limitations of utopian thinking, let me be more hopeful and also more direct about my hopes, as an immigrant and a mixed-race person who has made a life of crossing borders and trying to understand them. As researchers and educators, we know that we are privileged not so much to inform with facts but to help lead with understanding. We are better,
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perhaps, at dissecting failure than predicting success, but at a moment of such global anxiety, we can be a force, as Howie Baum says of planners, for “organizing hope about the future.”6 I leave you with those words and with a meditation on the imperative of making differences work. It is a thought penned by Rumi, the great Persian poet, some seven centuries ago: “Come, come whoever you are. Ours is not a caravan of despair.” Notes 1 2
3 4 5
6
There is a burgeoning literature on Islam in Europe and North America, in particular, but few references tie this growing, evolving presence to shifts within Islamic societies. Rosen (2002) is a key exception. On political incorporation in the US context, see an updated review and new analyses in Jones-Correa (2001) and in Europe, Tillie (2003); on shifting identity group boundaries and assimilation, see Alba and Nee (2003); on prejudice and discrimination, see Schuman et al. (1999); on network diversity, see Briggs (2003); on spatial segregation and status attainment, see Massey (2001); on cultural hierarchies and domination in urban space, see Zukin (1995). The latest debates in US scholarship center on how much today’s assimilation looks like yesteryear’s. For contrasting perspectives, see Alba and Nee (2003) versus Lee and Bean (2003). Simmel (1858–1918) was not translated into English until mid-century. See, for example Simmel (1955, 1964). Varshney’s toughest critics assert that his account is all but state-less, that it downplays the active involvement of political parties and the apparatus of the state – through police, for example – to incite ethnic violence. Whether valid or not, the possibility that crosscutting ties dissuade such complicity by the state must also be considered. It is the title of his book, The Organization of Hope: Communities Planning Themselves (Baum 1997a). The phrase owes originally to a German theologian.
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COMMENTARY
Local Networks and Capital Building Susan S. Fainstein
The four chapters in this section examine the role of internal and external networks in creating social and physical capital. As such, they represent both an analysis of how networks are used by people and a test of the network concept as a tool for social-scientific understanding of specific cases of action. Howell Baum chronicles the case of a community in Southeast Baltimore where activists conducted a community planning process in an effort to revive a declining urban neighborhood. He describes an educational task force that aimed to build networks both among parents and between the schools and outside institutions. He found greater success in the effort to create external linkages than in the development of a network involving parents with the school. He notes that low-income families lack the resources to construct new linkages with others: “the organizing case highlights obstacles to low-income adults’ involvement in education (and other) networks: limited skills, confidence, and time. These constraints can be seen as the result of the parents’ isolation from societal networks.” Essentially the lack of initial social capital prevents the development of additional social capital. Klaus Frey examines issues of local network building in Brazil. He observes that the increasing interconnectedness of global society through technology reinforces the exclusion of those who are not tied into global structures. He argues that the existence of networks does not necessarily contribute to social betterment: “they may sustain a system of domination and control incompatible with the principles of democracy and political participation.” At the same time, he comments that local networks are of increasing importance within the context of impoverished communities since they provide support necessary for survival. Like Baum, he concludes that state intervention as a facilitator of civic networks offers one way in which otherwise excluded citizens can become more empowered.
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William Siembieda looks at the situation of working-class and poor communities when confronted with natural disasters. Like the previous two authors, he both stresses the importance of external networks for overcoming adversity and finds that access to them is very difficult for low-income groups. Still, he does find variation in this respect among the countries he has studied. Xavier Briggs concerns himself not with the usefulness of networks for achieving a task such as school improvement or disaster mitigation but rather as a means for accommodating social diversity. He resembles the other authors in emphasizing the role of the state and of formal institutions in overcoming social exclusion. He asserts that state intervention is a requirement for effecting social change and argues against simply turning to networks as a means for building social capacity. Usefulness of Network Analysis The use of the network as a theoretical construct raises several questions: How should network be defined? What insights result from applying the notion that otherwise would not be evident? Does it obfuscate more than it enlightens? Network analysis falls into the category of what Ann Markusen (1999) calls “fuzzy concepts” that elude clear specification. While Markusen does not give sufficient credit to the efficacy of fuzzy concepts in provoking fruitful research, she does point us toward a requirement that a theoretical move needs to be justified according to some standard. That standard should be the production of significant results discovered as a consequence of its use. Of the four essays in this section, only Frey’s aims at definition. He presents a conceptual distinction that differentiates the network from other forms of social coordination: the network is neither bureaucracy, nor market, nor community but rather a set of non-hierarchical, non-competitive relations. “Its core feature is trustworthy cooperation between autonomous but interdependent actors.” He stipulates that network arrangements are temporary and based on the assumption that individual actors can best achieve their interests through cooperation. Under this definition they acquire a voluntary aspect. It is not clear whether or not the other authors share this view, and, in fact, examples given in the other chapters refer to networks that involve hierarchical relations. The issue joined by all four authors is the extent to which network can substitute for community in the effort to obtain social justice and whether or not the exclusionary aspect of networks necessarily disadvantages low-income and minority people. By and large, the four come up with a rather pessimistic judgment albeit tempered by an optimism of the will. Thus, Frey asserts that “this model [of civic networks] has its limits in developing countries due to extreme inequalities in the prevailing opportunity structure.” Baum argues that “although the remedy [to poverty] is to construct linkages, representatives of institutions are tied into ongoing networks, and low-income families have few resources for moving beyond the connections that help them cope with daily
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exigencies.” Briggs contends that “networks have probably been oversold as mechanisms for making diversity work.” Siembieda concludes that: it is difficult to sustain disaster recovery improvements over time if fundamental social and economic development factors . . . are not included in the overall effort . . . the . . . notion of networks as open structures able to expand . . . is not well supported. In other words, the underlying social and economic structure determines the character of networks, and the capacity of networks of poor people to produce social transformation is weak. Two of the essays (Frey and Siembieda) refer to Castells’ (1996) claim that we now live in a network society and that this constitutes a fundamental transformation from earlier conditions. In Castells’ work this argument is tied to his concept of “the space of flows,” in which spatial distance no longer constitutes an obstacle to instantaneous communication and the development of relationships. His view has no necessary implication for power within networks – in other words, simply being connected does not mean one is an actor rather than acted upon. It is therefore an error to build on his concept by implying that network formation is necessarily beneficial to people who lack resources; as Frey notes, “networks have probably been oversold . . . as consistently positive . . . and as remedying failures of the state.” The four authors make a valiant effort to wrap their various arguments and case analyses around the network concept. Siembieda argues that integration into both vertical and horizontal networks facilitates recovery after a disaster. It is difficult to see what the concept of network adds to his analysis. The notion of integration has been around in organizational sociology for a long time, and it is not at all clear that weak ties rather than sufficient resources are crucial for recovery. Briggs more or less dismisses the usefulness of the concept altogether, commenting that “a key danger in using network concepts is presuming a causality and even a determinism that has not been demonstrated.” He does agree that cross-cutting social networks can improve tolerance of diversity, but this argument differs little from what pluralist political scientists have referred to as cross-cutting cleavages – i.e., multiple affiliations. In his quest to determine what social “tools” allow diversity in cities to flourish without destructive conflict, he emphasizes their generative quality – i.e., their capacity to innovate – and the presence of tolerance. Neither of these qualities, beyond the contribution of cross-cutting networks to contribute to tolerance, depends much on the network concept. Frey, like Briggs (and Castells), stresses the exclusionary potential of networks and the importance of overarching institutions in leading communities to act collectively in favor of social development. By exploring the effects of information and communications technology (ICT), he addresses the core structure of networks, because ICT does create a capacity for excluded groups
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to connect with each other. Whereas Marx pointed to the factory as the basis for working-class organization, recent theorists of social movements have identified the Internet as performing a similar function of connecting previously isolated individuals who share a common interest. In this context the potential of the network as a device for mobilization does take on a causal meaning; it is, however, much more limited in scope than arguments concerning the strength of weak ties or the generation of trust.
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Governance Capacity, Policy Networks, and Territorial Specificities
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The Global Emergence of Private Planning and Governance Chris Webster and Shin Lee
Introduction This chapter pursues four related themes: (a) the emergence of club-based consumption in modern cities; (b) the transfer of governance functions to contractual communities (networks of co-consumers and co-producers); (c) transaction costs as an explanatory device; and (d) a critique of the network governance paradigm. The network paradigm has been used for a long time in the sociological and business literature. The club paradigm, in contrast, has principally served economists with a powerful model of “connected consumption.” The economic theory of clubs was formalized as a generalization of Paul Samuelson’s theory of public goods in a seminal paper by James Buchanan (1965). It has since generated a huge literature, which is well summarized in Richard Cornes’ and Todd Sandler’s authoritative review (1996). There are obvious parallels between the notion of a club and a network and it is surprising that little has been written on their similarity. An e-journal abstract search on the two key words threw up only one such paper – Roberta Capello’s Urban Studies paper (2000) examines the network externalities of city networks, which are also viewed conceptually as clubs (and the network externalities as club goods). This chapter develops the idea that private neighborhood planning and management is an evolutionary step in the organization of cities, explained by the search for less costly modes of economic cooperation, particularly cooperation over local public goods. The club is a powerful metaphor for understanding the dynamics of collective consumption and production in cities and the entrepreneurial club seems to be a compellingly efficient governance model for many civic goods and services. Clubs are a mode of governance that is neither
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completely hierarchical nor completely market. They are like networks in this respect. We discuss the connections between club and network paradigms and argue that club governance has qualities that make it more sustainable than network governance. Conversely, network governance is only transitional and naturally evolves into either hierarchical government or market-based co-operation, including club-based markets.
Broadening the Focus of the Private City Debate In the last quarter of the twentieth century, many cities throughout the world experienced a boom in privately developed, managed, and governed residential, industrial, and commercial clusters. The rapid spread of private residential spaces in particular, has attracted the attention of the media and social scientists and triggered extensive public debate. Where they are just emerging, they are a novelty that commentators seek to understand. Where the market is well established, practical questions about management, procedures and governing legislation are debated alongside the bigger questions of social polarization and fiscal exodus. For the antagonists, private communities – famously dubbed Privatopias by Evan McKenzie (1994) – have become icons of post-consensus, fragmenting civic society, enclosing and excluding by contractual constitution and sometimes by walls and gates. They are high-impact visual signs of change – of the shrinking public realm, rising urban fear, and growing inequality. For others, private communities are, less polemically, a new way of urban living that improves the lives of those within. The debate is polarized not only along ideological lines but also in terms of spatial and temporal focus. Much of the critical academic and public discussion is focused on systemic long-term effects – the social consequences of the private action of individuals buying into Privatopias. The latter do so on the basis of relatively short-term individual cost-benefit calculus. Living in a residential club may yield tangible gains for members but impose equal or greater social and economic costs on society in the longer term. They may be locally efficient forms of urban governance but not globally so (at the city or even national scale). To complicate matters further, the global and local costs and benefits may kick-in on quite different time scales. This contemporary urban debate is dominated by the US experience of gated communities – or, more precisely, common interest development (since possibly less than a quarter of proprietary neighborhoods are, in fact, gated). Private communities are not only a US phenomenon, however. There is a growing international literature. A strong theme in this discussion is to associate gated communities with economic restructuring on a global scale and with the rise of a transnational elite. Guarded enclaves are the places where the new transnational elites organize their housing; and they gate out a growing number
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of the economically excluded. It gets worse when private shopping malls, commercial and industrial complexes, and tolled highways are thrown into the mix – a thesis developed by Graham and Marvin (2001). The privileged are creating entire subsystems within cities – networks of economic and social relations – from which the less well-off are excluded. Transnational elites have undoubtedly been important in creating local demand for common interest development lifestyle in diverse countries, and globally-active real estate firms have helped to establish a club community niche in the property markets of most big cities around the world. This is not the end of the story, nor the whole of it, however. In many countries, domestic demand for condominiums and landed properties in co-owned neighborhoods outstrips expatriate demand. Possibly up to a half of the 1 million or so new homes constructed in Bangkok in the boom years 1986–1996 were low- to middleincome condominiums aimed at the local market (Yap and Kirinpanu 2000). This puts a very different complexion on the private micro-government debate. In Bangkok, enclosed and privately governed and managed condominiums and suburban estates are merely a market solution for providing co-ordination between neighbors in a crowded city without a strong tradition of government planning. As a domestic market for private neighborhoods evolves, so too do style, design, organizational, and institutional features of the products supplied. Governments have an important influence in shaping the local manifestation of this global genre of habitat. In some countries and with some types of community it may be that the origin of the local phenomenon has little to do with the American experience. This seems to be the case in China, whose wholesale shift toward gating and private management owes more to the productionconsumption club culture created during the central planning period through the organization of society into collective work units (Webster et al. 2005). The story is further complicated where societies have a relatively recent premodern or pre-colonial tradition of strong social-spatial demarcation and gating – as in parts of the Middle and Far East (Glasze and Alkhayyal 2002; Webster et al. 2002). In most countries of the world there is an emerging private neighborhood market. Developers, with the support of governments, are in the business of supplying not just homes but entire neighborhoods complete with local public goods, regulations, and governance infrastructure. This represents a shift from both informal social network-based and hierarchical modes of co-ordination and governance to a club market. In a club market, jointly consumed goods are excludable (through membership) and therefore capable of being priced. Price replaces informal relationships, government rules, and political process as a mechanism for allocating collective goods. Within the member-network of consumers created by a club supplied by a club market, however, goods are allocated by rules and hierarchy. If the club is well designed, the rules will be clear and congestion, levels of benefits, and price paid will be optimized.
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Emergence or Diffusion? Finding private neighborhoods the world over suggests two alternative (but not mutually exclusive) explanations. First, contractually governed neighborhoods are a real estate product that spreads by diffusion and, driven by global property markets and international mobility, becomes a model of urban development available almost everywhere on the globe. The innovation adapts as it spreads and it is important to understand the historically and geographically specific patterns of interaction between the agencies of demand and supply as well as the role played by the state. Important in this respect are local variations in the institutions (rules) that govern housing, urban planning, capital and land markets; local variations in entrepreneurial abilities and cultures; and local values governing interpersonal and inter-group relationships. Thus, proprietary neighborhoods may spread more rapidly in regions of the world where inequality is high; where traditional urban governance fails to guarantee security; fails to provide the rising professional classes with adequate civic goods and services; and where government power is limited by fiscal poverty and weak regulatory powers. Second, proprietary neighborhood governance is an emergent phenomenon. Private civic government is an invention waiting to happen – made possible by various technological, cultural, and economic changes. Inasmuch as it provides greater choice of civic goods and services, greater certainty of provision, less risk of neighborhood nuisances, more governance accountability, and better value for money, it is superior to conventional municipal government. Superior, at least, for those within. As diverse urban societies pursue more efficient ways of organizing themselves – organizing the co-operative transactions that create and spread wealth – they naturally converge upon more efficient strategies. Thus, governments throughout the world are converging in their adoption of public–private partnership approaches to delivering certain kinds of civic goods (Webster 2003a, 2003b). This is not because a higher authority has ordered it – although the role of donor agencies in some countries has been coercive – but because conventional government cannot deliver on its own the demands of modern society. Strong domestic markets in private neighborhoods (involving developers, management companies, lawyers, financiers, customers) have not been created by edict, law, or conspiracy against the poor; they have emerged spontaneously as producers and consumers seek mutually beneficial opportunities for exchange. Under the discipline of competition in local real estate markets, new products are constantly tested and superior products tend to persist. Under the political discipline of democracy or threat of civil unrest, governments develop new legislation to accommodate, facilitate, and regulate private cities. The evolution of a local proprietary neighborhood market and the institutional (legal and regulative) framework that shapes that market happen hand-in-hand therefore. The two hypotheses are not unrelated of course. Empirically, it may be impossible to tell whether a particular gated suburb market or condominium
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market is principally a locally emergent phenomenon or the product of a globally diffused urban consumption culture. All diffusing innovations adapt locally and these adaptations may be thought of as emerging from a specific cultural context. Nevertheless, the two views may be a helpful device for addressing the issue. In particular, the emergence hypothesis provides a methodologically individualistic approach that competes with the structuralist and post-structuralist arguments underlying global city and related critical hypotheses. Certain distinguishing characteristics of North American common interest developments (CIDs) may be noted when considering how they relate to private urban territories elsewhere. They are not a homogeneous product. They include lifestyle developments catering for those with common recreational and lifestyle preferences such as retirees and golf-players. They include low-income security developments in downtown areas; up-market city center condominium developments; and master-planned suburbs. In other words, they are a commodification of existing neighborhoods, which have always reflected heterogeneous tastes within income bands, and have diversified to suit a variety of tastes and capacities. The case of China makes an interesting comparison for a number of reasons. First is the scale of private urban governance, which may well dwarf even the US. Second is the fact that this has come about with a large amount of state involvement. China’s case is an example of state-led private neighborhood growth, in contrast to America’s spontaneous market development. Third is the lack of institutional constraints in the search for cost-effective methods of managing cities. The US has a long history of private neighborhood governance and a longer modern one of municipal government. Proprietary neighborhoods are emerging in America as an evolutionary adaptation of existing, well-defined institutions. In China, post-1979 reforms, especially land reform, created an immense institutional vacuum. China had immediately to discover new ways of managing mixed market cities, with few if any modern institutions in place that were capable of doing this. Fourth is the degree of competition between different tiers of government within and between Chinese cities. The exploration of alternative institutional and organizational approaches to managing cities, society, the economy, and the environment is proceeding with a remarkable amount of creativity and invention. All tiers of local government seem willing to compete with each other and there is a very real sense in which governments, being the holders of the scarcest factor of production in China – land – are organizing the new market-driven growth. The relative scarcity of capital and land helps determine the relative power of urban governments and investors in shaping new projects. Cities compete with cities, districts with districts, street offices (100,000 population) with street offices to develop land productively. Street offices in one district or city invest in projects in another district or city and the boundary between local government and enterprise blurs. Fifth is the rate of economic growth, which has helped generate this competition and experimentation. Cities, districts, and street offices become entrepreneurs, speculators, and partners in joint ventures because the potential
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gains are so high. The opportunity costs of doing nothing are so great that governments have been allowed a large amount of freedom to invent new approaches to delivering infrastructure and services in the absence of existing institutions. Sixth is the pace and scale of institutional change that results from this process. Nationally, this is so with, for example, there being no land market one year and then thousands of land-rich local authorities acting as institutional investors and developers the next. Locally, it is also so with one local authority competing with another with innovative regulations, policy, investment, partnership arrangements, taxation, and subsidies. Private Cities and Transaction Costs Reviewing the American literature on common interest housing, Evan McKenzie (2003) identifies eight distinct theoretical explanations of the phenomenon (Table 15.1). At the two extremes are, on the one hand, libertarians such as Foldvary (1994) who views contractual neighborhoods as a welcome step away from coercive government and, on the other, critical social theorists such as Davis (1990) and Caldeira (1996) who see them as sinister developments in the spatial manifestation of inter-group power struggles. By contrast, the view that private urban governance is an innovation emerging and diffusing because of certain inherent efficiencies is a positive, rather than a normative theoretical position. Efficiency may be variously defined according to various values but the hypothesis is that proprietary neighborhoods are an evolutionary step in society’s search for improved forms of ordering itself. That step might be a positive or negative one, depending on one’s values and on the spatial and temporal frame of analysis. In particular, private urban governance can be seen to result from the tendency of individuals to seek to reduce the costs of cooperating (or transacting) with each other. This hypothesis can be explored whether or not one personally approves of proprietary neighborhoods. For a detailed discussion of urban order as a response to transaction costs, see Webster and Lai (2003). Here we explore five transaction costs arguments that relate to several of the paradigms listed in McKenzie’s table. Table 15.1 Interpretations of Private Neighborhoods Neo-classical economics Democratic socialism Liberal democracy Critical urban theory Source: McKenzie, E. 2003: 2
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Libertarian future Rational choice Privatization of local government Communitarianism and social capital Socialism by contract Fragmentation of society and body politic Secession of the successful Segmentation and fortification of urban space
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Reducing the Risk of Competing over Shared Resources The first transaction cost argument is that private neighborhoods reduce the risk of having to compete over public domain resources. Resources over which ownership is ambiguous may be said to lie in the public domain. Public domain resources lack clearly demarcated property rights and, if they are scarce, they are subject to competitive attempts by individuals and groups to capture public domain rights. This is experienced as congestion and wasteful competition in the absence of clear rules of competition. If a public domain resource is not scarce, there may be no cost or social inefficiency arising from the absence of clear formal property rights. Informal social networks between residents or neighboring firms may be appropriate governance structures in that case. Few contemporary urban resources are like this, however. Private neighborhoods tend to supply local public domain goods in a way that reduces the possibility of congestion and wasteful competition. They do so by designing the quantity and mix of goods for specific numbers of consumers and by attempting to exclude non-paying consumers. They turn public goods into club goods and public domains into club domains (Webster 2002). Private neighborhoods may be viewed as entrepreneurial clubs that allow shared resources to be consumed collectively in a way that optimizes (a) the costs of competing over such resources and (b) the unit costs of supplying them. The latter falls and the former rises with the number of co-consumers. The point is simple – that club neighborhoods are more successful than conventionally governed neighborhoods at getting this balance right. As a consequence, home movers are increasingly willing to pay the premium for a more bespoken set of neighborhood goods, supplied with greater (contractual) certainty (or with lower risk). Buchanan (1965) formalized this idea of the club in order to address the crucial governance issue of how to efficiently supply so-called public goods. The club, as an economic model, is an efficient mechanism for allocating collectively consumed goods in which the costs of congestion and the benefits of cost-sharing are equated at the margin. As the membership of a club increases, unit costs of shared facilities fall but so do unit benefits due to rising congestion (competition for the shared resources). For any given set of facilities, there is an optimal number of co-consumers (membership size) at which the difference between unit benefits and costs is greatest. Increase the amount of green space, road space, or sports facilities and the population capacity of a neighborhood rises. This suggests a set of optimal neighborhood sizes for increasing facility sizes. This does not mean, however, that neighborhood size is unbounded. There is another set of optimal sizes – the size of facilities that maximize the difference between unit cost and unit benefit for a given membership size. For a given size of neighborhood, increasing the quantity (or quality) of shared goods and services is achieved by increasing the unit cost to each individual. But at some point the unit benefits of the improved facilities starts to flatten out as diminishing returns set in. They may even fall if a facility gets too big. Thus for any given neighborhood size, there is theoretically an optimal facility size
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at which the difference between unit facility cost and unit benefit is greatest. This optimum rises with the size of neighborhood. Putting together the curves that depict (a) optimal neighborhood size for different sizes of shared facilities with (b) optimal facility size for different sizes of neighborhood, gives, under certain assumptions, a unique optimal combination of facility size and club membership. The point we want to make here in relation to transaction costs is that neighborhoods-by-design can reduce the costs incurred when individuals have to co-operate in jointly consuming infrastructure and services. Many shared resources supplied by conventional urban governments are prone to congestion. Organizational and institutional innovations that deliver neighborhood goods in such a way that the costs of competing with fellow consumers are reduced, are likely to succeed. Clubs are, theoretically at least, a good organizational model for cities. The challenge for planners is whether neighborhoods that have not been “clubbed” can be (re-)designed to achieve the same specifications. Reducing the Costs of Resolving Conflict Second, when conflict does arise over shared resources, private governments offer clear rules of engagement that typically assign property rights in a less ambiguous manner than their equivalents in publicly governed neighborhoods. Rules constrain costs of competition, and the clearer and better enforced a rule, the lower, in principle, the cost of preventing and resolving conflict. This explains what is often seen as the perverse profusion of rules within American gated communities. Individuals opt out of conventional urban government only to subject themselves to more rigorous private government. Irrational? Not necessarily when rules are viewed as avoiding the costs of either anarchic or imposed resolution of public domain problems. The former gives economic might the right and the latter gives political might the right. Either way risks having a solution imposed that is contrary to an individual’s preference. Spontaneous governance within an informal network (such as a loosely constituted community group) runs the risk of breaking down into anarchy when the stakes get high or become dominated by particular interests. Hierarchical governance runs the risk of becoming ineffective through lack of funds or influenced by interests contrary to those in the locality. Contractual planning and nuisance rules give residents the certainty, safety, and dignity of buying into an agreed framework of behavior. Having said this, the social and economic costs of contractual government in the mature US CID market seem to be high, with widespread litigation reported between neighbors; between residents and management companies; between homeowners’ associations and developers; and all other possible combinations (McKenzie 2003). This may be a warning that the net advantages of contractual government and planning are slimmer than they might first seem. On the other hand, such problems may even out in time as the institutional and organizational superstructure adjusts to the practical problems of living in residential clubs. This is essentially an empirical question that can only be answered
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over time. The present evidence suggests that public government will do what it does in other spheres: legislate to make the market more efficient (for example mandating adequate re-investment funds; keeping CID litigation out of the public courts; and requiring the provision of private conflict mediation services). Reducing the Cost of Matching Demand and Supply of Local Civic Goods and Services Third, a competitive market in proprietary neighborhoods will reduce the cost of pricing public goods (and therefore the cost to society of ensuring appropriate supply). Price, in a competitive market, is a signal of consumer benefit. The traditional argument for government supply of neighborhood goods is that shared resources cannot be priced because they are non-excludable. When government supplies them, however, it faces the impossible task of measuring demand or need by proxy indicators such as surveys, votes, lobbying, and complaints. This yields information that tends to be partial; aggregated to spatial units that conceal real differences in preferences; biased toward the preferences of dominant groups, especially the better-off; and subject to distortion by public officers and politicians. Another Nobel prize-winning economist, Kenneth Arrow, famously proved the impossibility of aggregating a set of individual preferences in a way that uniquely optimizes social welfare. Even if accurate information were obtainable for each individual’s preferences for civic goods, it would be impossible to supply society with such goods without the imposition of politically chosen redistribution. Civic goods and services organized by governments are therefore supplied on the basis of inherently inferior demand information compared to market supplied goods. That information is processed by individuals whose cognitive limitations, self-interest, and personal and political preferences mean that there is rarely a precise match in demand and supply. Addressing the question of how to supply public domain goods efficiently, the economist Charles Tiebout (1956) proposed that under certain conditions individuals could be expected to reveal their true preferences for such goods without the use of individual property rights and associated exclusion mechanisms. This throws another light on the idea of clubs. Tiebout conceptualized entire cities as clubs – competing with each other for citizens on the basis of bundles of services and local tax “price.” Under conditions of perfect mobility and information, preference for jointly consumed goods is accurately revealed by the migrants’ choice of city. The original model is a neat one for demonstrating that under certain (unrealistic) conditions, local public goods can be efficiently allocated. Tiebout’s model achieves this result because the civic goods available in one city are effectively available only to members of that city – non-paying citizens are excluded by distance. The emerging markets in private neighborhoods operate something like Tiebout’s model of competitive cities – only the model fits the intra-urban scale better than the inter-urban scale. Individuals choose between alternative bundles of common goods and services, each supplied at a price that reflects the cost
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of supply – the greater the competition the nearer this will be to the true marginal cost. Movers reveal their preferences by choosing between schemes and the service charge, and property premium effectively prices the public goods. Property rights, not distance, deter non-payers from using local public goods, making the Tiebout market work efficiently. It might be noted that conventional property markets work inefficiently as Tiebout markets in that residents select from a range of neighborhoods, each with a different bundle of local public goods and each with a different neighborhood “price” – the locational premium bundled into the property value. The “pricing” is inefficient because the locational attributes paid for in the premium are tie-ins that are not protected by contract; are subject to change according to the action of neighbors and politicians; and are subject to congestion by outsiders – those using the neighborhood but not paying the premiums. In US cities such as San Antonio and Metro Phoenix and in certain quarters of Bangkok, Beijing, Santiago, and Pretoria, where home-buyers are presented with a large number of alternative private neighborhoods, an efficient market in neighborhood goods effectively exists. Residents moving within a city or in-migrants selecting location within a chosen city acquire information about alternative neighborhoods and prices of alternative bundles of local amenities. The greater the number of suppliers and schemes, the more accurately does the property premium/service charge reflect consumer benefit. Competitive forces may be assumed to drive prices down and quality up and to encourage accuracy of information. In such circumstances, it might be assumed that demand also helps drive supplier innovation. Over time, bad products tend not to succeed, prices are disciplined by competition to reflect supplier costs and residents’ benefits, and popular product ideas tend to dominate. This is in contrast to conventional monopolistic urban governance. In many cities, there is a single government, subject only to the discipline of re-election. The political incentives for delivering neighborhood infrastructure and services according to demand are often weak and frequently unable to compete with incentives to deliver to other agendas, including those that result in redistributing local tax revenue between neighborhoods (via environmental legislation and school subsidies, for example). A competitive club neighborhood market reduces the costs faced by homemovers when searching for a new location. This is achieved at the expense of the developer or other “supplier” who assumes a higher proportion of the searchrelated transaction costs. This redistribution of search costs from consumers to suppliers happens through marketing and, more specifically, packaging. The role of the real estate sector in driving gated community and condominium markets is often viewed with cynicism. The criticism tends to overlook the benefits of packaging as a mechanism for reducing transaction costs, however. The condominium market resembles the packaged holiday market in which many goods are bundled into a single commodity. Like the package holiday market, many home-buyers are apparently willing to pay for the convenience
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of the packaging – which avoids costly individual search and multi-criteria quality appraisal. One way of interpreting the rise of common interest development housing schemes in the US and elsewhere is that they save consumers the costly task of making comparisons between complex bundles of goods. In particular, they save on the cost of trying to evaluate in advance, what can only really be evaluated in consumption. Homes and the attributes of the neighborhood implicitly bundled into the price of a home, are examples of experience goods – goods that can only truly be priced after consumption. By heavily branding condominiums, gated suburbs, industrial parks, and shopping malls, developers, neighborhood management companies, and real estate agents are assuming some of the cost of information search and concurrently reducing consumers’ liability in terms of search costs and risk of locational choice. They are prepared to assume these costs because experience shows that home-movers are averse to search costs and are attracted to a packaged product. As with conventional property markets, in times of over-supply or weak demand, developers and agents will assume more of the search costs by marketing more heavily, offering inducements, etc. In a sellers’ market, these activities will be cut back and home-movers will be left to assume a greater proportion of search costs. Inducements in conventional property markets are generally limited to on-site attributes. In club neighborhoods, they extend to the size, shape, and value of the home-neighborhood package. Notwithstanding these variations in consumer benefits, which will vary with local and wider economic cycles, if private neighborhoods are an innovation that fundamentally reduces consumers’ property and neighborhood search costs, they are likely to succeed and dominate other forms of neighborhood organization, if allowed to do so. Network Governance and Clubs Networks are commonly talked about in three ways in the literature: as a set of social relations; as infrastructure; and as a governance and organizational structure that is distinct from the market (decentralized decision making) and the hierarchy (centralized decision making). The network as a structure of human relationships is clearly the glue that makes both hierarchies and markets work. Granovetter (1985), in his frequently cited article in The American Journal of Sociology, claims that economic action and social structure are essentially linked together and what links them together is social embeddedness. The world of organization accounted for by markets and hierarchies is thus incomplete as they are all overlaid by social (and personal) relations. Economic decisions are bounded and shaped by social networks. The network as a configuration of technological infrastructure, on the other hand, permits new flows of information exchange and transactions, and thus shapes, expands, and deepens markets and hierarchies. New infrastructure
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networks create new relational networks, new network externalities (network benefits), and new opportunities for entrepreneurs to create new markets, including markets in club goods. Global fiber optic communication networks plus deregulated telecommunication industries, for example, have led to a plethora of new ICT clubs – individuals sharing the costs of shared broadband lines by paying a monthly fee. Network governance is understood by some to be a new mode of less formal and more lateral relationships between agents. Castells (1996) speaks of new forms of producer organization in which strong horizontal relationships give the crucial organizational flexibility demanded by the new knowledge economy. Implicitly, and more explicitly in the work of others, these are seen as replacing hierarchical forms of governance and pure market relationships. It seems to us, however, that network governance, if it can be said to exist as a separate category to markets and hierarchies, can only be transitional. We explain this conjecture below in relation to private neighborhoods. Consider the idea we have already used, that institutions (rules and sanctions) emerge to reduce the costs of open competition over scarce resources. These may be the institutions that make market-based exchange possible or the institutions that govern resource allocation by administrative fiat and political process. Resources within urban neighborhoods are typically allocated by a mixture of markets and hierarchies: private goods (buildings) are typically allocated by property markets and public goods (shared infrastructure and regulations) by government hierarchies (planning and other municipal functions). In the absence of effective allocation of the latter kind of goods, informal institutions tend to arise, created and policed by individuals related by various kinds of social networks. Good neighborhoods in wealthy cities work largely because of the informal codes of conduct and shared cultural norms often strengthened by informal organizations. Informal networks and institutions take on a more crucial function in low-income settlements where collective action is necessary to supply even the most basic kinds of civic goods such as security, potable water, and waste collection. In entrepreneurial neighborhoods, the informal institutions maintained by informal networks and the formal institutions created (but often not maintained) by public government hierarchies are replaced by privately designed and maintained institutions. These may be thought of as innovations that seek to offer lower costs of competing/co-operating over shared neighborhood resources – lower than either informal networks or government hierarchy. Thus market replaces both hierarchy and informal network. Network governance in the context of the urban neighborhood might mean the informal governance of neighborhoods including rules and sanctions that emerge within informal associations (between homeowners, residents, or businesses) and within even less formal neighborhood relationships. This is certainly a form of governance but it must surely be only a primitive form. In particular, it is a form of governance more suited to commonhold property rights over resources with little scarcity value. History and contemporary society show
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that when the value of a common resource increases beyond some threshold, common property rights break down (Barzel 1997; Umbeck 1977; Webster and Lai 2003). Since the alternative – anarchy – is not sustainable, hierarchy often emerges as a co-ordinating strategy. Entrepreneurs also play their part and the informal consumption and production networks of low-income cities have often evolved into fully fledged markets just as Britain’s nineteenth-century informal mutual savings societies evolved into financial corporations and entire markets. The costs of co-operating under informal institutions become so high (property rights and liabilities are ill-defined and hard to police) that eventually contractual formality steps in. Entrepreneurs also have an eye for the failings of hierarchy. If the hierarchical decision networks of government cannot supply sufficiently secure and serviced neighborhoods, then neighborhood corporations will inevitably emerge and with them, neighborhood markets. They also have an eye for failings of formal market institutions. The resurgence of informal economies in high-income cities in the past few decades, attributable to the economic structural crisis of the 1970s, proliferation of organized labor, overregulation, and other factors (Portes et al. 1989), is a reorganization of the pattern of economic co-ordination. Big firms (hierarchies) may collapse, sole trading on the weakest of legal bases may rise and with it, the density of individualbased transactions within a market. Informal markets with dense transactions have a habit of maturing as players become more capitalized and develop skills and networks of trading and relationships. We are not suggesting that networks play no role in managing change in modern cities. They help create, establish, and mature informal patterns of exchange. Loosely constituted networks of interests also frequently come together to pursue urban regeneration agenda and strategic planning issues. As a form of governance, however, (in the sense of making real decisions about material resources) these are inadequate. The resources at issue are scarce and this inescapably means that constraints on competitive and opportunistic behavior are required. There are two options: trust and contract. Challenging the analysis of human behavior conducted by sociologists who claim trust or “generalized morality” to be a significant behavioral basis, Granovetter (1985) points to the fact that “the more complete the trust, the greater the potential gain from malfeasance . . . The temptations posed by this level of trust [very high level of trust existent among densely knit networks of actors] are considerable.” It is reasonable to suppose that there exists a threshold of “generalized morality” for the average individual, beyond which point the psychological costs of breaking trust are exceeded by the anticipated economic gain. This moral threshold obviously varies among individuals and might be infinitely high for some individuals with strong internalized beliefs or for some individuals in particular situations – as with family and clan loyalty. The more general case of a finite threshold must be the norm, however, as evidenced by the bodies of tort and criminal laws found in all modern societies. How the moral- or trustthreshold varies among societies has been documented, as illustrated by the peculiar Japanese business culture where personal connections count so much
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more than in Western societies (Lohr 1982). Less attention has been paid to how the threshold varies over time within one society as the culture and underlying values evolve. (Racial connections once overrode economic gains in the period when racial discrimination was a cultural norm in America.) The realities of secular and possibly irreversible changes in prevailing levels of trust in society are an important consideration in the debate about private governance and planning. Many of the social networks that have made cities work in the past are clearly under stress – including the networks bonding politicians with voters; the networks that once kept residential neighborhoods stable; and the networks binding economic production activity to place and to local labor markets. The incentives not to vote (Mueller 1989), to move business for lower labor costs, or to over-consume or produce at the expense of polluted neighbors, are all too great. Trust thresholds are everywhere exceeded and at the same time fall faster as a result. It takes an inordinate investment in consensus building to begin to re-establish thresholds that have fallen too low. And ironically, it is likely that giving real governance power to fragile consensual networks risks breaking them. Contrast this to hierarchies, where networks of individuals pool their property rights (over labor and other resources) and agree to be bound by rules to ensure a common outcome. Or contrast it to the market, where individual contracting parties retain property rights but contract with other resource owners in wealth-enhancing co-operative acts of exchange. This brings us to Oliver Williamson’s (1975, 2000) important insight into organizational choice: the make-or-buy decision depends on the relative transaction costs (an idea derived from Coase’s 1937 paper “The Nature of the Firm”). Shall we co-operate by market-based exchange or by planning and organization within a single firm? Shall we co-operate in cities by pooling our citizen rights to local neighborhood goods and service into a single representative municipal government – in exchange for a vote and local tax payment? Or shall we co-operate informally with a network of neighbors and other citizens, receiving fewer rights but also having fewer obligations? Or shall we contract with a neighborhood entrepreneur and with other citizens to secure neighborhood goods in the market place as we do for other wants? Network governance of urban change processes might have its place. This will be less governance and more consensus building however. Once parties see the whites of the eyes of material resources, property rights are essential to prevent dissipation of the resources in question. The same is true of network externalities. Once the benefits of belonging to a network reach a certain threshold, members are likely to act opportunistically to secure more than their fair share (if, indeed, there is a clear meaning of “fair” in the sense of natural right to a share in those benefits). Networks cannot allocate property rights effectively and, sooner or later, there will be a need for rules. These may be delivered either by consolidating the network into a single legal entity (hierarchy) or allowing it to break down into separate entities that then interact via market transactions. Where the resources subject to competition are
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collectively consumed, as in urban neighborhoods, the form of organization that emerges will need to be able to effectively and efficiently allocate goods using non-market signals. Mullet-function municipal governments emerged as the contending organizational form during the twentieth century. At the end of that century, smaller collective units organized by entrepreneurs and priced by markets took their place as contenders. This leads to our last point, which is about network size. The relationship between group size and collective action has been widely discussed in the literature, following Mancur Olson (1965) and others. It would seem reasonable to suppose that network size is a crucial determinant, along with network externality value and the value of “disloyalty opportunities,” of network success and sustainability. There seems scope for applying Buchanan’s (1965) model of efficient club size to analyze the efficiency of different network sizes and configurations (with a possible link to social network analysis and actor network theory). Positive network externalities grow, up to a point, with the number of nodes (participants) but congest when diseconomies set in. Such an analysis might also consider trust thresholds and network breakdown in relation to the relative value of staying or leaving. Thompson (2003) proposes a model in which network embeddedness and trust are mathematically related to transaction costs. The graphics look similar to Buchanan’s but there are features of the latter that are not present in Thompson’s model. This suggests the idea of looking more analytically at the way informal neighborhood institutions evolve into hierarchical and market institutions as a function of size, transaction costs, trust, and other variables. One dimension worth exploring is anonymity. As the size of network gets bigger, the visibility of each individual by most members gradually diminishes. Once anonymity prevails, the strength of social values as the glue of a network will cease to persist. Jones et al. (1997) speculate on the optimal size of a network considering a diversity of resources to be the principal benefit of large networks, achieved at the expense of co-ordination problems, which ultimately undermine the network’s value. This is pure club economics. What is not, and is worth exploring, is the extent to which network size dilutes the individuality of members and therefore weakens the strength of social and personal relations that proved informal governance. This is a relatively straightforward extension of club economics in which diseconomies of size result not just from congestion but also from a breakdown in organizational “glue.” This suggests a very rapid, even catastrophic downturn in net benefits after some critical size in contrast to Buchanan’s more gradual peaking and declining of net benefits. The problem caused by anonymity in large groups can be avoided by contractual design in organized clubs. This is so from an ex-ante contracting position: members of a gated community choose to buy into a particular allocation of collective goods, size, price, levels of service, and anticipated congestion being relevant considerations. Ex-post contract adjustments in clubs (where members have an ownership stake as in private neighborhoods) present problems similar to those encountered in hierarchical government (Deng 2003). When it comes to revising
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the constitution, adding new rules, or expanding the neighborhood, collective decisions are unavoidable and with them all the collective action problems of hierarchies. The discussion on the size of network above implies a departure from Castells’ notion of the network. According to Castells (1996: 470), “networks are open structures, able to expand without limit, integrating new nodes as long as they are able to communicate with the network, namely as long as they share the same communication codes.” Indeed, Castells uses the term network in a slightly different way from the way social network theorists use it. His network is very much tied to the new informational economy. While he admits that the organizational change from the mid-1970s happened independently from (and preceded the most dramatic) technological change, he attributes the main cause of organizational change (from vertical to horizontal structure, in particular) to “flexibility requirements of the global economy.” He predicts that networks will be the base unit of the new organizations and they will expand all over the space of the global economy, as all participants of global economy will rely on “information power provided by new technological paradigm.” This seems completely abstracted from any micro-behavioral analysis of networks. In reality, networks are limited by the balance of costs and benefits and congest with the number of members. A profound analysis of the role of networks in urban dynamics needs to understand the economics of club consumption and production (even if it does not use the language of Buchanan and neo-classical economics). It also needs an explicit model of the political economics of network governance (even if it does not use the language of the new institutional economics). Conclusion While he was an undergraduate at the London School of Economics, Ronald Coase asked the question “why do firms exist?” (Coase 1937). His answer was that the costs of transacting in the market for every single act of co-operation in a production process would be too costly. Firms combine property rights over resources and avoid certain contracting/transacting costs (such as searching for exchange partners, negotiating repeat contracts, etc.). He then asked, “why then is society not a single firm?” His answer was that at some point the costs of organizing resource allocation within a firm exceed the benefits of saved transaction costs. Hence the notion of optimal firm size (which changes dynamically with technology, knowledge, tastes, and resource values). Why did China not remain a single firm? Coasian logic applies – the costs of organization were too great, especially the cost of acquiring the information necessary to plan at such a scale. State planning collapsed under the weight of its own mission. Why are traditional modes of urban governance under threat in all parts of the world? Part of the answer is that they work under an impossible informational handicap compared to the market. Where entrepreneurs can demonstrate the
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ability to take on functions once administered by the state, markets will develop in these services; alternative organizations will emerge; and with them new institutions to govern those markets. Like the modern urban governments that emerged during the twentieth century, privately planned and managed neighborhoods will be tested over time. In this chapter, we have suggested that there is a material economic reason for their emergence; they reduce the cost of collective action at the crucial neighborhood scale. When certain conditions prevail (strong democracy, permissive constitution, weak or undeveloped institutions, high inequalities, insecurity, etc.), they are likely to emerge as an efficient mechanism for organizing some aspects of urban society – at least in the short term (the more compelling arguments from antagonists tend to be long term in their predictions). Privately governed neighborhoods are economic clubs that are emerging to address the failures and limitations of both hierarchical forms of neighborhood governance and the informal institutions of social network.
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CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Inter-agency Transport Planning: Cooperation in a Loose Policy Network Tore Sager and Inger-Anne Ravlum
Coordination and Governance Structures Introduction Some decades ago there were already definitions of planning that recognized the salience of coordination (McCloskey 1971). For example, Galloway (1941: 5) defines planning as “a process of coordination, a technique of adapting means to ends, a method of bridging the gap between fact-finding and policy-making.” An examination of the relevant literature of organization theory, economics, administrative science, and management theory ascertains that coordination has many meanings and can be pursued with a number of techniques. A few planning theorists have also examined the concept, with Alexander (1995) making the most notable synthetic effort. Planning-oriented contributions are also offered by Friend et al. (1974), Friend (1980), and Mastop (1983). A number of definitions of coordination exist (Alexander 1995: 3–7), as is to be expected with such a widespread phenomenon treated in many academic fields. The few suggestions below catch some of the essence without referring to any particular governance structure. Ménard (1994: 224) sees coordination quite generally as “the set of processes by which initially distinct plans are brought to a condition of compatibility.” Malone and Crowston (1994: 87) define coordination as “the process of managing dependencies among activities.” Burton and Obel (1984) assume that the coordination process in organizations is in some ways similar to iteratively approximating the solution of an optimization problem. The general idea is to act in combined order for the production of an outcome that is acceptable to a controlling coalition. For now, cooperation can be loosely depicted as working together in ways requiring some measure of trust. Degrees of cooperation will be specified when the case study is introduced.1
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It has long been clear that activities are coordinated quite differently in a competitive market compared to a centralized hierarchy (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982: Ch. 5).2 Nevertheless, the need for conceptual analysis has increased in recent years, and it has been convincingly argued that the market/hierarchy dichotomy is too simple. The currently most discussed planning style, communicative planning, fits best with a network type of governance structure. Restructuring of the public sector in line with the tenets of New Public Management introduces market mechanisms into the traditionally hierarchical organization of the public sector (Hood 1991; Sahlin-Andersson 2001). Planning is often thought to incorporate elements of several governance structures, but the implications for its coordinating properties have not been clarified. First, this essay briefly describes the governance structures in an “ideal type” style, largely adopting the criteria of Powell (1990).3 The basic premise of the conceptual scheme is that market, hierarchy, and network provide very different contexts for coordination efforts, and that different strategies and techniques are pertinent for solving coordination problems in the three structures. Second, a case study is used to demonstrate how the theoretical categories can be applied to the analysis of coordination and cooperation processes in planning. Norway released its first National Transport Plan in 2000, which attempted to coordinate the investments in road and rail transport, civil aviation, and coastal infrastructure (Samferdselsdepartementet 2000). The Plan involved the cooperation of the central administrations of these four transport sectors in the planning process. Differences in organizational structure, sources of revenue, size, and competence in long-range planning complicated the cooperation both directly and by producing divergent interests and uneven power relations. Market, Hierarchy, and Network Market transactions usually entail limited personal involvement, even if there is an interest in retaining customers and maintaining good business relations. Competition in the market coordinates the actions of buyers and sellers and thereby produces the equilibrium equating supply and demand. The market is a form of non-coercive governance, as individual behavior is not dictated by a supervising agent: “No one need rely on someone else for direction, prices alone determine production and exchange” (Powell 1990: 302). In markets, one typical strategy is to drive hard bargains in the immediate exchange, while another is to seek increased market share and stable relations with customers before short-term profits. This second strategy is similar to the network practice of creating indebtedness and reliance in the long term. The value of the goods exchanged in markets is more important than the relationship between the trading parties. Little trust is required in most market transactions (Hardin 2002: 186), and when needed, contracts or other documents are signed, and agreements are bolstered by legal sanction. In contrast, sanctions in networks are typically internal to the “solidarity framework” rather than provided by legal authority, making trust and reputational concerns essential. Offe (1999) argues that trust can produce desirable means of social coordination
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when other means – in particular, state regulation through sanctioned rules and the unintentional coordination of markets – are limited in their capacities to accomplish necessary social tasks. Relationships matter in hierarchies too, but are shaped by a person’s position within the formal structure of authority. Communication and exchange in hierarchies are typically affected by concern for the goodwill of superiors who control working conditions and influence advancement. In a hierarchy, the visible hand of management supplants the invisible hand of the price mechanism in coordinating supply and demand. Management divides up tasks and positions and establishes an authoritative system for harmonizing and combining the activities of the agents. Hence, in hierarchies there are problems of (1) coordinating the efforts made at the various levels, and (2) making the individuals, agencies, etc. at the same level act in unison. The working of the command structure entails supervision and administrative order. When this is successfully combined with an incentive system, the coordination of all the delegated decisions in the hierarchy can result in effectiveness and goal achievement. In the solidarity-linked networks outlined here, transactions take place between actors engaged in reciprocal, preferential, and mutually supportive actions (Lindenberg 2002). A network is composed of a set of relations among actors, either individuals or organizations. Relations can be described by their content and form; that is, the type of relation and its strength, respectively. For example, the content can include information or resource flows, advice or friendship (Powell and Smith-Doerr 1994: 377). Campbell and Harris (1993: 186) describe the collective self-interest of network members, “where each identifies its own best interest so closely with the interest of the other that it is inaccurate to view them as individual maximizers.” When the term “resources” is interpreted broadly so as to include information and power, Powell’s (1990: 303) characterization can be subscribed to: The basic assumption of network relationships is that one party is dependent on resources controlled by another, and that there are gains to be had by the pooling of resources. In essence, the parties to a network agree to forego the right to pursue their own interests at the expense of others. Power-based behavior is restrained in the kind of network considered in this essay, and cooperation depends on solidarity and respect for obligations.4 Even though working together can be seen as a universal economic phenomenon, cooperation gains a particular status “in the context of relationships which are to a significant degree separated from the market, and where, as a result, competition between large numbers of agents cannot operate to ensure allocative and operational efficiency” (Deakin et al. 1997: 106). Information exchange and communication approaching (Habermasian) dialogue help to build trust and lay the basis for joint planning and decision making.5 The ideal speech
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situation would satisfy the improbable conditions of “openness to the public, inclusiveness, equal rights to participation, immunization against external or inherent compulsion, as well as the participants’ orientation toward reaching understanding” (Habermas 1999: 367). The coordination following from the participatory form of network governance promotes efficacy, meaning desirability of the outcome. The solidarity association stands out as a third and qualitatively different governance structure, not as a hybrid of market and hierarchy. Its properties give strong connotations to communicative planning. The three governance structures are unlikely to be found in the clear-cut and “ideal” form described here. They co-exist in society and within the system of national transport planning and policy-making. The actual governance of the coordination process is affected by all three of them. It is becoming clear that hierarchies and networks are often inextricably intertwined. “(H)ierarchical organizations are embedded in wider networks while network-like relationships are emerging within as well as across the boundaries of hierarchical structures” (Scharpf 1993: 159). Moreover, White (2002: 20) holds that markets are always observed in some sort of network. They embed into, but also decouple from, networks of economic relations. Governance structures interact in complex ways not necessarily honoring the principles guiding internal behavior in any of them. There are, for example, networks of cooperation among hierarchical organizations, as in the case at hand. This account illustrates the interaction of the three governance structures. The theoretical model is deliberately kept simple and limited to exploring how governance structures and forms of coordination have a bearing on inter-agency cooperation.6 Instruments leading to coordination in one governance structure do not necessarily have this effect in another structure. The market mechanism, for example, functions less efficiently when actors are cooperating in a cartel instead of competing. Another significant characteristic is that cooperation in networks helps to achieve other goals in addition to those attained through coordination. Cooperation promotes dialogical values and thus furthers democratic deliberation and personal growth (Sager 1994). The trust and dialogue needed in solidarity-based networks are associated with empathy and mutual understanding, accentuating what Mansbridge (1999) denotes “altruistic trust.” The remainder of the essay is organized as follows. In the next section, attention shifts to the case study. The Norwegian National Transport Plan 2002–2011 is introduced, as is the research project reported here. The relative influence of market, hierarchy, and network governance is used to describe the successes and failures of the cooperation between the central administrations of roads, railways, civil aviation, and coastal infrastructure. The properties of each participating transport administration are described in a separate section discussing the effects of their characteristics on cooperation. This information is needed to appreciate the subsequent sections dealing with issues that are particularly challenging to the coordinating planning process and interpretation of the administrations’ cooperation strategies, respectively. Some conclusions end the exposition.
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The Norwegian National Transport Plan This section very briefly presents the National Transport Plan, and also the research project from which this case material is extracted. Modest, moderate, and high levels of cooperation are characterized to facilitate the description of the administrations’ efforts with respect to ambition and collaborative adjustment of planning routines. The purpose of the case study is to analyze how the coordinating planning endeavor is influenced by the different governance structures. Cooperation is the primary mode of coordination in the case here, and there is an examination of how it is hampered by institutional differences and shaped by the interests of the administrations, in turn reflecting their particular conditions of governance. The National Transport Plan In the spring of 1997, the Norwegian Storting (parliament) voted for the preparation of a National Transport Plan covering the period 2002–2011. The Plan was to give more detailed recommendations for the first four years than for the latter part of the period. Four-year plans were already established separately for roads, rail, and civil aviation. These planning efforts were now to be integrated, and a plan for the harbors administered by the State was included. The aim was to facilitate: •
setting of comprehensive political priorities;
•
efficient use of policy instruments in the transport sector; and
•
coordination of services provided by the various modes of transport.
Preparation of the National Plan included public involvement as well as work at the county level, in the national transport administrations, in the ministries, and in the Storting. The focus of the article is the cooperative planning effort of the Public Roads Administration, the National Railway Administration, the Norwegian Air Traffic and Airport Management (Avinor), and the National Coastal Administration. (Hereafter, they are often referred to as the road agency, the rail agency, the aviation agency, and the coastal agency, respectively.) The aim was to integrate their separate plans into a coordinated plan for the entire transport sector. The ministries gave the road agency the leadership of the Cross-sectoral Project Group (see below) and thus a principal role in this planning process. The loosely knit network of the four administrations is part of a political-bureaucratic hierarchy with the Storting and the ministries at the top. Hence, the coordination objective was not only user satisfaction with the transport services, but also effective achievement of the national transport policy goals. The Storting decided that national goals would be easier to achieve with the existence of a professional and politically neutral basis for redistributing
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investment funds to the different modes of transport and thus to the executive transport agencies. This coordination effort of the National Transport Plan was not without risks to transport agencies previously relying on rhetoric with weak links to impact assessment. Most of the agencies’ cooperative work on the National Transport Plan took place in groups at different bureaucratic levels. At the top there was a Coordination Group with members from the four administrations, the Ministry of Fisheries, and the Ministry of Transport and Communications. There was also a Steering Group consisting of the managing directors of the four administrations. Interorganizational coordination was meant to be achieved by having a “lead organization” process the input from what Alexander has called an “interorganizational group” structure (Alexander 1995: 121–42, 177–8). The Cross-sectoral Project Group with members from the four transport administrations was to write the administrations’ common proposal for the National Transport Plan. This Project Group received its mandate in the summer of 1998 and submitted its planning proposal in September 1999. In addition to this group, the Transport Corridor Group and the Alternative Strategies Group are important. The problems they were dealing with clearly required inter-agency problem-solving. Most of the challenges to fruitful cooperation and coordination became visible in these groups. The national political guidelines demand public involvement and an open process toward municipalities and counties,7 as well as cooperation between the central transport administrations. Directly and indirectly, the guidelines promoted the development of a policy network which, to some extent, had the characteristics of a solidarity association. The Research Project The research project drawn on here evaluates the work of the four transport administrations on the common planning proposal.8 The present brief account clarifies three issues: •
To what degree was the common planning effort cooperative?
•
What contributed to the form and content of the coordinating planning process? The main independent variables chosen are (1) the institutional differences between the transport administrations and (2) the national political guidelines issued by the Ministry of Transport and Communications.9 Both variables reflect the governance structure.
•
Which planning tasks created most problems for inter-agency cooperation?
A total of twenty-five representatives from the various working groups were selected, but three of them chose not to be interviewed. Representatives from all four agencies were interviewed in every group except the Steering
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Group and a group preparing facts and facilitating debate. The interviews followed a written guide, by and large posing the same questions to all informants. However, some follow-up questions went deeper into issues peculiar to the informant’s group. It follows from the research method that the conclusions are based on the participants’ opinions about the degree of cooperation in the groups. Some participants may have had an interest in presenting the planning process as “successful” – for example, defined as the absence of conflict – thus placing little emphasis on controversies in the group. There might also be a tendency that informants satisfied with the end product of the process, the National Transport Plan itself, convey more positive opinions of the process than participants disappointed with the plan. We distinguish between three levels of cooperation. The steps of this short ladder are not specified in such a way that cooperation is successful per definition. The levels of cooperation depend on the kind of action actually taken by the agencies. If successful, these actions lead to certain coordinated outcomes, also specified below: •
A modest form of cooperation requires that representatives from the four transport administrations meet and exchange information. They plan within the framework set by the national political guidelines. Coordinating aims: The agencies plan much the way they would have done without the Cross-sectoral Project Group. The common plan is not much more than the sum of the four sector plans without any mutual adjustments or trade-offs between the interests of the agencies.
•
A moderate level of cooperation shies away from mutual adjustment on controversial issues and matters concerning the core interests of the four administrations. However, the parties discuss a common framework of analysis and make mutual adjustments on peripheral issues. Coordinating aims: The planning results in a common understanding of problems in the transport sector. There is a common framework as well as common political and analytic assumptions, but the infrastructure investments for railways are planned by the railway administration, and so on for the other transport sectors.
•
A high level of cooperation, corresponding to a well-functioning network, requires that not only problem formulations and assumptions but even investment priorities and plans for the use of other policy instruments are discussed. Redistribution of resources, intermodal solutions, transfer of goods and travelers across modes, and reconsideration of the policy instruments of each transport administration are on the negotiation agenda. Coordinating aims: The agencies mutually adjust, and each administration gives the others some influence on its core interests. The final investment plan for each transport sector differs from the plans that would have been produced separately by each agency.
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Cooperation entails that each party takes some actions it would not otherwise have taken. This is more evident for higher levels of cooperation. It should not be inferred that the parties act contrary to self-interest. Rather, cooperation gives them opportunity for pursuing their self-interest in new ways. They might, for example, substitute the short-term opportunistic benefits from acting alone by the long-term mutual benefits from cooperation (Calvert 1995: 226). Cooperation is the main vehicle for achieving coordination in networks, and it is therefore at the centre of this case study. A higher level of cooperation brings the parties into a more tightly knit solidarity network with more wide-ranging and unconstrained dialogue. The next section looks at the features of the transport administrations likely to influence the level of cooperation achieved. Agency Properties Affecting Cooperation This section outlines institutional conditions pertaining to each of the cooperating transport administrations. The purpose is to identify characteristics of each agency that affect its cooperation with the others. There is a look at size, planning tradition, source of revenue, and organization model. Moreover, leadership backing and incorporation of the joint planning process in the standing planning procedures of the agency are regarded as indicators of high interest in the planning process. The size and planning tradition of an agency influence its relative power in the coordination effort of the network. The type of organization and the main source of funding give an indication of the autonomy of the agency and the interests at stake. Ordinary governmental agencies funded through the State budget take their orders as well as their money from the ministry and operate under a governance structure heavily influenced by hierarchy. It is often seen as advantageous that agencies operating in competitive markets have some administrative autonomy. Hence, there are constraints on the ministry’s direct steering of central administration enterprises. Their revenue often comes from user fees, and they are governed as much by market forces as by hierarchical relations. In addition to different market/hierarchy groupings, each agency is disciplined by the expectations of the other network members and by the national political guidelines specifying the working of the network. Table 16.1 displays some important characteristics of the cooperating transport administrations. Further Characterization of the Agencies The National Coastal Administration Due to modest size and power, this agency is not seen as a threatening or dangerous partner in the common planning effort. The coastal agency has reason to take an interest in the political instruments of the other administrations, as
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Table 16.1 Properties of the Cooperating Transport Administrations
Agency size
National Norwegian Coastal Air Traffic Administration and Airport Management
National Railway Administration
Public Roads Administration
Small, 10% of the road agency
33% of the road agency
Big, yearly budget NOK 12 billion
25% of the road agency
Political principal Ministry of Fisheries
Ministry of Ministry of Ministry of Transport and Transport and Transport and Communications Communications Communications
Organization model
Ordinary governmental agency
Central administration enterprise
Source of revenue
50% state budget, 50% user fees
Landing charges Fully funded on and other user the state budget fees
83% state budget, 17% user fees, etc.
Autonomy
Little autonomy in the use of revenues; tight hierarchical relation to the ministry
Considerable administrative and budgetary autonomy, coming with the obligation to make a profit
Little autonomy on overall activity level and resource allocation; strong hierarchical steering
Some market dependence but still subjected to considerable hierarchical steering
Leadership backing
Director supporting NTP cooperation
Director and board were little involved in the NTP
Varying involvement due to agency reorganization, but increased toward the end
The cooperative planning effort was given priority
Long-range strategic planning competence
Very limited experience
Some experience with corporate planning, not with CBA or EIA
Second only to the road agency in planning competence and experience with EIA
Ample planning resources and high expertise; experience with CBA and EIA
Incorporation of NTP in standing agency planning procedure
Not well integrated. Small part of activities relates to transport planning
No links to the ordinary agency planning processes
Partly integrated, but there is a separate internal process
Fully integrated, the NTP process is also the agency planning process
Ordinary governmental agency
Ordinary governmental agency
Notes: CBA means cost-benefit analysis, EIA means environmental impact assessment, and NTP means the National Transport Plan.
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well as instruments at the disposition of authorities outside transport. It stands to gain by competing with other administrations for economic resources, partly because it has little to lose. Furthermore, the agency has the motive to argue for increased possibilities of funding through user fees, and to expand its area of responsibility, particularly toward the municipal harbor administrations. It sees the potential benefits from being able to affect the priorities of some other administrations, especially the improvement of roads leading to harbors, and it wants to convince the others of the significance of sea transport and harbors in the broad context of transport policy. The influence of the agency would increase if it could persuade the larger administrations to support its problem formulation. All this gives the coastal agency incentives for active participation in the national transport planning process. The position of the agency is summed up by one respondent: We were enthusiastic but had problems with this kind of planning. We didn’t have much to pound the table, so it wasn’t easy to get acceptance for our points of view. Nevertheless, we are reasonably satisfied with the result. Our points are incorporated, for example, regarding the importance of the traffic between Norway and other countries and the internalization of external costs. On the other hand, for this administration, investment in infrastructure is not the most important policy instrument. Investments in harbors and seaways amount to just above 20 percent of its budget. The municipal harbor administrations are the most important investors in coastal transport infrastructure. Hence, the transport plan’s bias toward infrastructure investment did not do much to stimulate the agency’s interest. According to many informants, the National Transport Plan was not high on this ministry’s list of priorities. The Norwegian Air Traffic and Airport Management Little is at stake for the aviation agency in the national transport planning process. The administration is not in a position to compete with the others for economic resources. However, it has some interest in the priorities of the road administration, partly out of a wish to increase accessibility to airports and partly to compensate for the possible closure of small and unprofitable regional airports by improving the road network. Furthermore, the prospect of being backed by the other agencies when arguing for more emphasis on civil aviation in overall transport policy, and the desire to raise support for more autonomy, might give the aviation administration reason to interact. Otherwise, its motivation for this inter-agency cooperation is low. Air traffic is subject to strict international regulations, and on many issues these constitute an institutional framework of greater importance than national plans. Low commitment to the agency network is also due to the predominantly market-based governance within a framework of loose hierarchical steering at the strategic level. The ministry can adjust the required profit rate and specify the level of the fees, but except for that, the markets for air transport determine the income.
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The National Railway Administration The Administration has considerable interest in the outcome of the national transport planning process. Reallocation of investment funds between road and rail is an important point. Big, intermodal transport investment packages have not been a realistic policy instrument for the railways up to now, but this may be changing. The agency has a motive for using the common planning process to build support for new instruments that can improve its insufficient funding (compared to political goals) and allow more discretion for the managers. The railways compete with road transport both in the passenger and the goods markets; and on some links they even compete with sea transport and aviation. It is in the interest of the agency to argue for environmentally friendly transport, expanded use of road pricing, and other policies that can shift traffic to the railways. Nevertheless, it is not certain that the National Railway Administration stands to gain from cooperative planning. The railway budget is large enough to make other administrations interested in competing for a slice of it. Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted that projects in the railway sector will have the highest environmental benefits according to the CBA. The rail agency has the motive to cooperate but does so at a risk. The Public Roads Administration The analytic planning method preferred by the ministries and delineated in the national political guidelines was already used by the road agency in its National Road and Road Traffic Plan for the previous four years. So the agency had experience with the specific approach required for this joint planning effort. When political attention is directed to the development of intermodal nodes or corridor projects serving several transport modes, part of the issue is often that other administrations aim to influence the priorities of the road agency. They want to arrange for transfer of traffic away from roads, ensure good access to their own terminals, and expand their funds at the expense of the road budget. Thus, the road agency does not stand to gain much economically from being cooperative in the planning effort. Even if some resources should happen to be transferred to it from other parts of the transport sector, this would mean budget adjustment by only a small percentage. A modest slice of the road budget would, however, mean much to the smaller administrations. From this perspective, the road agency seems to have more to lose than to gain from cooperation. Network influence is significant, however, as the agency is assigned a key role in the cooperative planning process. While representatives from other agencies tend to see the Public Roads Administration as strictly governed from the top, this is not how the informants from the road sector view their organization: In the Public Road Administration it is not the national priorities that count, rather the priorities set by the counties. It is a myth that the highway authority is a strong sector agency with strict national steering. We put emphasis on county input and the decisions of the county
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councils . . . Outsiders who are critical to our priorities find this hard to comprehend. This allegedly strong county-level influence is regarded as a challenge when the agency is to make proposals for national policy in cooperation with other transport administrations. Analysis of the Agency Interests Table 16.2 is based on the above characterization of each transport administration. Only organizational type and main source of funding are used to set up the table, although these variables do not quite capture the richness of the considerations underlying the agencies’ interests in the coordination process. The features are important, however, and clearly associated with the governance structures. The degree to which efficient markets exist for the products of the transport agencies determines their main source of funding. Market forces and the need to act swiftly in a competitive environment also indirectly influence the organizational type selected for the agencies. Table 16.2 develops the argument by linking each agency to the relative strength of market and hierarchy in their governance structures via source of funding and type of organization. These variables also indicate whether the agency has core interests at stake in the common planning process. When hierarchical relations are tight and the agency depends on the state budget for Table 16.2 Factors Influencing the Administrations’ Interest in the Common National Transport Planning Process: Type of Organization and Source of Funding
Market as a main source of funding (user fees about 50% or more)
State budget as the dominant source of funding
Central Administration Enterprise
Ordinary Government Agency
1 Norwegian Air Traffic and Airport Management
2 National Coastal Administration
Few interests at stake and low interest in the National Transport Plan
Policy interests at stake
3 This combination of characteristics is unlikely, although some inspectorates feature a similar combination of state funding and organizational autonomy
4 Public Roads Administration and National Railway Administration
Economic interests at stake
Many interests at stake and high interest in the National Transport Plan
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income, it has many interests at stake. Such an agency is likely to take a keen interest in the National Transport Plan. This is not necessarily because there is much to be gained from the other agencies, but because high costs will be incurred by disregarding the ministry’s demand for inter-agency cooperation. For example, leadership involvement and incorporation of the cooperative effort in the ordinary long-range agency planning strongly indicate road agency interest, although it seems more likely to cede resources than to gain. The agencies belonging in cell 4 – the road agency and the railway agency – are the two largest, and they have the strongest tradition for societal strategic planning. The power this gave them in the coordination process enhanced their interest in the National Transport Plan. Income earned from market transactions will not be affected by the National Transport Plan. When dependence on the state budget is moderate, potential interests at stake must therefore concern policy matter to a higher extent than economic issues, as shown for the coastal agency in Table 16.2. Obviously, this agency receives enough state funds to still have some economic interest in the common planning. Being of small size and having a weak planning tradition limit the power of the coastal agency in the coordination process. Nevertheless, with virtually no risk of losing, the prospect of gains evoked the director’s active support for cooperation. The four administrations are hierarchies cooperating in a kind of loose “policy network” defined by Kickert et al. (1997: 6) as a “(more or less) stable pattern of social relations between interdependent actors, which take shape around policy problems and/or policy programmes.” Each agency has a hierarchical relationship up to its principal, which is the ministry, and down to its agents, which are (in most instances) its regional or county offices. Two typical network tasks are to persuade decision makers to allocate more resources to transport in general and to argue for more autonomy for the administrations vis-à-vis their ministries. There is also rivalry, however, as the agencies compete for bigger slices of the overall transport pie on the state budget, as indicated in Table 16.2, and as they compete for market shares. It should be mentioned that even agency size and planning competence indirectly depend on governance structure, in particular on the exposure to market forces. Both the road agency and the rail agency have been split up since this empirical study was carried out, as part of their production is similar to that of private companies. Therefore, according to the principles of New Public Management, they should be exposed to competition, thus requiring reorganization to free this market-oriented part from national politics and state bureaucracy. Regarding competence, impact assessment from the perspective of society was not previously expected from the agencies earning most of their income in private markets. However, the National Transport Plan created a need for such analysis, as intermodal transfer of resources requires projects in all modes to be assessed in the same way. There must be reasons other than a mismatch between the way organizations are run as to why inter-agency cooperation is sometimes difficult. A few such
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reasons of particular relevance to the Norwegian national transport planning process are exemplified in the next section. While the present summary is based primarily on agency differences related to source of funding and organization type, the subsequent sections also draw on the other differences identified in the present section. Issues Particularly Challenging to the Cooperation This section deals with challenges to the cooperative process as experienced in the Transport Corridor Group, the Alternative Strategies Group, and the Crosssectoral Project Group. Even if the problems reflect institutional differences, the arguments in the groups also addressed other issues reflecting dissimilarities between the modes. Divergent views on what problems are important and how they can best be sorted out took center stage in the conflicts of the Corridor Group. Opposition to externally given procedures and deviating views on the use of analytic tools were important in the Strategies Group. The dominant role given to the road agency was a challenge to the Project Group. Transport Corridors The work of the Transport Corridor Group shows that the definitions of important concepts can hamper cooperation. The description of transport corridors in the national political guidelines fits primarily the inter-regional road system and the main railway lines. The coastal agency maintained that corridors should include waterways and harbors. This would provide the opportunity for dealing with problems not only along coastal seaways but even intermodal and international corridors. Civil aviation members of the group were even more critical, as they considered the nodes, that is, the airports, to be of far more interest to the National Transport Plan than the flight corridors between them. Even the division of long flights into several shorter corridors caused problems. Between Oslo and Tromsø (more than 1,000 km), air transport has 98 percent of the passenger market. On shorter distances, road transport does, of course, mostly dominate, so when Oslo–Tromsø is divided into the three shorter corridors of Oslo–Trondheim, Trondheim–Bodø, and Bodø–Tromsø, then air transport will appear to be relatively less important. Some other practices supported by the majority of the Corridor Group increased the frustration of its civil aviation members. First, they had expected that the importance of air traffic would be clearly exposed in the analysis of long-distance journeys, these being the focus of the corridor studies. However, the aviation agency defines a long distance to be 300 km or more, while the majority chose the definition used in the national travel surveys, that is to say 100 km or more. With this definition, the category of long-distance travel would, to a large extent, consist of road transport. Second, it was decided to put emphasis on weight instead of value in the analysis of freight transport. This resulted in a smaller share for air transport and a bigger share for the modes transporting
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cheap bulk in large quantities. Third, the road and rail members of the group particularly wanted more attention directed to local and regional traffic in the corridors, as such traffic occupies much of the capacity of the infrastructure. This perspective further marginalized air traffic. The above points illustrate that the design of tools for analysis and measurement within a planning process should be meaningful to all parties in order to facilitate cooperation. The method of structuring the planning information base should be part of the coordinated process. Had there been a stronger influence from the solidarity network ideal, the issues above could have been handled in a way that did not alienate the aviation agency. Originally, the civil aviation members of the Transport Corridor Group wanted to discuss the possibility of closing down some unprofitable regional airports in parts of the country where road capacity is sufficient to handle the transferred traffic. However, as the Ministry of Transport and Communications found this discussion untimely, the aviation administration was asked to postpone it. This blocked the discussion of one of the few corridor issues of common interest to the aviation members and others in the group, hence alienating the aviation members even more. There were divergent interests also between the rail and the road members of the Corridor Group. The rail agency questioned the safety gains of expanding some main roads to four lanes. Furthermore, the rail members insisted that the modeling of competition between road and rail in the inter-city market underestimated the potential for transferring journeys to rail. These might have been quite trivial disagreements, but they came up in a phase when the group was about to set priorities between corridors and between projects related to different transport modes in a corridor. The outcome of this process would have had significant budgetary consequences, and there was considerable tension in the group. The conflict was managed by the Steering Group, concluding that too little is known about the cross-elasticities of demand to settle such disputes on an analytic foundation. In addition, the Steering Group made it clear that the setting of priorities between the transport modes, and thus between the four administrations, was not the responsibility of the Corridor Group. Alternative Strategies What threatened cooperation in the Alternative Strategies Group was not so much conflict as the fact that the exercise of forming alternative strategies for the future development of the transport sector seemed quite meaningless to the coastal agency and the aviation agency. Their respective ministries wanted strategies directed at the achievement of important national goals. The national political guidelines demand that the planners compose four strategies improving accessibility (efficient traffic flow), traffic safety, regional economies, and the environment. The problem was, however, that the coastal and aviation members of the group were adamant that their sets of proposed projects would be the same regardless of which goal was in focus. The aviation agency argued that its selected set of projects was not designed to further one specific goal. It was
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not considered an interesting option to emphasize, for example, efficiency goals by designing strategies lax on safety regulations or international conventions for environmental protection. The aviation agency and especially the coastal agency have no tradition for long-term strategic planning, and the National Coastal Administration was not in a position to allocate competent staff to the design of strategies. It added to the discomfort of this administration that the perspective it was most at home with – a strategy for improving the transport conditions of industry – was not to be given special attention. It is symptomatic of the weak planning competence of both agencies that impact assessment was not carried out for any of their proposed projects. This explains some of their inability to discriminate between projects with respect to goal direction. Their task was not made easier in that the national political guidelines prescribe that the same traffic forecasts be used in all alternative strategies. Common calculation principles and models can play a significant role in coordinating resource allocation in the transport sector. Were forecasting models and impact analyses based on the same principles and on consistent parameters and variables for all modes, the planners would be able to recommend the socially most profitable projects throughout the entire sector. However, this is not the situation today. The analyses of road and rail build on different transport demand models, making the assessments incomparable across the modes. Another inconsistency is that road and rail apply different criteria for identifying people troubled by noise. Analytic models for calculating the social effects of projects related to aviation and coastal infrastructure in a Norwegian context were not operational at the time. However, considerable work has subsequently been undertaken on cost-benefit analysis in the transport sectors. The special situation of the aviation agency as a profit-making organization sensitive to the international competitiveness of Norwegian air transport was reflected in its attitude toward the environmental strategy. The other members wanted input on how the aviation agency might contribute to a reduction of environmental damage from air traffic; for example, by developing a policy encouraging transfer from air to rail on some long-distance links. The aviation representatives regarded this as an ideological discussion and denied that air transport is a significant threat to the environment. They were opposed to fiscal taxes motivated by environmental goals, as they saw this as a practice peculiar to Norway. Furthermore, it was a problem to them that the transport administrations should outline a more ambitious environmental policy than Norway’s official policy in international forums. The proposal for the National Transport Plan signed by the four administrations states that they considered whether it would be right to propose a reallocation of resources from one mode of transport to another. However, the document concludes that available methods cannot lay a sufficiently solid and professional basis for determining whether another allocation would be a social improvement. This was given as a reason for avoiding adjustment of the relative size of budgets in the recommended strategy. However, even if the methods
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had provided the foundation for such changes, most informants hold that it would not have been possible for the administrations to come to an agreement. This is a zero sum game, in which each player strongly holds on to their current budget, and demands a little extra. In the words of one informant: We had this discussion (about relative adjustment of budgets) sporadically. However, we realized that the calculation of effects and the transport models indicated modest transfer of traffic. It was better, then, to base strategies on the existing budgets. Many seem to think we should have taken the discussion instead. We agreed, nevertheless, to do it this way and avoid all the trouble. The deadlines did also encourage this decision. This is in line with the following remark from another informant: There are some formulations (in the planning document) that might just as well have been omitted. For example, that we did not have the tools required to make (intermodal) decisions. At the same time, we voiced our opinions on many other issues, on which analytic tools are lacking to an equal degree. We believed that we could reallocate resources even if it would not be founded on the use of precise tools. These comments indicate that reference to uncertainty, deficient analytic models, and need for further research – whether the allegations are true or not – provided an effective excuse for postponing controversial decisions and thereby make cooperation run smoothly. It is well known that external challenges can strengthen the ties between the members of an alliance. In some cases the representatives of the four administrations made a common front against the directives from the ministries. For example, the national political guidelines state that the alternative strategies should only be based on the effects of political instruments under the authority of the four agencies. Their representatives in all the groups regarded this as an unjustified and counterproductive constraint. It would make it impossible to achieve the holistic planning that the ministries themselves wanted, judging by the national political guidelines. For example, the agencies wanted to analyze to what degree it is possible to reduce CO2 emissions by imposing high fees, and to compute the effect of such fees on the modal traffic shares. They finally chose to include a discussion of political measures outside their authority – such as land-use planning and parking policy – in the presentation of strategies, but without calculating the impacts. The desire to clearly and effectively express their common annoyance with this part of the ministerial guidelines encouraged cooperation. Cooperative Consequences of the Process Organization Many conflicts that remained unsolved in other groups were discussed in the Cross-sectoral Project Group. Both the chair and the secretary of this group
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were from the Public Roads Administration. Moreover, as the work progressed an editorial sub-committee was appointed, consisting of several representatives from the road agency and one from the rail agency. Obviously then, the road agency had a very strong position in the compilation of the common planning proposal. The mandate for its leading and coordinating role was given in the national political guidelines. Such a special position given to one of the administrations is a potential threat to productive cooperation. The privileged party will easily be suspected of using its position to cater for its own interests, and certainly, many informants are skeptical about the road sector’s dominance. Some complaints are about substance, but more frequently the critique is diffuse and mentions the pro-road tone and the emphasis on road issues. It is noteworthy that the Cross-sectoral Project Group has continued as an inter-agency cooperative body even after submitting its proposal for the National Transport Plan. Among other issues, the group discusses the need for developing analytic models and the possibilities of cooperation on the detailed action programs for each administration. The aim here is to draw attention to a few points of general interest to explain why the privileges of the road agency do not seem to have done much harm to the cooperation. First, there was correspondence between the privileges of the road agency on the one hand and its competence, willingness, and capacity to take the leading role on the other. In contrast, the aviation agency had signaled very clearly that it found the plan to be of little interest, and the coastal agency had neither the competence in long-range social planning nor the capacity to assign people to the job. Even for the railway administration a heavier involvement would have come up against capacity limits. Moreover, the internal reorganization separating the Norwegian State Railways from the National Railway Administration diverted attention from the National Transport Plan. The agencies seemed to realize that the road sector would have remained influential even with a neutral consultant in charge of coordination and editing. Second, because of the dominant and coordinating role of the Public Roads Administration, the other group members could concentrate on promoting the interests of their own agencies. Informants from the road sector often had the impression that it was their duty alone to provide the Plan with an interagency perspective. Even though they were in the position to leave their own imprint on most of what was written, they reported a strong feeling that their coordinating role called for them to suppress undue promotion of road sector interests. Third, the Public Roads Administration coordinates the activities of 19 county roads offices. It is also a big organization in itself and must strike a balance between technicians and social planners, construction and maintenance interests, public transport enthusiasts and those giving priority to private car accessibility, etc. The road agency chose to organize its work on the National Transport Plan according to the procedures of ordinary road sector planning. As a consequence, the conflicting interests and the trade-offs that are usually
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handled internally, now surfaced in the cooperative process. Several informants from other administrations said that at times there was just as much negotiation and disagreement among the road sector members as between them and representatives from other administrations. To a large extent, the discussion among the road sector members of the groups (dealing with the transport corridors, the National Challenges Document, impact assessment, and alternative strategies) was due to the role conflict between defending the specific interests of the road agency and coordinating the input of all administrations into a societal perspective. If the road agency had solved the role conflict by exclusively promoting its own interests, the other group members would not have experienced the divergent views of the road sector representatives. The open treatment of internal road sector problems seems to have contributed positively to inter-agency cooperation. It weakened the impression of a big and monolithic agency suppressing its own differences in order to stand united and strong in negotiation with the other administrations. Summing Up The problems of the Transport Corridor Group reflect a situation in which concepts, rules, and the framework of the joint effort have to be negotiated between the parties. The conditions of their interaction are not externally given, as for small actors in a free market. Neither are they given by detailed decree, as in a hierarchy – despite the political guidelines. The outcome of the negotiation signals quite clearly to the participants whether they have a natural place in the network, and what they can expect to get out of the cooperation. The problems of the Alternative Strategies Group are quite fundamental. They reveal that two of the agencies are not comfortable with the main strategy of designing alternative plans, which is mandatory and stated in the national political guidelines. These problems strongly indicate that the network had to be a loose one. The problems of the Cross-sectoral Project Group are directly related to the choice of governance structure for the coordinating planning process. The superior coordinating role of the road agency – backed by the authority of the political guidelines – shows that there is an element of hierarchy embedded in the network. However, the willingness of the representatives from the road agency to open up the discussion of issues internal to the public road administration seems to have been important in dampening the impression of hierarchy and strengthening the image of the network as a solidarity association. This is in line with the process design requested by the ministries in the political guidelines. They wanted the planning to be open and participatory, with close cooperation between the agencies throughout the entire process. The discussion of the controversial themes in this section supplements the description of each agency given in the previous section. The clearer portrayal of the administrations is used to re-examine the picture of agency interests given in Table 16.2 and gives a new interpretation of agency strategies.
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Interest Interpretation of the Administrations’ Strategies The previous case study sections are drawn on here to assess each administration’s possible loss or gain from the cooperative planning process. Based on the results shown in Table 16.3, the strategy followed by each agency is explained. The explanation rests on the connection between an agency’s interest and the particular mix of elements from market, hierarchy, and network making up its governance structure. It is well known from game theory that it can be rational for individual players to follow strategies of conditional cooperation (e.g., tit for tat) in repetitive games. This is true even for games in which the players will rationally choose to defect if the game is played only once (Bendor and Swistak 1997). In the case study, the road and rail agencies already had a system of separately producing new rolling plans each fourth year. They obviously expected this sequence to be continued within the new and coordinating governance structure. The National Coastal Administration did not have a tradition of four-year plans prior to the National Transport Plan, and it is organized under a different ministry. However, the coastal agency made a serious effort to be accepted as a transport agency dealing with many problems whose resolution would benefit from cooperation in the policy network. The aviation agency had a very different attitude to the cooperative process. The agency would have preferred not to take part, and its aim was to make the other administrations acknowledge its deviant position and concede that it should not be part of the next common planning effort. The aviation agency behaved as if the cooperative game was to be played only once. Command from principals was needed to make the aviation agency take part, while the cooperation among the others might have developed from mutual interest, including the road agency’s interest to maintain its central position and look good in the eyes of its principals. The more or less cooperative strategies chosen by the transport sector administrations are determined by their interests shaped by prospects of loss and gain. The institutional properties of the agencies, the way they are affected by the particularly challenging issues, and their expectations about repeating the joint planning effort result in the strategies shown in Table 16.3. Table 16.3 The Administrations’ Potential Outcomes and Cooperation Strategies Big Potential Loss
Small Potential Loss
Big potential gain
Railway agency follows a strategy of active probing
Coastal agency follows an advancing strategy
Small potential gain
Road agency follows a defensive strategy
Aviation agency follows a receding strategy
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The governance structures have an indirect bearing on which cell in Table 16.3 an agency belongs to. For example, the aviation agency earns its revenue in the market. Because of this, the agency has a high degree of autonomy, meaning that ties to the ministry are weakened. Both the overall budget and the investment projects have to be sanctioned by the agency’s board of directors. As its important economic conditions are thus not determined in the National Transport Plan, both gains and losses from cooperation will be small. The railway agency is another example. The active probing of the railway agency follows from a mix of uncertainty and the hope that close cooperation will make it a budget-winner. The railways are seriously lagging behind plans when it comes to investment. An expanded budget is badly needed because they are organized as an ordinary governmental agency receiving all funding from the state budget, and the tight hierarchical relationship with the ministry prevents other solutions. The above examples draw a line from the strategies displayed in Table 16.3 back to the organizational characteristics of Table 16.2, and still further on to the governance structures. The ministries demand that the four agencies cooperate in a policy network. National political guidelines, agency size, and planning traditions determine their relative power in the network. Besides the network requirements, the agencies are governed by different combinations of market forces and hierarchical directives. The relative influence of market and hierarchy is indicated by the agency’s main source of funding and its organization model. These variables also tell us whether economic interests and/or policy interests are at stake in the national transport planning process (Table 16.2). As it is important to please the principal, the big agencies with many interests at stake show commitment to the cooperative network although considerable loss may be incurred. Because the prospects of gains to the road and rail agencies are different, so are their cooperation strategies, as shown in Table 16.3. The following paragraphs offer further comments on the strategy chosen by each agency. In Table 16.3, the strategic choices in the right column are the most obvious. With little to lose and much to gain, the coastal agency is on the offensive, despite the indication provided by Table 16.2 that its institutional features should give it less interest in the National Transport Plan than the road and rail agencies. The combination of big potential gains and few interests at stake gives low vulnerability and stimulates activity. A network solution emphasizing actions increasing the common good might put the agency in a better position than exchanging favors of equal value, as the coastal administration has little to offer. Hence, it opts for debate and mutual understanding rather than negotiation. By its representatives in the various coordinating groups, the aviation agency is regarded as dependent on competitive markets, and this leaves an imprint on their arguments. The aviation administration chose a withdrawal strategy, as both potential gains and losses are insignificant. Any net gains are likely to be outweighed by the transaction costs of participating in the joint planning effort, and there is little, except pressure from principals, to make the
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aviation agency keep up network membership. This pressure is clear from the national political guidelines, which, unfortunately, simultaneously sketch an approach alienating the aviation agency and giving it incentives to withdraw. The railway agency was encouraged by the stated political goal of reducing road traffic. However, the agency did not succeed in bringing forth results of formal analysis supporting such a policy. Thus, it had to rely on the willingness of other network members to accept “qualitative considerations” as the basis for a policy reallocating resources from road to rail. With some hesitation, the railway agency has been placed in the upper left cell of Table 16.3. At least it seems closer to the big loss/big gain cell than any of the other administrations. The specific actions taken in this situation depend on the agency’s relative emphasis on minimizing losses compared to maximizing gains. In spite of the national political guidelines, the network structure gives some room for influencing the coordination techniques used in the cooperative effort, for example, influencing the stress put on comparable ex ante investment evaluation techniques. The railway agency can try to push into the background issues that might increase the possibilities of loss. Taking a negative stand toward allocating investment on the basis of benefit/cost ratios is in line with such a behavioral pattern, as comparable calculations might reveal a strong tendency for lower benefit/cost ratios in the railway sector than in the road sector. If successful, this pattern brings the railway agency closer to the position of the coastal agency, which would give it a safer vantage point for further planning in the policy network. The railway agency will probably also take action to avoid approaching the big loss/small gain cell. Hence, the agency could be expected to seek a high profile for issues on which it scores political points, such as environmental protection calling for transfer of traffic from road to rail, and rail transit as a means to fight congestion in the biggest cities. Although the road agency might stand to lose more than it would gain from cooperative planning, attempts to escape this situation would seem to be futile. The withdrawal strategy is all but unthinkable given the central role of roads in the national transport system and given the other agencies’ interest in the dispositions of the Public Roads Administration. Even a transition to the railway agency’s cell seems farfetched, as the sheer difference in size means that politically unrealistic budget shares must be captured from other transport sectors, were they to be regarded as big gains for the road agency. The behavioral pattern of fending off loss is, after all, more cost-effective, although it cannot be combined with the strategy of receding from the network. The agency uses formal arguments and analytic techniques at home in hierarchical structures and insists that agency resources should not be reallocated unless economic evaluation shows this to increase the net benefits to society. This behavioral pattern is consistent with the way road agency representatives managed the Cross-sectoral Project Group. Given the agency’s dominating role, it would have been a provocation to its political principal and to the other agencies had the road agency used its position more aggressively to arrange for increased road sector gains.
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Even if the road agency adopted a strategy in line with responsible network behavior, an element of competition lingers in this policy network, especially between the road and rail agencies. The road agency potentially stands to lose much, predominantly to the rail agency – and vice versa. This explains why the two administrations, which should have the highest interest in the National Transport Plan according to Table 16.2, both nevertheless chose the cautious strategies shown in Table 16.3. Conclusion The central administrations of roads, railways, civil aviation, and coastal infrastructure coordinating their investment plans in the Norwegian national transport planning process operate under different steering models. The main argument here is that there are close connections between an agency’s form of governance (a certain mixture of market, hierarchy, and network), the combination of funding source and organizational type specified in Table 16.2, and the more or less cooperative strategy chosen by each agency as outlined in Table 16.3. It is thus shown how an important aspect of inter-agency transport planning – that is, coordination – is linked to governance structure. Coordination strategies are quite different in markets, hierarchies, and networks. In the loose network studied here, cooperation is essential to the coordination. Some further conclusions of the analysis are listed below: •
Inter-agency coordination in the national transport planning process had to make concessions to the market conditions some of the agencies are operating in, to the agencies’ hierarchical and bureaucratic relations up to their respective ministries and down to their regional offices, and to the request for cooperation (network relations) made in the national political guidelines.
•
The looseness of the inter-agency network is indicated by the relatively strong competition between some administrations (road and rail) and by the withdrawal strategy of the aviation agency. Even though there are also common network goals, separate agency objectives remained important throughout the joint planning process. The coastal agency and especially the aviation agency found many issues and tasks in the coordinating planning process to be of little interest.
•
Features of market, hierarchy, and network contribute, directly and indirectly, to the agencies’ choice of different strategies in the coordinating planning process. That is, the interests of each agency depend on how it is funded and on its organization model. These characteristics are evidence of the relative influence of the three archetypal governance structures.
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•
The cooperation between the four administrations was at the medium level according to the criteria used in this essay. Several documents as well as the proposal for the plan were worked out in common, and the agencies developed a mutual understanding of the conditions under which each of them is working. Only on a couple of issues, however, are the activities of different administrations actually juxtaposed with the direct purpose of influencing investment. Each agency did largely contribute to the proposed plan the same set of projects it would have put forward without the cooperative process.
Policy networks have become more common in many democracies addressing the dilemma of combining a fragmented government with high ambitions of coordination (Kickert et al. 1997). However, these networks often have to be rather loose. One reason is that the ideas of New Public Management have penetrated some parts of public administration far more than others. Some central agencies in the transport sector are therefore strongly influenced by market forces, while others are managed in a rigid hierarchy with tight relations to the ministry. Consequently, their survival strategies differ, and coordinated planning and network cooperation will be of higher relevance to the traditional bureaucracies than to the market-sensitive public enterprises. Holistic and coordinated plans are not a good to be produced for its own sake. Coordination is costly and should be kept at a level giving net benefits to the principal or to society. With limited competitive interfaces between the transport modes in most markets, attempts at more coordination – expanding cooperation in the national transport planning process from a moderate to a high level – might well be counterproductive. However, despite the cooperation problems discussed in this essay, the optimal level of inter-agency coordination cannot be deduced from the analysis. Acknowledgments Thanks are due to Randi Hjorthol, Henning Lauridsen, and Tor Lerstang at the Institute of Transport Economics in Oslo for their comments on the first manuscript. Tore Sager also thanks the Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy at Murdoch University, Western Australia, for providing facilities and an inspiring working environment while writing this essay. Notes 1
Calvert (1995: 226) means by cooperation “that an individual engages in some act whose immediate consequences for that individual, regardless of what others do at that moment, are negative, but which generates some positive benefits for some other individual (and usually for several others in a group).” Usually cooperation is undertaken with the idea that other actors will be cooperating as well, for mutual benefit. Cooperation is therefore closely linked to trust.
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The planning literature contains many articles on “integration,” which is a narrower concept than coordination. To integrate is to combine something in such a way that it becomes fully a part of something else. For example, demand and supply are coordinated, but not integrated, in the competitive market. In an integrated transport plan, the operation of buses, trains, and taxis should fit well together. Integrated land-use and transport planning has often been analyzed (Stenstadvold 1996; Banister 1999). Examples of other integration themes are integration of spatial and environmental policies, integration of strategic planning and regional development, and integration of technical analysis and citizen participation in planning. The concept of governance is discussed by March and Olsen (1995). Their main distinction is between exchange conceptions and institutional conceptions. The last perspective encompasses many of the properties attributed here to networks but is even broader. See also Kickert et al. (1997: 1–5) and the introduction to Hajer and Wagenaar (2003). In their attempt to distinguish forms of governance structures empirically, Considine and Lewis (2003: 136–7) state, with reference to networks, that “(t)he willingness of officials to define their day-to-day work as based on the development of trusting relationships with other agencies, the high levels of practitioner autonomy, and the willingness to cooperate with other agencies all signal a distinctive governance type.” Trust is enhanced by the sincerity, truthfulness, and mutual respect that are the basis for dialogue. Nevertheless, what one trusts another person to do depends on the context, and this conditional nature of trust is analyzed in more depth by Hardin (2002). I trust you to do X under conditions Y, but I do not trust you to do Z under conditions W. An extended explanatory framework could cater for more of the richness of behaviorforming detail in the case study. Besides game theory (Aoki 2001), structural economic sociology (Lazega and Mounier 2002), transaction cost theory (Levi 2000, Chabaud and Saussier 2002), and contract theory (Ménard 2000) might give valuable contributions. A match between the theoretical and empirical parts of the exposition can be achieved by expanding the explanatory model or by simplifying the description of what was happening in the coordinating planning process. The challenge is to balance increased analytic complexity against the banality and unrealistic stereotyping of an oversimplified outline of the case study. The choice is to keep the theoretical model simple compared to the richness of the case description. The advantages of including case details that might in themselves be of interest to planners outweigh the disadvantages of not being able to fully explain how these details affect the cooperation strategies of the agencies. The process is open toward lower administrative levels in that: • The counties are represented in groups advising the planners. • The counties are invited to submit statements on documents listing local challenges as well as commenting on the final plan. Inger-Anne Ravlum was project manager for this research and author of the Norwegian research report (Ravlum 2000). She also evaluated the national transport planning process in Sweden and was project manager for a comparative analysis of the Norwegian and Swedish processes (Ravlum and Lauridsen 2001). Two national political guidelines are dealing with the National Transport Plan. The first was issued in July 1998 and gives the general political context and conditions for the plan and the process leading up to it. The second guideline was issued in early November 1998. It gives more detailed instructions about the alternative strategies and the analytic work required.
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Collaborative Planning, Commitment, and Trust: Dealing with Uncertainty in Networks Ronald G.H. van Ark and Jurian Edelenbos
Introduction The purpose of this article is to develop theory about trust as a concept in collaborative planning. We will focus on the role and meaning of trust in interorganizational relationships and we will investigate whether this understanding of trust can help in dealing with uncertainty in collaborative planning. In recent years the concept of trust has gained a great deal of attention in organization studies, business administration, economics, sociology, and public management. Trust appears to play an important role in inter-organizational relationships (Smith et al. 1995; Lane and Bachman 1998). One of the assumptions in literature is that trust provides a way to cope with uncertainty in exchange relationships. From a planning perspective this makes trust an interesting concept to explore more fully. In the context of the emergence of a network society, inter-organizational relationships become more and more important to planning. In general, we see a shift from “government” to “governance,” indicating a shift from hierarchical and well-institutionalized forms of government toward less formalized forms of governance in which state-authority makes way for an appreciation of mutual interdependence (Cars et al. 2002; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003). As a consequence, the number of actors involved in planning processes increases, making the situation more complex and unpredictable (Scharpf 1997). In this context, trust becomes interesting. “Specifically, in a world of increasing uncertainty and complexity, flat hierarchies, more participative management styles, and increased professionalism, trust is thought to be a more appropriate mechanism for controlling organizational life than hierarchical power or direct surveillance” (Sydow 1998: 31). 271
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In the context of these so-called policy networks, many stakeholders in planning have an interest in the design of policy arrangements and instruments that can facilitate collaboration (Healey 1997a; Hajer and Zonneveld 2000). In this chapter we address two questions. What is the role and meaning of trust in inter-organizational cooperation? Can this understanding of trust help in dealing with uncertainty in collaborative planning? In the next section, we will address the first question. We will highlight the literature on trust and go into the characteristics, the value, and the development of trust in collaborative processes. In “The Teylingen Pact and Trust” section we will elaborate on the role and meaning of trust in planning practice, presenting a Dutch case study on the Teylingen Pact, a regional agreement. In the “Conclusion and Discussion” section, we will present our conclusions on the usefulness of the concept of trust in dealing with uncertainty in collaborative planning and discuss the implications for designing new policy arrangements. Collaboration and Trust For some, trust is the answer for coping with complexity. Trust can help to reduce uncertainty and complexity or at least make them easier to handle. Trust seems a very promising coordination mechanism in a modern network society where public and private organizations are increasingly horizontally related (Castells 1996). In such relations, hierarchy rules and direct supervision seem less suitable than social coordination mechanisms, such as trust (Lane and Buchanan 1998). When we look at the literature on trust, some general characteristics can be traced (Nooteboom 2002; Edelenbos and Klijn 2006). First, when an actor trusts another actor, he is willing to assume an open and vulnerable position. He expects the other actor to refrain from opportunistic behavior even if the chance for that arises. He trusts that the partner will take his interests into account in the cooperation (Rousseau et al. 1998). Second, trust plays an important role in unpredictable and risky situations (Nooteboom et al. 1997). In risky situations, trust is a precondition for undertaking any action. A conscious choice is made to take a risk, because of the belief that the other party can be trusted. The assumption in most of the literature on trust is that actors will refrain from action (and cooperation) if trust is absent. Third, the concept of trust presumes a stable positive expectation (or prediction) of the intentions and motives of other actors. Trust reduces unpredictability in interaction, because one assumes to be able to rely on the other (Zucker 1986). Russell Hardin (2000, 2002) makes a distinction between trust and trustworthiness. Trusting is what we do ourselves; trustworthiness is what others do. “Trustworthiness begets trust, which, perhaps to a lesser extent, begets trustworthiness” (Hardin 2000: 29). Hardin positions trust within the modified “rational-choice” paradigm, of which the basic premise is that both the truster
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and the trustee act to maximize their utilities by rational calculations that take into account available information. According to Hardin (2002: 6) trust refers to “essentially rational expectations about the self-interested behavior of the trusted.” Hardin (2002: 4) describes trust as “encapsulated interest”: “I trust you because I think it is in your interest to attend to my interests in the relevant matter.” What is the Value of Trust? In the literature, trust is seen as an important condition for cooperating in complex decision-making situations. As previously mentioned, substantial uncertainty and complexity exists in decision-making due to differing perceptions and the variety of (sometimes-conflicting) strategies. This uncertainty and complexity will drive actors to pursue “go it alone strategies” and not cooperation, which is necessary to achieve interesting results. In general, authors argue that trust enhances the chances for cooperation between actors, and this holds true for both the public and the private sphere (Zand 1972; Woolthuis 1999). Trust reduces the uncertainty of the actions of other actors. Because parties already know what they can expect from each other, the relationship will begin more smoothly. Trust will also lead more quickly to mutual commitment. Actors are willing to be vulnerable to the actions of another party. One is prepared to be dependent on other parties’ actions and is less afraid of handing business to another without installing control mechanisms (Zand 1972: 49). This results in a greater inclination to cooperate. Another important advantage of trust is that it reduces the transaction costs involved in decision making and organizing. Trust enhances the predictability of the strategies of other actors and reduces the possibility of opportunism. Cooperation is costly because it leads to transaction costs that are the result of drafting and monitoring contracts (Williamson 1996). And trust can serve as an alternative or at least as an extra addition to designing contracts that result in transaction costs (Ring and van der Ven 1992; Sako 1998). Trust also plays an important role in solidifying cooperation; it is an important condition for creating stability and durability in the (organization of the) cooperation. Trust enlarges the robustness of inter-organizational cooperation; it promotes ongoing interaction among organizations and the continuation of cooperation (Klijn and Teisman 2000). Partners in the cooperation can handle difficult times more easily and these will not soon lead to a rift in the relationship. The partner is willing to believe that the reason for a breach of confidence is not their partner’s fault, but the fault of others, or can be put down to situations beyond the control of their business partner. They are willing to believe that the partner has tried as much as possible to comply with the rules of the cooperation. We can conclude that trust is an important (pre)condition for interorganizational cooperation. It reduces the cost of cooperation and enhances the chances of cooperation. However, although a certain degree of trust is essential, “the more complete the trust, the greater the potential gain from malfeasance”
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(Granovetter 1985: 491). Therefore, too much – i.e., “blind trust” – can be as problematic as a lack of trust. Some scholars approach trust as a form of “social capital.” Putnam (1995: 664–5) defines social capital as follows: “By ‘social capital,’ I mean features of social life networks, norms, and trust that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared goals.” Trust, as a part of social capital, is seen as given, as one of the sources that determine social capital. Putnam (1995), for example, tries to explain the erosion of social capital in America by investigating the changes in society – e.g., mobility and suburbanization, pressures of time and money, and the changing role of women. In this chapter, we will not approach trust as a part of social capital, because this approach tends to ignore the role of trust itself; the role of trust as a coordination mechanism (see also the criticism on the use of the term social capital by Mayer (2003)). We want to stress that knowledge about this mechanism is important to gain insight into the problem of coordinating expectations and interactions in inter-organizational relations (Bachmann 2001). Our purpose is not to discern different kinds of trust; our aim is not to measure the amount of trust – even if that was possible. Rather, we want to know how trust “works” and how it can be influenced, in order to obtain insights for the design of new planning arrangements for collaborative planning. Can Trust be Created and Managed? Many writers have avoided the issue of managing trust altogether, arguing that it either grows spontaneously or not at all (Sabel 1993). According to them, trusting relationships emerge “naturally” and instinctively in the absence of any deliberate intent or intervention to create them. Other writers argue that trust exists as a result of frequent interactions and previous trusting relationships. Zucker (1986), for instance, prefers to speak of process-based trust, which is tied to past or expected interaction processes. She argues that trust arises from long-term relationships, which have proven to be stable over time. Dasgupta (1988) also holds this view: trust can intentionally be created and manipulated, but takes a lot of time and energy. According to these scholars, trust can be created through frequent interaction over a long period of time. What is the Relation between Contracts and Trust? In general it is argued that the presence of trust leads to a decrease in opportunism and therefore to less legal ordering. Contracts are not needed, or need less specification, because trust provides the basis and flexibility to cope with the uncertainties regarding future states of nature and with the risk of opportunism. Problems can be solved in an interactive manner through joint problem solving. In this way “trust can . . . be seen as a psychological contract that holds certain expectations of the behavior of the other party” (Woolthuis 1999: 56).
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Some authors have argued that trust makes contracts unnecessary, and some argue that contracts could even be seen as a sign of distrust (Nooteboom 1998). This places legal governance and social governance in opposition to each other. Contracts might decrease the level of trust, because they put too much emphasis on negative aspects such as use of coercion or frequent monitoring. Other authors do not approach contracts and trust as mutually exclusive but as mutually reinforcing elements. For example, Zand (1972) describes how trust leads to the willingness to be vulnerable and to commit to the relationship with others. “A contract can be seen as the consolidation of this commitment. As such, trust would precede contract and contract could be understood as the consolidation of trust” (Woolthuis 1999: 57). Woolthuis (1999) concludes that trust and contracts play equally important, but different, roles in inter-organizational relationships. Furthermore, they are strongly interrelated and can undermine or reinforce each other. Instead of confirming the hypothetical expectation that higher levels of trust would lead to less (complete) contracts, Woolthuis (1999) found that trust is related to the specific content, rather than the completeness of contracts. High trust relationships are supported by different types of contracts. They do not exclude each other. In high trust contexts, contracts are interpreted in different ways; not primarily safeguarding but with a guidance function. The Teylingen Pact and Trust Introduction The case study is about a regional agreement in the Netherlands. The concept of regional agreements has recently been introduced in a new Dutch governance model that is aimed at creating better opportunities for integrative and collaborative planning by using an area-specific planning approach, in which regional and local parties can cooperate (Van Ark 2005). The regional agreement can be described as a non-statutory plan and a commitment package between stakeholders about the spatial development of a region. By signing these regional agreements, the parties involved show their commitment to the plan, the measures to be taken and their individual contributions. Regional agreements form an interesting concept for planning in the context of a network society. These planning instruments can facilitate collaborative planning processes, because a diversity of stakeholders (public and private) can participate and express their interdependency. Furthermore, regional agreements can be used independently of the administrative boundaries and scales. Our question is what role can and should these regional agreements play. Dutch planning authorities tend to consider regional agreements from a traditional “command-and-control” perspective and investigate methods to reach legally binding agreements based on “hard” performance criteria. Therefore they call them “regional contracts” (Van Ark and Van der Valk 2004).
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We argue that the strength of the regional agreement is not juridical but collaborative. The interdependency between actors involved in these regional agreements reduces the demand for (judicial) certainty and firmness (Alexander 2001). As a consequence, trust becomes more relevant. We will explore this argument by presenting a case study of the Teylingen Pact. This is one of the few older and thus time-tested regional agreements in the Netherlands. This regional agreement has not been introduced intentionally by the Dutch government. It emerged more or less spontaneously because the situation in this region required the cooperation of various regional stakeholders. This makes the Teylingen Pact an interesting case to explore the relation between collaborative planning, the performance of a planning instrument, and trust. Context of the Pact The Teylingen Pact is a set of strategic agreements between public and private actors in the Dune and Bulbs district (“Duin- en Bollenstreek,” we will abbreviate this to “Bulbs district”), concerning the spatial development of this area. The Bulbs district is situated in the western part of the Netherlands. The area is dominated by sand dunes, bulb fields, and rapidly expanding villages, and is inhabited by about 175,000 people (Provincie Zuid-Holland 1998). The Bulbs district is famous for its extensive bulb fields, which attract 3 to 4 million tourists a year from all over the world. The Teylingen Pact is the outcome of a collaborative effort of the actors from the Bulbs district to prevent the construction of a new city (“Bulbs City”) in this district. The plan to build this city was introduced in national and provincial planning documents at the beginning of the 1990s. The actors in the Bulbs district all had their own specific interests in opposing the construction of a new city. The main reason, however, has been the serious threat to the activities related to the production and distribution of bulbs, including tourism. Together, these activities comprise the so-called “bulbs complex.” The construction of a city would take up so much open space that the bulbs complex would no longer be possible (Stuurgroep Pact van Teylingen 1996). The Teylingen Pact was signed in 1996. Along with a set of strategic agreements, the Pact comprises expected efforts and results of each of the eighteen parties that signed it. The most important parties involved in the Pact are the Province of Zuid-Holland, the municipalities (10), the water management districts (2), the farmers’ associations (2), and the nature and environmental organizations (7). The Pact is not legally binding. The strategic agreements of the Pact have to be put into effect by means of (formal) planning documents, such as the provincial regional plan (“streekplan”) and the municipal structure plan (“bestemmingsplan”), and in projects, as for example, the development of eco-zones and nature areas. Five times a year, a steering committee of the parties’ representatives meets to discuss the progress of the activities agreed upon in the Pact. Once a year, an event is organized, called the Corso, in which the public is invited to
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discuss an important theme from the Teylingen Pact. Every five years, the parties evaluate the progress of the execution of the Teylingen Pact, as was recently done (Stuurgroep Uitvoering Pact van Teylingen 2002). The Pact has shown a clear impact on spatial decision making. The agreements have been adopted in formal planning documents resulting in the conservation of the openness of the Bulbs district. Furthermore a diverse set of projects has been initiated, ranging from developing eco-zones to developing tourism arrangements. The Teylingen Pact is often mentioned in the regional newspapers. We have examined the role and meaning of trust in the case of the Teylingen Pact by interviewing the parties involved. We interviewed five government officials (two from the province of Zuid-Holland, one from a water management district and two from the municipalities), as well as two representatives of the local farmers’ associations and two from the environmental organizations. Because the Teylingen Pact came into effect a number of years ago, the actors involved have gained much experience with this kind of policy arrangement. In analyzing the role and meaning of trust, we will also use a report by Hendriks and Verhaaren (1996), who have evaluated the process of coming to agreements in the Teylingen Pact. The Value of Trust Before the parties involved in the Teylingen Pact started to collaborate, they had struggled with each other for years. The relationships, both between the governmental organizations and private organizations, were characterized by distrust (Hendriks and Verhaaren 1996). The municipalities believed that the government (the province of Zuid-Holland and the national government) launched all kinds of plans without consulting the local actors and that these “higher” governments continually tried to urbanize the Bulbs district. Among the local governments, this created great resistance to the province of ZuidHolland and the national government. Furthermore, a large gap existed between the agrarian sector and the nature and environmental organizations because, for years, the parties had been arguing about the use of manure and pesticides in the cultivation of bulbs. The interviewees pointed out that this distrust was problematic. For instance, one of the interviewees replied: “I am not willing to cooperate with representatives I do not trust.” Another interviewee pointed out: “You have to trust each other, because in a situation characterized by distrust, everyone is staring at each other, trying to catch the other party doing something that is not allowed. This creates an atmosphere in which you cannot deal jointly with difficult problems.” This deadlock prevented the development of the Bulbs district, economically as well as environmentally. The Emergence of Trust In 1993, the province of Zuid-Holland launched a planning document in which Bulbs City was introduced. Municipalities and citizens found each other united in their opposition to this large-scale urbanization which, in their opinion,
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would harm the regional identity, along with their own interests. The size and vehemence of the opposition caused the province to adjust her policy. The province invited the municipalities, the water management districts, the farmers’ associations, and the nature and environmental organizations to collaboratively plan the spatial development of the region. The representatives of these public and private parties formed a working group, resulting in the Teylingen Pact (Hendriks and Verhaaren 1996). In the process of creating the Teylingen Pact, distrust among the parties in the Bulbs district decreased, mainly as a result of the discussions in which the actors learned to understand each others’ drives and problems (Hendriks and Verhaaren 1996). According to several interviewees though, the parties involved in the Teylingen Pact would not have come to this set of agreements without the intervention of a civil servant from the province. He inspired the parties to cooperate; moreover, he created a moral binding between the parties involved. He was able to translate the parties’ specific problems in order to come to a joint perspective on the region. Furthermore, his strong involvement encouraged the representatives to persevere. One of the interviewees told us, for example, that at a time when the process threatened to get stuck, the civil servant took the trouble to call him on Sunday evening – something most Dutchmen do not expect from a civil servant. This strengthened this representative’s awareness of the importance of coming to an agreement with the other parties and forced a breakthrough. Hendriks and Verhaaren (1996) concluded in their research on the Teylingen Pact that good process management increased trust and the possibilities for parties to link their specific interests to a shared perspective on the spatial development of the region. In this respect, trust was mainly process-based and needed active process-management. Increased trust among the parties in the Bulbs district was very important in order to reach a set of agreements and to cooperate in the spatial development of the district. One of the interviewees stated: “The fact that the Pact was jointly signed, at least signals some kind of trust, else you really would not do that.” The representative of the farmers’ associations replied: We have come to trust each other; this trust grew gradually. I mean, with the nature and environmental organizations we are jointly developing ecological zones. Furthermore, it is much easier to contact each other; we have become acquaintances, not friends, but acquaintances. Things have opened up and the Teylingen Pact has surely contributed to that. Another interviewee described the relationship between trust and the Teylingen Pact in the following way: “The Teylingen Pact represents trust among the parties in the Bulbs district, that set of agreements is trust; the fact that the Pact is formed and that the parties keep themselves to it.” The interviewees consider the Teylingen Pact to be a framework that makes it much easier to speak to each other than was the case in the past; it helps develop personal relations.
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Nevertheless, from the interviews we learned that the actors do not trust each other blindly. In case of disagreements, the document itself (the Pact) plays an important role: “You can refer to a set of agreements that was signed by all parties and to the fact that it was a matter of give-and-take.” The Pact constitutes trust among the actors involved because they believe one can break the agreements only at great expense. An interviewee replied: “The Teylingen Pact is indeed a frame of reference in which many representatives of private, as well as public organizations, very well realize that breaking their agreements would cause them serious damage.” First, breaking this mutual agreement without good reason would damage the actor’s reputation in light of public opinion. Second, and in connection to this, the actors’ interdependency strongly limits their opportunities to break the agreements. One of the interviewees, for example, stated: Goodwill is very important in this context. The Netherlands, of course, exists of governmental organizations that are dependent on each other; the same goes for non-governmental organizations. For example, being a water management district, we will never succeed in widening a canal when all municipalities are against us. Personal Commitment and Trust Although the consequences of breaking the agreements concern the organizations as a whole, the interviewees pointed out that the Teylingen Pact is based mainly on the representatives’ personal commitment. One of the interviewees stated: “The hardness of the agreements is depending strongly on the person who made the agreements.” This is a result of the fact that the Teylingen Pact does not legally bind the organizations involved; it is a set of strategic agreements, which is signed by representatives. The agreements can be put into effect only by means of (formal) planning documents and by initiating (collaborative) projects. Therefore, the representatives need to feel committed to these agreements in order to carry them out within their own organizations. According to the same interviewee, this personal commitment can be a problem when representatives are succeeded, because newcomers often do not feel committed to these agreements. He considered the meeting with the steering committee (five times a year) insufficient to involve newcomers. The interviewee considered the evaluation of the Pact to have greater opportunities to involve newcomers: “From time to time, you need to revitalize the Pact because you need to give newcomers the feeling that they have signed the agreements, while in fact they have not.” According to the interviewee, this was an important role of the recent evaluation. The evaluation of 2001 was shown to serve another purpose too; straightening out conflicts. The representative of the water management district, for example, seized the opportunity of the evaluation to address his problems concerning the water quality. He pointed out that the agreements with respect to improving the water quality had hardly been taken into consideration since the Pact was signed. He argued that the water quality would be better
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with the construction of Bulbs City than with the conservation of the bulb fields and threatened to step out of the Teylingen Pact. In the end, this argument was resolved by initiating a collaborative project of the water management district and the farmers to improve the water quality. Furthermore, these parties jointly organized the Corso of 2004, in which the improvement of the water quality was the central theme. In the interview, the representative of the water management district pointed out: As a result of the evaluation, the parties can look each other in the eyes again, we can speak freely again. We really needed this evaluation. The mutual understanding has increased, the other parties know now that we are not just playing a political game, but that we really have a problem, the municipalities now understand our drives. Despite the fact that we had an argument, the whole discussion created goodwill after all. Again, the actors’ interdependency proved to be crucial in resolving this conflict. On the one hand, it would be of little advantage to the water management district to abandon the Teylingen Pact because in many other projects the water management district cannot do without the cooperation of other parties. On the other hand, the other parties in the Bulbs district needed the commitment of the water management district to the Teylingen Pact in order to prevent the weakening of the coalition of parties opposing large-scale urbanization. Contract, (Un)Certainty, and Trust In general, the interviewees were very positive about the performance of the Teylingen Pact. A representative of the farmers’ organization commented: “The region has been kept open, the environmental quality is improving and the parties are having a positive attitude.” A representative of the nature and environmental organizations pointed out that: “the development of a nature area on 90 hectares of bulb fields would never have been achieved without the Teylingen Pact.” The ambitions for nature development in former policy documents were higher. However, these ambitions could not be put into effect by the government because these plans depended on the voluntary cooperation of others, such as farmers for example, who were opposed to these plans. Although most of the interviewees think that legally binding agreements could give more certainty, they consider a judicial approach unsuitable for regional agreements such as the Teylingen Pact. One interviewee argued that: In a judicial approach people immediately start to question the possibilities of binding the other, while trying to prevent being bound. But you have to make arrangements for developing a joint perspective, because all parties have their own perspectives on the situation. You have to start by developing a mutual understanding for each other’s problems. Along with the others, this interviewee considered a judicial approach problematic. He argued that it is much more important that the parties can
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learn to understand each others’ problems and drives. “It is all about learning processes, it is all learning,” one of the other interviewees stressed. A third interviewee referred to his negative experiences with other agreements, called covenants, which had the pretension to be legally binding. He said: “I do not know any covenant that has been executed. Often the agreed deadlines are heavily exceeded and with regard to the contents of the agreements, the execution greatly deviates.” When we asked this interviewee the reason for believing that the Teylingen Pact performed better than these covenants, he answered this had to do with the fact that many societal parties were involved, such as farmers and conservationists, which was not the case with these covenants. The interviewee believed that the public discussion in reaching the Teylingen Pact has achieved stronger commitment of the parties to the set of agreements, than a judicial approach could have done. Another interviewee pointed out that trying to achieve legally binding agreements has several disadvantages: Actually, you come to work in an atmosphere of distrust, because you think you have to make everything legally binding in order to be able to cooperate. In addition, it costs a lot of money and effort to come to legally binding agreements because you need to go into great detail. Moreover, things can change and as a result you may find yourself being bound to an agreement you spent a lot of time and energy on, but which has lost its relevance. The interviewee’s arguments show that striving for legally binding agreements can be counterproductive to collaborative planning, because this approach consolidates distrust. Furthermore, legally binding agreements make it difficult to deal with unexpected situations (uncertainty), because these kinds of agreements lack flexibility. According to another interviewee, every now and then such an unexpected situation arises. For example, one of the Teylingen Pact agreements is that building is restricted on bulb fields. As a consequence, the Laboratory for Bulb Research, located in the middle of the Bulbs district, could not expand. Because it was necessary to expand the laboratory, the owner (Wageningen University) decided to move out of the Bulbs district. However, the parties involved in the Teylingen Pact considered this laboratory to be very important for the Bulbs complex and jointly decided to make an exception. The interviewee pointed out that when you trust each other it is easier to solve these kinds of problems. “The better you get to know each other and each other’s drives and the better everyone is aware of the perspective of the Pact, the easier it is to deal with an exception.” Conclusion and Discussion We have theoretically and empirically shown that trust is an important aspect of inter-organizational cooperation in general, and of collaborative planning in particular. In situations of trust, actors have a (positive) expectation that other
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actors will refrain from opportunistic behavior and by that, the actors can take a vulnerable position. We described trust as an important coordination mechanism in coping with complexity and uncertainty. Especially in uncertain and unpredictable situations, trust is a crucial condition for the initiation and the continuation of cooperation in complex networks. The informality and boundaryspanning qualities of networks uniquely depend on trust to sustain collective action. If trust is absent, cooperation in networks will not hold. With respect to the relation between trust and agreements, we can conclude that a written agreement does not imply a lack of trust. On the contrary, trust is needed to reach an agreement such as the Teylingen Pact. In this respect, it is striking that the Teylingen Pact does not have a legal basis. The Pact has not been heavily “dressed up,” which could be interpreted as a high degree of trust among the parties in their ability to solve problems together. The Pact has, mainly, a guidance function; it offers a frame of reference in processes that are characterized by complexity and uncertainty. We observed a trust-enhancing cycle in the case study. First, there was some degree of trust needed to come to the Teylingen Pact (apart from the fact that some kind of interdependency is needed). Second, this Pact is found to consolidate and solidify trust; the cooperation has become firmer and the parties are able to deal with unexpected conditions and events. The degree of trust has increased due to the civil servant’s strong involvement and his skills in process management, by the Teylingen Pact itself, and by the fact that the Pact (or actually the cooperation) has performed well. The civil servant had the role of catalyst in the planning process (Bryson and Crosby 1992). He can be seen as the engine for the collaborative planning process; he brought people together and arranged meetings between them. High density of interaction in networks, and increase of this density, will enhance the degree of trust in networks. In the longer term, process management such as the improvement of the reciprocity of interactions, regulation of rules of the game through mutual agreements (process rules) and stabilization of interactions can enhance trust. The Teylingen Pact case reveals that the cooperating parties can handle conflicts and unexpected events, such as the incident with the water management district and with the expansion of the Laboratory for Bulb Research. The latter demonstrates that the parties involved in the Teylingen Pact are willing to operate flexibly and that they can deviate, in mutual agreement, from former agreements. This can be achieved in a cooperation that is based on trust. From that we can conclude that the virtue of trust lies also in coping with highly dynamic network processes, of continuously changing situations (new information, new insights, new problem definitions, new solutions, etc.). A high degree of trust in networks allows actors to act flexibly within the contours of the rules of the game. Furthermore, the case study shows that the respondents do not expect much good to come from legally binding agreements (“contracts”), because these are regarded as a sign of distrust and do not create the opportunity to act flexibly. A legally binding agreement is too fixed; collaborative planning requires the opportunity to change things according to the situation.
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However, trust should not be regarded as a substitute for legally binding agreements, but rather as a precondition for collaborative planning; without trust it is hardly possible to reach agreements and to cooperate. A judicial approach can even be counterproductive, because such an approach does not provide much opportunity to increase mutual understanding and trust. On the contrary, in fact, efficient transactions may not be reached, because parties are not willing to reach agreements for fear of others’ opportunism. Moreover, this opportunism can become problematic when certain agreements lose their relevance due to unexpected circumstances or events: outdated legally binding agreements can cause high transaction costs ex-post due to high costs of adjusting agreements or of judicial procedures (Williamson 1985). Knowledge of the role and meaning of trust in spatial planning can help to anticipate these problems in designing new policy arrangements. Like the Netherlands, governments across Europe and North America are developing new spatial planning systems, practices and tools to deal with the new context for planning (Healey et al. 1997; Innes and Booher 2003). Unfortunately, most governments tend to design these new arrangements according to the traditional models of public sector command and control. The Dutch concept of a regional contract is a powerful example. Dutch planning authorities introduced this instrument to better facilitate collaborative planning, but they designed this policy arrangement from a traditional perspective on planning; i.e., they tend to strive for certainty and thus a binding agreement. However, whereas contractual incompleteness is a gap in formal contracts that induces only mistrust in this traditional perspective on planning, this incompleteness (and flexibility!) sends a positive relational signal that sustains trust in collaborative planning. We can conclude that planning authorities need to adjust their traditional perspectives on planning. Without recognizing the relational aspects of collaborative planning, and especially the role of trust therein, it is hardly possible to reach agreements and to cooperate successfully. Acknowledgments The Dutch Expert Network for Multiple Land Use (Habiforum), the Dutch Government Service for Land and Water Management (Dienst Landelijk Gebied), and the Delta Research Programme of Wageningen University and Research Centre provided funding for this study. The study is part of the research program of the Mansholt Graduate School, Wageningen University and the research program on trust of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, Centre for Public Management.
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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Reconnecting Space, Place, and Institutions: Inquiring into “Local” Governance Capacity in Urban and Regional Research Enrico Gualini
Introduction This essay presents some reflections on notions – such as governance and networks – currently widespread in urban and regional research. The first reason for reflecting upon them is that we cannot take the meaning and viability of these notions for granted. Reference to governance and networks has gained such diffusion – even in the specific domain of urban and regional studies – as to become almost commonsensical, while raising increasing skepticism about their usefulness and consistency. As in even more inflated cases – such as globalization – the role played by intellectual fashion and academic emulation in their fortune is apparent. Similarly, there is increasing awareness of the potential for political manipulation behind the diffusion of fashionable (pseudo-)concepts. Moreover, little critical attention has been devoted in urban and regional research to their viability as means for inquiry. Despite being backed by long-established traditions in the social sciences, and despite the proliferation of related research programs, reference to governance and networking still lacks sufficient theoretical and methodological awareness. This is evident, for instance, in the case of their application in a comparative perspective. All too often, the aim of comparison is reproduced in current research practice without reflection. This is true in an analytical sense, but is the more striking as territorial research becomes increasingly instrumental to framing public policy discourse – for instance, through the provision of insights on good practices.
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A deeper reason for concern behind these reflections, however, is how far these notions may contribute to structuring urban and regional research in order to advance knowledge about a key issue: the changing spatial nexus of public policy. Notions such as governance and networks – from a perspective centered on institutions and from a perspective centered on the actors, respectively – share a focus on phenomena that affect the nexus between spatiality and public action. Governance research has pointed to the importance of processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization in redefining – if not hollowing-out – governmental boundaries and jurisdictional competences. Network analysis has inquired into emergent forms of interest intermediation that exceed or bypass established institutions of territorial representation. Both emphasize the relativization of geographical space – in particular of bounded space – as a determinant for policy action. Both point to processes that exceed the domain of territorial institutions. And both share an interest for phenomena of rescaling of state action and for shifts in the meaning of the territoriality for public policies. And yet, the key issue of how the changing meaning of bounded spaces – intended as “collective institutional structures that are conservative, bounded and change relatively slowly” – and of related institutional practices, may develop into a new sense of “place” – intended as “the spatiality of experience,” as its “cumulative archive” (Paasi 2001: 24–5) – is still underrated, and lacks a viable research program. Reference to glocalization and rescaling posits the existence of such processes, but does not adequately support empirical research. The consequence is our inability to understand the emergence of new meanings of territoriality and of their role in reshaping key dimensions of politics such as legitimacy, representation, and identity. Reconnecting space, place, and institutions, therefore, means posing a relevant research question at the heart of transformations in urban and regional policies, and that, far from being exhausted by higher abstractions, requires mid-range approaches and long-term trans-disciplinary strategies in order to advance empirical knowledge on the variance of its manifestations. The way I approach this reflection is the following. My discussion of the “network paradigm” in urban and regional research is based on the specific meaning taken by networks in policy analysis. The notion of policy networks is hence assumed as central, and its meaning for inquiring into change in the territorial dimension of public policy is assessed within a broader framework of governance research. Finally, I draw some conclusions on the meaning of these notions in defining a research strategy for urban and regional studies, focusing in particular on the challenge of comparative governance research. Governance and Networking: Meaning and Relevance for Urban and Regional Research Governance – in general terms – is a notion concerning the reframing of relationships between the ideal-types of social order represented by the state,
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the market, and civil society in realizing governing effects. Hence, the focus is less on the formal dimension than on the dynamics of change involved in governing practices. This general issue has, however, undergone a whole range of interpretations, in which governance is defined differently according to the specific traditions of research. In broad terms, in the social sciences, three main approaches to governance are recognizable: as a concept for the analysis of state action; as a concept for the analysis of the social order of economic systems; and as a concept for the analysis of steering capacities beyond government. Given the different traditions of research that converge into the term, it is not an irrelevant task to define governance in a way that may (a) bear a transdisciplinary validity and (b) be applicable to the study of the diversity, variation, and multidimensionality of governance practices in urban-regional contexts. There is much concern, however, about the risk of concept stretching and of an excessive and uncontrolled extension of its application. This makes it the more important to clarify the domain to which the notion is applied as part of a strategy of inquiry. In this section, I discuss the meaning of the notion for urban and regional research, focusing on its application to public policy and, in particular, to its territorial dimension. Public Governance: The Political-Institutional Dimension Since the 1980s, as a result of changes in state–society relationships in Western welfare-state democracies, reference to governance has conveyed a re-assessment – and, often, more or less ideologically framed criticism – of the effectiveness of public action based on the role and functioning of governments. Attention has progressively shifted toward the idea of governance as the ability to achieve governing effects as a complex result of a variety of inputs from different societal domains.1 Governance studies, however, have not remained focused on an alleged dichotomy between government – intended as state-centered governmental activity – and governance as an alternative taking the form of a retreat or withdrawal of the state (in terms of the adoption of a (neo)liberal minimal state model based on privatization and systemic de-regulation) or even marking its erosion (through the dominance of private interests in defining policy outcomes). Rather, analyses of late capitalist societies – in institutional economics, economic sociology, policy analysis, and other branches of political science – have contributed to blurring the dualism implied in these conceptions, pointing to governance as the emergence of new modes of public steering. Shifting relationships between different forms of socio-economic regulation (ideal-typically: state-led, market-led, and cooperative-reciprocal forms) hint at a change in the role of the state in ensuring an effective level of aggregate performance while mediating between conflicting interests. This has been the privileged terrain of governance research in political science and political economy. In this domain, a more sophisticated meaning of the concept has consolidated. The emergence of new forms and new combinations of steering
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capacity, enlarging the range of governing activity beyond the statutory tasks of state structures, highlights their changing functioning and role in defining social order. In this sense, traditional distinctions between state, market, and civil society become blurred. Reference to governance becomes peculiar to an area of research that focuses on steering activities developing on the edge between governmental structures, the market and civil society, ranging beyond traditional models of governmental activity. Thus, the focus of interest becomes “the particular division of labor between the market, social structures, and political structures” (Le Galès 2002: 14) at play in reproducing modes of regulation in capitalist economy societies. This line of research stresses the features of a substantial change – rather than a decline – of state power: a phenomenon that is expressed by the changing role of state structures and by the trajectory taken by them in moving away from traditional hierarchical-authoritative roles in policy-making (e.g., from that of a provider to that of an enabler; from that of initiator to mediator and facilitator; from pivot to gatekeeper or arbitrator; from manager to policy entrepreneur). This has led to the development of studies on the context-specific combinations of modes of regulation at play in defining patterns of economic competitiveness (Hollingsworth and Boyer 1997; Amin and Hausner 1998). This conception is expressed by Jessop (1995: 317): he defines governance studies as “concerned with the resolution of (para-)political problems (in the sense of problems of collective goalattainment or the realization of collective purposes) in and through specific configurations of governmental (hierarchical) and extra-governmental (nonhierarchical) institutions, organizations and practices.” In the political sense, governance is therefore a process of coordination among actors, social groups, and institutions who define and attain collective goals: in other words, governance “is not about the neoliberal rhetoric of delegitimizing governments and politics” (Le Galès 2001: 172), but rather about local, context- and situationspecific processes of reconstruction of politics in fragmented, competitive, multi-level policy environments. Research inspired by the regulation approach, in particular, has pointed to the fact that models of the political order (political institutions and political orientations) traditionally associated with Westphalian nation-states and with prevalent models of state capitalism are being redefined – under conditions of internationalization, transnationalization, and globalization – as new modes of governance are provided and experimented, attempting at a response to changes in production and accumulation (Jessop 1995, 2000b; Swyngedouw 1997). What is increasingly put at stake by these developments is the ability of the (local) state to enhance viable local forms of regulation or, in other terms, the rescaling of the ways through which the state performs its tasks of socio-economic regulation. Territorial Governance: The Local Dimension The relevance of the notion of governance for urban and regional research, it has been stated, resides in the fact that it expresses the attempt of social research
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“to make the link between changes in the state, the economy, and society which are causing upheaval in the model of the nation-state and altering the constraints and opportunities for sub-national territories.” In this perspective, “the sociology of governance is intrinsically part of a thinking that attempts to integrate economic, political and social changes at different scales, while privileging access through the territorial level” (Le Galès 2002: 13). The increasing role taken by cities and regions as sites of socio-economic regulation hints at a specific local dimension of governance. Defining this local dimension is, however, highly problematic. Local governance refers, in the first instance, to two key phenomena: the changing position of localities and regions within the domain of the nation-state and national economies; and the shift from nested-hierarchical to interconnected patterns of vertical (state–state) and horizontal (state–society) relationships. These phenomena draw attention to changes in the tasks and policies of local governments, but also question the notion of the local as a given, underlining its emerging, socially constructed nature, and its dependence on relational patterns of spatial behaviors. Localities undergo a change in patterns of autonomy and interdependence with regard to the public sector (i.e., in the domain of vertical intergovernmental relationships) and to the private sector (i.e., in the domain of horizontal state–society relationships). Both aspects are central to the attention of research for the emergence of processes of rescaling of public action. The first reason that justifies taking a local perspective of governance is the change in relationship between local societies and the state witnessed by local (i.e., urban and regional) governmental activity. Harding (1997: 295) has identified three ideal-typical features of emergent patterns of local governance: a general move away from welfare/distributive modes of governance to ones that prioritize localized supply-side measures aimed at enhancing economic performance; a shift from nationally based, process-oriented governing arrangements to locally based, product-oriented ones; and a change in emphasis from vertical integration, standardized rules, clear lines of authority, accountability, and national equity to horizontal integration, flexibility, networking, problem solving, and the realization of economic potential through strategic competition and collaboration. In addressing these changes, research on local governance has moved away from a dual conception of the state (O’Connor 1973; Saunders 1986), according to which the nation-state grants conditions for the competitiveness of the national system (through social investments), while the local state is responsible for regulating welfare and reproduction conditions (through social consumption). One of the assumptions behind governance research in economic sociology and politics, in fact, is that the role of the nation-state as a site of regulation is changing in terms that specifically affect the role of territories and territorial governance. As the local state – that is, local governments, cities, and institutional regions – is no longer placed in a nested pattern of sovereignty, in which conditions for local welfare and cohesion could be
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seen as a function of broader policies for national competitiveness, and in which the local played a defined role in a performative whole, supported by redistributive mechanisms, local communities have to establish themselves – and, to a certain extent, reinvent themselves – as sites for the production of local conditions for welfare and cohesion. This, in turn, implies building the capacity of competing locally in a competitive environment that encompasses, but also exceeds, the nation-state. By this, the typical dichotomy between welfarist and neoliberal policies becomes gradually less apt to account for the features of local governance. Rather, the quests for competitiveness and cohesion become two sides of the same task facing the governance of localities, and two dimensions of the challenge of achieving and sustaining a viable cohesion of the local society while playing in a global competitive arena (Harding 2005). The apparent oxymoron of “competitive cooperation” thus gains ground in constitutional set-ups based on principles of redistributive solidarity – as well as in the politics of European integration – highlighting the structural incorporation of economic imperatives within national welfare discourse. What is most important to note here is a threefold consequence for the meaning of the local. First, the local state – that is, territorial governments, such as cities and institutional regions – faces new policy challenges, for which the institutional and organizational settings and the resources provided by their embeddedness in a particular form of the nation-state prove increasingly inadequate. These challenges can be met only through the development of new local capacities. While this represents a potential for new forms of initiative and mobilization for local polities – which has led to envisioning a new era of social and political activism for European cities (Le Galès 2002) – this also puts localities and the local state in a new dialectic relationship with the nation-state. Even without indulging in metaphors – such as, a neo-medieval geography of citystates or a Hanseatic model of urban relations – it is plain that the claims of cities and regions, expressed by their elites and growth coalitions, have increasingly affected the political game at the national and even at the transnational level, often introducing a counterpart to classic dynamics of domestic intergovernmental and interdepartmental politics. In this sense, as has been aptly stated, “[r]aising the question of governance suggests an understanding of the linkage of different types of regulation in a territory in terms of political and social integration and at the same time in terms of capacity of action” (Le Galès 1998: 495). Therefore, the centrality of the issue of building local capacities in order to deal with the challenges of governance introduces a discontinuity in the way local politics is understood. Studying local governance directs attention to new, potentially innovative but highly demanding dimensions: the mobilization of local resources, i.e., of traded and untraded interdependencies between local material and immaterial assets; the need for experimentation in view of enabling and activating local development initiatives; and the need for practices of collective sensemaking and learning in order to enable the production and
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reproduction of institutional capacities. All these dimensions bear opportunities for empowering and renewing local societies, potentially contributing to their consolidation as “collective actors” (Le Galès 2002). Their conditions and constraints, however, also bear potentials for conflictual relationships between state structures and societal interests (Mayer 1996). Second, identifying the spatial scale at which these policy challenges ought to be met introduces a further contradiction. This goes beyond the constraints of acting locally in a global world, and the observation that “the sovereignty of the state [and, even the more so, of the local state] is territorially limited, while the capitalist economy tends toward global interaction” (Scharpf 1999: 29–30); rather, it is related to the redefining of the scales involved in the local dimension of governance. Far from representing an objective shift in spatial scales, this redefinition relates to a multiplicity of scalar rationales, and depends on how these frame local perceptions and strategies. As a matter of fact, the only scalar dimension amenable to objective distinction, that between local government and governance, hints at a discrepancy between the statutory set-up and the actual practices of territorial governance. In urban research, the distinction between urban government and local government is well established (Dunleavy 1980). While local government refers to a narrow institutional focus of urban institutions, urban government is a concept that refers to the actual scale at which the resources for urban development are defined, including fragmentation and dispersion across intergovernmental levels. With a conceptual differentiation between government and governance, the meaning of this distinction becomes even clearer. If, in fact, the field of urban/local government is defined as a domain of public action structured into statutory levels of competencies and roles that – according to a classic model of sovereignty – are coincident with a definite territorial articulation, urban/local governance is rather defined as a complex of activities of regulation and decision making extended over spatial scales, often with a weak or unstable form of territorial bond, and of which local government is only one of many actors possibly involved (Harding 1994). The notion of local governance introduces therefore a fundamental discontinuity not only in the definition of the actors and practices in the governing of territories, but also in their territorial identity. Hence, the dimension of identity-building that so often emerges as part of governance practices – for instance, through the need for a collective image for the marketing of places and regions – becomes a tangible expression of what sociologists like Giddens (1990) have called the stretching between the global and the local, of the tension between the despatialization and the reterritorialization of processes and policies of economic development and competition. The contradiction between the political-institutional identity of localities and their socio-economic identity results therefore in a double pressure, from below and from above, to reforming the institutional scales of governing activity in terms that better fit local issues, needs, and claims. As local modes
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of governance and regulation become essential, the nation-state needs to redefine the scales and modes through which it can operate further as a key site of socio-economic regulation (Brenner 1999, 2000; Goodwin 2001). Accordingly, as regulation theorists have stressed, the nation-state is forced to redefine its loci and to enter a process of rescaling and scale-related institutional restructuring, through which new territorial arenas of governance and regulation emerge – in an often experimental and sometimes unintended way – and possibly enter a dynamics of institutionalization. This, in turn, underlines the complex, mixed features of the spatial and institutional embeddedness of local jurisdictions in an increasingly flexible and interconnected pattern of governance scales. And, as these features and the forms of their institutionalization may be contested or dysfunctional to specific political projects, local governance increasingly takes alternative forms, which establish much more complex relationships between actors, institutions, and territories, such as relational, non-contiguous, or non-Euclidean forms of spatiality. Third, these developments exert pressure on the effectiveness and legitimacy of public policy. A remarkable result is the fact that policy legitimation is increasingly sought for outside of the domain of established territorial institutions. Special-purpose modes of (territorial) interest representation introduce a contradiction with the form of democratic representation embodied by territorial governments, stressing the risk of the emergence of interest-based forms of hegemony in public choices. Even relativizing the identification of current local governance trends with an alleged neoliberal hegemonic project (Harloe 2001), it is apparent that the dominance of economic imperatives in local policy discourse constrains the freedom of choice of local polities, and stresses the inherent contradictions between general-purpose governments and interest-based development initiatives. Policy Networks and Urban–Regional Research Rethinking urban policy and politics in terms of local governance bears significant consequences for the role and meaning of research concepts inspired by the metaphor of networking. Reference to networks bears an ambiguous meaning in governance research.2 Its conceptual aim is to address complex forms of decision making in fragmented contexts, in which the effectiveness and legitimacy of political institutions is eroded and boundaries between social, economic, and political domains are blurring. Networking has become an important metaphor for the displacement of policy arenas from formal public institutions to weakly or nonformalized domains of interactions between special interest groups, constituting over time patterns of influence capable of shaping public policies by defining mutual expectations and setting agendas. As a consequence, reference to networks has become paradigmatic in addressing a key dimension of modern governance, but also in spanning between the extremes of understanding of governance – on the one hand – as governing without government, and – on the other hand – as a new form of governing activity.
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The notion of networks plays an important role in inquiring into patterns of modern governance. The conceptual linkage is made particularly explicit by reference to governance as a form of self-organization. Assuming networks as diffuse forms of social coordination, “governance refers to self-organizing, inter-organizational networks” (Rhodes 1996: 660) constituting complementary structures to markets and hierarchies in allocating resources and in enacting forms of regulation and coordination. Networks thus feature important elements of self-coordination and self-governing capacity, tending to develop organizational and operational forms capable of creating their own actionenvironment. There is a strong connection here with a socio-cybernetic perspective on governance, intending it as an outcome of interactive socio-political forms of governing (Kooiman 1993). These positions bear divergent consequences, however. On the one hand, governance comes to be defined from a radically interactionist stance, tending to solve distinctions between state and civil society: the former is rather seen as “a collection of inter-organizational networks made up of governmental and societal actors with no sovereign actor able to steer or regulate” (Rhodes 1996: 666). This also implies a shift in understanding change in public administration from earlier interpretations that emphasized the introduction of “governance” practices as modernization (Osborne and Gaebler 1993). The challenge of public governance, rather than being defined by a shift from rowing to steering, is increasingly defined as an issue of co-production, that is, of the pursuit of public goals as joint results of governmental and non-governmental activities and initiatives. Governance thus represents a perspective in territorial management no longer identifiable with guidance-and-control functions of governmental institutions, but, rather, structurally involving the mobilization of economic and social initiatives and resources within loose frameworks of interdependence with formal governmental institutions. On the other hand, conceptualizations of governance inspired by network theory are apt to hint at potentials for dissolution of the public sphere. As Rhodes (1996) and others stress, there is an intimate relationship between conceiving governance as governing without government and the decline of the ability of public institutions to produce effective and legitimate public policies. This concern was also at the origin of the fortune of the network metaphor in urban and regional studies. What characterizes policy networks research from previous approaches is a focus on patterns of embeddedness of interest representation in the procedures and routines of governing institutions that are not explained by elitist metaphors or by traditional references to interest and pressure groups. The influence of networks constitutes an efficient means for balancing social aims by granting them channels of access to policy-making arenas, but it introduces a fundamental challenge to patterns of legitimate representation and accountability. This is made apparent by the contradiction between the mode of representation embodied by general-purpose governments – such as territorial jurisdictions – and the issue-orientation of policy networks that increasingly penetrate territorial development practices, often bypassing
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formal institutions and directly accountable channels of influence. Early significant contributions – starting from Heclo’s “issue networks” (Heclo 1978) to Richardson and Jordan’s “policy communities” (Richardson and Jordan 1979; Richardson 1982) – have not by chance emerged from studies of neoliberal destatization policies. In such contexts, a post-welfarist turn in state policies, resulting in the demise of local governments and the privatization of development interests – under the influence of emerging glocal economic dynamics – has underlined the fragmentation and hollowing out of public arenas for the definition of local choices. Significant theoretical generalizations have also been advanced, most notably, in the framework of research programs embedding the notion of policy networks in a structuralist conceptualization of change in public policy-making (Powell 1990; Marin and Mayntz 1991; Mayntz 1993a, 1993b). The shift from a descriptive to a theoretical-explanatory use of the concept has, therefore, been addressed by studies pointing at structural conditions of decline of state regulation, at the emergence of forms of governance based on self-organization (Rhodes 1996) and, in particular, at the shift from intergovernmental bargaining to special interests intermediation in European politics. The analysis of policy networks has thus become instrumental to inquiring into new forms of influence in trans-national policy arenas (Heinelt and Smith 1996) as well as to conceptualizing “network governance” as an alternative mode of regulation in a “post-national” state (Kohler-Koch 1996; Kohler-Koch and Eising 1999). Meanwhile, other interpretative models share assumptions about the loosely coupled and non-institutionalized nature of patterns of influence in contemporary policy-making, but reject a structuralist view of networks as identifiable sites of influence and power, rather stressing their symbolic-cognitive and discursive dimension (Ansell et al. 1997). Networking as an interpretative framework for policy-making processes has met criticism concerning both its theoretical and methodological consistency (Dowding 1995; Thatcher 1998) and its explanatory power (Le Galès and Thatcher 1995; Le Galès 2001). Undeniably, analysis of policy networks performs an important descriptive function. As a matter of fact, given its “generally descriptive and reflective character” (John 2000), the notion has produced distinctive contributions mainly in case-study research – in particular in locality studies – instrumental to gaining insight in changing patterns of local governance. Despite this important contribution to an empirical grounding of critical research, however, the fortune of reference to networks has led to applying the notion “to quite different configurations covering the totality of forms of patterning among social groups and the state,” thus “considering as ‘network’ any form of human organization more or less directly related to political decision-making and, by this, threatening to blur its distinctive features” (Muller and Surel 1998: 91–2). Generalized references to networking in governance research, in my view, raise several points of criticism. First, descriptive uses of policy networks (as a typical meso-level concept) fail to break down the notion in ways that allow linking macro- and micro-levels of analysis, with significant
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limitations to the explanatory and heuristic potential of the concept. Second, a peculiar consequence of this is the difficulty in distinguishing the dual character of networks, as both being interconnected (i.e., featuring multiple and overlapping configurations) and “nested” (i.e., featuring relative differentials in power and influence). The specific combination of these two dimensions, however, is crucial in defining policy outcomes, stressing the importance of horizontal and vertical modes of coordination among networks and of the capacity to perform forms of “network management.” Finally, two further consequences derive from this attitude. On the one hand, there is a tendency to reification of networking patterns, which detaches the analysis of policy networks from the concrete action situations, mechanisms, and practices through which they possibly influence policy outcomes. On the other hand, there is a distinctive threat of despatialization of policy networks. While consistent with assumptions on their relative detachment from political-institutional contexts, reference to networks often threatens losing ground to specific contextualized practices through which networking activity may affect concrete, localized policy outcomes. In summary, in order to avoid undue generalizations, the analysis of policy networks needs to be situated, grounded in definite action situations: this is a condition for understanding networking processes in both their extensive dimension, spanning across different levels of policy action, and their intensive dimension, concerning their specific spatio-temporal fix. Governance and the Local Politics of Networking Networking may be a significant metaphor for interpreting emergent features of territorial governance. In particular, emphasis on networks as modes of influence alternative to the channels and arenas provided by representative territorial jurisdictions addresses a key phenomenon. The question, however, is how far the notion helps in reassessing the link between space, place, and institutions as it is being reshaped in local governance arenas. In this perspective, network metaphors may stand in contradiction to attempts at understanding processes in the reconstruction of a local governance capacity: that is, in understanding the specific relationships that tie local governmental and institutional action with networks in defining policy outcomes, and the public strategies that are built around these ties. In fact, inquiry into policy networks applied to locality studies raises some critical observations. First, the importance attributed to policy networks is based on the assumption of the increasing autonomization of policy domains from state action, allowing the emergence of new forms of mobilization and influence. Such an assumption, however, often neglects to recognize also the increasing interdependency among policy domains in both a horizontal (i.e., intersectoral) and vertical (i.e., multi-level) dimension: a phenomenon that highlights a new role for public policy in coordinating relationships among policy domains, by developing new enabling or gatekeeping modes of regulation.
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Second, emphasis on the fragmentation of public policy as a condition for the influence of policy networks tends to divert attention from issues of mobilization and organizing capacity and, inevitably, from issues of power. Conversely, recognizing the importance of organizing capacity in the management of networks should lead to recognizing the importance of structural factors of power – in terms of the relative position of actors in the policy arenas affected by networking activities – as well as of the symbolic-cognitive and discursive dimension of power – in terms of the capacity to exert an hegemonic influence on policy directions and, hence, on the strategic orientation of policy networks. Finally, the rhetoric of policy networks often tends to neglect the reality of situations in which policy networks are absent, or lack the organizational input or the means for mobilization that are required in order to make their access to the public policy arena possible, consistent, and effective. All of these dimensions are particularly important for local policy, as the connection of (often de-territorialized) policy networks with the (local) dimension of territoriality is crucial in affecting policy outcomes and, especially, in directing them to the pursuit of collective goals. Hence, the connectivity between space, place, and institutions is not only key to granting democratic representativeness and legitimacy to policy choices, but is also a condition for networks to exert an effective policy influence at all (Amin and Thrift 2002). As Le Galès (2001) argues, what emerges from this is an interpretation of networking as the public management of networks that bears significant implications for understanding local politics, since it reaches beyond mere issues of problem-solving and coordination and, rather, hints at the capacity of mobilizing and organizing for context-specific purposes, and related issues of influence and power. Bringing local politics and governance back into the picture is, therefore, the key to understanding policy networks within the concrete courses of action in which they are enacted. At issue, in other terms, are the modes of social and economic embeddedness of networks within local governance regimes. This requires analysis of how policy networks affect local policy arenas, while responding to local attempts at reconstructing public policies based on new interactional and organizational settings. Insights in this direction are offered by recent locality studies. Le Galès (2001), for instance, shows that, in defining policy outcomes, the way networks are horizontally coordinated within a local political context may be more significant than their pre-existence, as expression of autonomous, relatively independent, self-organizing interests. This statement has several consequences. First, while it recognizes its relevance in descriptive-analytical terms, it relativizes networks as a generalizable explanation. Second, it avoids a (reified) view of networks as determinants of local policy outcomes and, rather, places emphasis on the concrete articulation of policy networks in a given political space. The focus of attention becomes the capacity of local polities to organize
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– and even to create – policy networks in view of reconstructing local capacity for collective action. Moving from similar assumptions, I have analyzed the building of “thematic networks” concerned with interconnecting specific policy domains as part of the renewal of urban policy (Gualini 2000). These networks are not only key resources for local mobilization, but also organizational arenas for proactive and innovation-oriented development strategies, the mobilization and steering of which becomes the focus of local politics. The analysis stresses the capacity of local political elites to mobilize, organize, and structure networks as part of the reconstruction of a local governance regime. In particular, the political management of networks becomes, here, a key to connecting developments in “locales” within broader processes of regionalization. Thus, horizontal network management also becomes functional to constructing a vertical hegemony in regional intergovernmental and inter-organizational arenas, as a response to new forms of regionalization of policy-making (Gualini 2004). In such a perspective, features and effects of policy networks appear largely constructed by local politics: that is, shaped by the interests and collective goals of local governance regimes. Interestingly enough, this is recognized in what appears as the least contentious application of network analysis in the study of urban politics: the comparison of policy networks. As John (2000) has argued, in this perspective: the descriptive character of policy networks studies can be used to great effect. Rather than seeking to explain policy outputs and outcomes from networks, the researcher can use the comparative method to explain changes in the network. The network becomes thus what it should usually be: a dependent variable. In this manner, other theories can take the weight of explanation and the researcher can make inferences from the differences and similarities of the networks under study. An interesting example is offered by Fürst and Kilper (1995) who, inspired by Atkinson and Coleman (1992), have attempted to evaluate alternative regionalization approaches based on a concept of “innovation-oriented networking processes,” defined according to the following aims: •
integrating new actors into the policy discussion;
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shifting the weight of established decision makers in social decisions;
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initiating and organizing new forms of cooperation;
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focusing political awareness on new subjects and on new strategies;
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developing new approaches to problem-handling and -solving.
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Such approaches offer useful clues to assessing the influence of public initiatives (for instance, institutional design) in shaping the networking features of policy arenas. By this, networking is recognized as the expression of a strategic orientation and as a function of the agency of local policy elites, connected to the reconstruction of local governance and regulation regimes. By this, however, research also highlights the inherent limitations of the concept of policy networks for assessing local policy and politics. As complex tasks of network management come into play, policy networks and their effects need to be viewed as a function of the capacity of local policy elites and political structures. Thus, a focus “on the integration of different policy networks paves the way to reintroducing politics, legitimacy, public sphere, collective choice” (Le Galès 2001: 170). Far from testifying to the erosion of the state and to the “end of politics,” analyzing policy networks requires inquiring into the redefinition of the role of the (local) state in shaping (local) governance regimes. In terms of their policy outcomes – rather than of alleged “essentialist features” – policy networks may be thus interpreted as part and parcel of the production and reproduction of local regimes of governance and regulation, intended as “emergent” constructs (Jessop 1995, 2000b). Clearly, this implies that, in order to address the outcomes of policy-making, the notion of policy networks must be embedded in an understanding of governance not as an (inherently a-political) alternative to public policy, but rather as an (inherently political) form of governing activity through which societal inputs gain access to public policy. Governance in Urban and Regional Research: A Summary Statement The heuristic potential of the notion of governance, as it has been developed in social and political science, consists in addressing structural changes in the relationships between the state, the market, and civil society and, in particular, their effects on the features of public policy-making. In this perspective, governance is, in my view, a useful and usable notion. There is broad agreement, however, about the fact that, in order to be so, governance should not be considered a theoretical concept, but rather a framing concept (Judge et al. 1995: 3; Stoker 1995: 18). This has important implications. First, it relativizes its explanatory claims. The relevance of the notion should not be assessed on the basis of its explanatory potential – i.e., of its capacity to provide verifiable/falsifiable causal proposition – but rather of its structuring potential – i.e., of its capacity to structure research programs, raising relevant questions on emergent phenomena, and to address them with a consistent strategy of inquiry. Second, it relativizes the ontological scope of definitions. While it is crucial to keep clarity and consistency in use, it is also important to recognize that, as it addresses a broad and multifaceted domain of phenomena, governance allows for a reasonable pluralism of research perspectives. Third, it means that different disciplinary approaches need not be considered as rival theories: rather, they may offer different contributions to enlightening
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specific facets of the complex and multidimensional issues involved in new forms of urban and regional governance. Combining different specific research traditions may thus contribute to a better understanding of this change, and open the way to conceptual renewal. Accordingly, my understanding of governance converges toward the following stipulative definition: emergent patterns of policy-making (a) dealing with the resolution of collective problems (b) at the threshold between state, markets, and civil society (c) in terms which may be held accountable to institutions of representative democracy. This reflects some key assumptions. While it stresses issues of the attainment of collective goals that are not reducible to the output (or the performance) of governmental institutions alone, it also rejects a dichotomy between governance and government. Just as the study of government cannot be reduced to a (classical) state-centered, institutionalist view on politics and policy-making, the study of governance cannot be reduced to a notion that conceives collective action as an alternative to government and the state. Issues of collective action, on the contrary, are central to the constitution of the public domain of state politics. In this perspective, the focus of governance research does not exclude statutory governmental tasks and institutionalized patterns of governmental activity, but, rather, includes their trajectories of change and innovation in the pursuit of collective goals and of new sources of effectiveness and legitimacy. In summary, recognizing the relevance of this notion for research goes hand in hand with three key statements. First, governance activity does not exclude the state. On the contrary, the concept of governance is precisely aimed at inquiring into the ways in which the state intervenes in realizing forms of socio-economic regulation and into its changing patterns of agency, legitimacy, and effectiveness. Second, governance activity, as a combination of forms of state, market, and social regulation, is anything but new. Rather than using the concept in an unqualified way, as if referring to an epiphany, or as generalizable explanation of change, research on governance should be intended as an exploration into the emergent structured patterns of this relationship. In other words, as it recognizes that structural changes are under way in this relationship and in the way it is framed and institutionalized, the attempt to conceptualize this in terms of “governance” should be understood as an heuristic effort aimed at highlighting similarities and differences with the help of new interpretive frames. Third, governance activity should, accordingly, be explored in terms of its context specificity and variation. This implies deploying adequate approaches and methods to the study of local, i.e., space-time specific situations, rather than the mere application or – as it were – imposition of given models of the political order to local situations. Governance, in this, bears a key dimension of institutional experimentation. These considerations, finally, bring us back to the main question: how the notion of governance and its correlates may be usable in the framework of urban and regional research. This question cannot be addressed assuming governance as an explanans, but rather as a heuristic framework for structuring
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research on change in the territorial dimension of public policy. In my view, at least three directions can be identified, all of which imply a focus on how the spatial scales of public policy are being redefined through governance practices. The first direction concerns the need to develop consistent approaches to comparative research on urban and regional governance. The second direction concerns the emergence of experimental and informal practices of governance and their relationship with institutionalized rules and routines. The third direction concerns the potential of innovative practices of governance for generating new forms of collective action and their stability and reproduction. A first step is made, in the last section, toward defining a possible framework for comparative research. Inquiring into Local Governance Capacity: Challenges for Comparative Research If we accept the stipulative definition of governance proposed, urban and regional research face the specific challenge of operationalizing it in the analysis of local contexts. First, this raises a dual difficulty shared by glocalization studies in general: this consists, on the one hand, in the need to avoid positing deterministic causal relationships between alleged global processes and local response to them; and, on the other hand, in the need to avoid falling into a localist trap in analysis and explanation, by too readily (and possibly ideologically) assuming the existence of a local dimension of the actors’ identity, preferences, and of the definition of policy arenas. In this, it should be kept in mind that local is not only a social construction, but also – hermeneutically – a construct of research. In a comparative perspective, more specifically, research faces problems related to the notion of governance itself. Addressing the question of governance capacity – in line with our definition – at the local level stresses the need to focus on the differentiation and variation of its local conditions, and this amounts to asking how far a notion as governance may be viable in providing a framework for a comparative analysis. The question is justified if we look at three inherent analytical challenges of the notion of governance: first, the ongoing and, to a large extent, tentative state of conceptualization of the notion itself; second, the inherently multidimensional character of its objects; and third, the socially constructed and emergent character of its objects (Jessop 1995). A further specific challenge to research on governance and to its comparative adoption is related to its spatial application: that is, to the task of backing analysis of the multidimensional determinants of governance with adequate geographical conceptualizations of the relational and scalar forms taken by its spatiality. This task is the more difficult, in a comparative perspective, as reference to non-contiguous, relational, or – as they have been defined – “nonEuclidean” forms of spatiality (Friedmann 1993; Graham and Healey 1999) – if metaphorically – shapes our understanding of agency and interaction in urban and regional contexts. In a perspective of governance, the increasing discrepancy
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between the patterns of spatiality that define territorial development dynamics, on the one hand, and the institutional set-up of public policy-making, on the other hand, results in a dissociation between territorial jurisdictions (as based on historically consolidated patterns of territorial sovereignty), territorial constituencies (as local actors are increasingly detached from formal bonds with localities), and functional competencies (as they are increasingly forced to redefine themselves across and according to varying territorial scales). Hence, addressing conditions for governance to cope with in local contexts requires an understanding of the specific spatial patterns taken by this dissociation, and the ways in which the multiple, flexible forms of spatiality involved may be connected, or recomposed, in order to pursue an effective and legitimate capacity of public action with regard to collective problems. These are crucial and interconnected aspects in defining a comparative approach to governance research.3 Governance Regimes and Local Conditions for Collective Action As a crucial aspect in our definition of public governance, the dimension of collective action is an important aspect of the assessment of local governance capacity. In recent years, the issue of capacity-building with reference to collective action has become an important topic of territorial (urban and regional) research, either from the perspective of sociology (Pichierri 1997; Bagnasco and Le Galès 2000), of policy analysis (Maloney et al. 2000), of economic geography (Amin and Thrift 1995; Morgan 1997), or of strategic spatial planning (Innes et al. 1994; Healey 1997a; Salet and Faludi 2000; Gualini 2001; Cars et al. 2002). Besides differences in approach and vocabulary, such trends in research on urban and regional policy converge on an interest for collective action as an emergent (and provisional) construct of patterned forms of agency focusing around a shared definition of a common policy goal, in which spatial planning and policies may play an important proactive and constructive role. A key question of research in a comparative perspective is hence the identification of the conditions and dimensions that contribute to the emergence of collective action. In their recent discussions of emergent modes of governance that underline a revival of cities as autonomous actors in the European policy arena, authors such as Bagnasco and Le Galès (2000), while raising the issue, emphasize the need for caution in identifying cities as collective actors and, accordingly, the need to study the conditions under which such a collective dimension of their agency is recognizable. This has of course a tradition – albeit under different denominations – particularly in urban studies. The need to develop comparative tools for inquiring into political action capacity within the specificity and uniqueness of local socio-economic and institutional contexts lies behind a concept that came into vogue in recent decades, that of “urban regimes” (Harding 1994, 1997; Stoker 1995). Unlike US-originated attempts at characterizing urban politics – such as growth machines and urban growth coalitions, which have been often
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criticized for their considerable degree of context-specificity, making its application to the European context difficult and, above all, heuristically less fertile – the concept of urban regime has been adopted by urban researchers in terms more likely to be capable of accounting for the diversity and, in particular, for the peculiar and complex multi-level dynamics of interests representation and intergovermental relationships found in Europe. Comparative applications of the concept of urban regimes (Keating 1991; Stoker and Mossberger 1994), in positing the centrality of collective action, have pointed at differences and variations in the territorial policies of European post-welfarist states, calling for the identification of types of urban regimes that bear a significant importance. As we shall see, in fact, the notion of regime bears more than a superficial similarity to that of mode of governance. Yet, research on urban regimes still presents a prevailing focus on issues of economic growth and on bureaucracies and governments in dealing with them, and provides less well-developed frameworks for encompassing other dimensions of governance, including spatial strategy formation, spatial planning, and policies for socio-spatial cohesion. Above all, the concept of urban regime seems less capable of grasping an important feature of governance previously discussed: the deployment of innovative ways for defining and pursuing specific collective urban goals. This point is addressed, for instance, by Pichierri (1997), who identifies five dimensions that are crucial for defining the capacity of cities to act in the pursuit of collective goals – and hence to arise as potential collective actors: •
the presence of common interests (real or perceived) in the city;
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the capacity for collective decision making, including mechanisms of boundary-setting (inclusion-exclusion) and conflict resolution in the sphere of politics and institutions;
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the forms of external and internal representation;
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the presence and nature of integration mechanisms;
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the capacity for innovation.
As important as the local availability and combination of these factors, moreover, are the process conditions under which a capacity for collective action may arise. This is expressed by reference to institutional capacity-building. Governance Capacity and Institutional Opportunity Structures The focus on institutional capacity as a condition for the constitution of forms of collective action has been developed in urban and regional research and in planning theory (Amin and Thrift 1995; Healey 1997a; Salet and Faludi 2000;
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Gualini 2001; Cars et al. 2002) as part of a broad multi-disciplinary thinking focusing on the dynamics of policy experimentation and institutional change in new governance environments. The source of inspiration is a distinctive newinstitutionalist stance in the social sciences, which understands institutional capacity as an outcome of interactive processes involving practices in the negotiation and social construction of meanings, and possibly favoring the deployment of collective learning abilities. An important premise is an evolutive conception of institutional change that encompasses both formal and informal dimensions of institutions: not the statutory features of formal institutional structures, but also the informal dimension of socio-cultural rules and routines of conduct. Accordingly, institutional change involves interplay between aspects of institutional design (i.e., the regulative input related to specific formal status of institutions) and of institutional capacity (i.e., the enabling dimension of institutions related to their ability to sustain social cohesion and to generate collective action). Hence, attention is directed toward the generative dimension of building institutional capacity – or institutional capital – as the endogenous result of this interplay, rather than of exogenous inputs: that is, as the result of self-policing practices that encompass “the incremental self-transformations that frequently are involved in the process of supplying institutions” (Ostrom 1990: 190). A key mechanism in fostering institutional change is seen in the actors’ and organizations’ quest for new sources of institutional legitimacy and effectiveness: the enabling of effective forms of purposive action is seen as strictly related to the development of new forms of legitimation, dependent on the actor’s or organization’s perception of their position within an “institutional field” (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). Accordingly, institutional change is understood as a process of institutionalization resulting from situational and contingent combinations between elements of purposive and strategic action (i.e., individual or organizational abilities) and the opportunity structures that may favor a reframing and realignment of identities, preferences, and roles of actors and organizations involved in an institutional field. Therefore, this approach introduces a crucial focus on the dimensions of mutual adaptation and learning in institutionalization processes, in which the evolution of regulatory settings is correlated with practices of a symbolic-cognitive order. The notion of institutional opportunity structure may contribute to building an heuristic framework for this direction of research. In analogy with that of political opportunity structures – developed in social sciences and in applications to urban research (Maloney et al. 2000) – the notion is directed toward inquiring into the conditions that may enhance and shape the institutional capacity-building, focusing on the combination between three sets of properties of an institutional field: •
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the formal institutional settings, or the formal sets of rules and practices that define institutional regimes;
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the informal institutional settings, i.e., the prevailing procedures, strategies, modes of interaction (Scharpf 1997), and forms of relationship that define routinized patterns of behavior;
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the symbolic-cognitive and discursive context: the complex of frames, narratives, images, scripts, and the like, through which communication and mutual understandings are produced, reproduced, or transformed.
The emergence of forms of institutional innovation and their consolidation and persistence (institutionalization) in space-time are substantially affected by the features of institutional opportunity structures. Within the framework defined by their combined properties, the capacity of institutional contexts to adapt and change implies not only inputs of purposive action, but also their capacity to “fit” the features of the institutional field as a whole. A most important consequence, in our perspective of governance research, is the emphasis placed on the interplay between institutional conditions and factors of social and political culture in facilitating or constraining the emergence of collective action. Understanding governance capacity as a result of innovative institutional practices reintroduces the role of local societal and political factors in the mobilization of collective resources, as well as the distribution of power, influence, and opportunities – and possibly the hegemonic bias – that may define their patterns and directions. Local politics re-enters the scene as a significant factor for understanding the specific features of glocal territorial connections. Governance Capacity in Comparative Perspective: Inquiring into Modes of Governance Notions such as institutional capacity-building and institutional opportunity structure underline the need for multidimensional approaches to studying local conditions for effective and legitimate governance activity. In a comparative perspective, this implies adopting an approach to governance research that explores this multidimensionality, in an effort to identify specific context-dependent combinations of conditions and outcomes of governance. An approach to defining a comparatively robust research agenda has been advanced by Le Galès (2002). His proposal develops from a conceptual framework centered on local governance as the emergent capacity of constituting forms of collective action within local societies, characterized according to their specific institutional, political, and socio-economical features and to their historical and path-dependent patterns and trajectories of development. At the core of the proposal stands the notion of modes of governance. Le Galès defines the mode of governance as a context-specific combination of a set of dimensions that constitute specific units of inquiry and, accordingly, can rely on specific traditions and frameworks of analysis from political and social science. The key dimensions that are combined in identifying modes of governance are defined as follows (Le Galès 2002: 268–71):
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Conditions for modes of governance: local society and political institutions; this dimension comprises classical analyses of features of local societies that are rooted in formal institutions as well as in the dominant models of social and economic organizations, including aspects such as: •
institutional and political resources: types of governments and their mutual relations, degree of integration or fragmentation, degree of autonomy or dependence;
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economic situation and patterns of economic organization (firms, labor markets, economic interests);
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social structure: groups, patterns of inclusion and exclusion, patterns of domination;
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forms of organization of civil society; associations, parties.
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Coalition-building and forms of institutionalization of collective action: this includes the analysis of forms of mobilization, representation, and mutual relationships among interest groups and their forms of institutionalization.
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Political orientation of collective action: this concerns the prevailing value orientation of political systems and political formations, as represented by classical models in the analysis of the welfare-state political systems.
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Outcomes: that is, the dimensions related to the results of the implementation of policies and to their patterns with regard to their impact, to their selective (inclusive-exclusive) and to their innovative features with regard to different societal sectors and groups or individuals and to different policy issues.
As the author makes clear, while inquiring into each single dimension may draw on established models, their combination is necessarily tentative. This constitutes the real challenge of local governance research: given the specificity and – to a certain extent – the uniqueness of modes of governance in different cities and regions, it cannot rely on deductive models nor lean on simplistic taxonomies. Accordingly, even if certain patterns may be recognized in a relatively easy way, comparative research cannot yet rely on a viable typology of “modes of governance.” The heuristic aim, however, is that of identifying conditions for effective governance practices in light of recognizable patterns of institutional, political, and socio-economic embeddedness, and of advancing cautious generalizations across different contexts.
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Conclusions: Toward a Topology of Governance? Reintroducing space and place in our understanding of emerging forms of governance requires new conceptions of the territoriality of socio-economic, political, and institutional processes. In this sense, a creative use of a notion such as networks – and others – may offer significant contributions. The challenge, however, is to apply these new conceptions of spatiality to understanding the specific spatio-temporal fix of governance processes. Unless this challenge is addressed, the contribution of networks to understanding local policy processes and policy outcomes is bound to remain metaphorical. Defining a viable comparative framework is an important step in this direction. As I have argued, a spatialization of modes of governance may represent, in this sense, a significant contribution for comparative research. Behind this proposal stand three critical assumptions. First, governance research requires a critical stance toward a priori assumptions of space-place boundedness. It needs to exit the localist trap implied in taking localities and locales for granted and in neglecting the increasing influence of multi-level or non-space-bounded policy arenas. Research on urban policy and politics needs to address a spatialized analysis of modes of governance in order to grasp the specific relationships between factors of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of governance activity. Second, and conversely, the analysis of policy networks must overcome programmatic assumptions of space-place unboundedness. Networks, in particular in its most unreflective uses, is increasingly becoming a spatially disembedded if not a-spatialized metaphor. It opens to debate whether the notion of networks may be able to define a meaningful conception of spatiality. In urban and regional studies, however, this may only become the case if network analysis contributes to understanding the specific patterns of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of governance activity in which policy networks are embedded. This means, again, focusing on the embeddedness and on the spatiotemporal fix of networking practices. Third, the notion of networks cannot exhaust the need for new relational or post-Euclidean conceptions of spatiality in interpreting territorial dimension governance. Behind the unchallenged fortune of the network paradigm hides the risk of hegemony of an ethereal, immaterial, and paradoxically monodimensional conception of geographic space. Governance research, however, requires representations reflecting a reality of multiple spatiality logics as they are concretely enacted through the specific spatio-temporal fix taken by policy practices. Beyond mere taxonomic tools, governance research needs to identify modes of governance that reflect specific differentials and variations in the spatiality of local action: we might call this, perhaps, a topology of governance.
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Notes 1
2 3
Definitions and discussions of the notion of “public governance” are plentiful. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to review them thoroughly, I shall at least mention some key references: Kooiman (1993); Jessop (1995, 2000b); Rhodes (1996); Stoker (1995); Pierre (2000); John (2001); Bevir et al. (2003). The notion of networking is central to distinctive research traditions in policy analysis. For useful reviews of the policy network literature, see: Dowding (1995); Le Galès and Thatcher (1995); Börzel (1997); Thatcher (1998); John (2000); Le Galès (2001). The reflections on comparative governance research presented here were developed in the framework of COMET - Competitive Metropolises: Economic Transformation, Labor Market and Competition in European Agglomerations. COMET is a research project financially supported by the European Commission (DG Research, 5th Framework Program, key action “The City of Tomorrow & Cultural Heritage,” project no. EVK4_CT_2001_00050, see: http://www.comet.ac.at) and coordinated by A. Borsdorf at the Institute for Urban and Regional Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. The scientific concept was designed by M. Paal and developed by A. Borsdorf, M. Paal and A. Pöckl. Between 2001 and 2004, 16 European partners – including local governmental end users – have analyzed seven metropolitan regions: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Copenhagen, Strasbourg and Vienna. The sub-project that forms the background for this essay deals with an analysis of the different strategies to handle the consequences of tertiarization and suburbanization of services adopted in the case-study areas. The empirical results of this sub-project are being edited for publication by W. Salet and E. Gualini.
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COMMENTARY
Governance Capacity, Policy Networks, and Territorial Specificities Patsy Healey
The chapters in this section explore the extent to which a focus on networks helps in understanding the ongoing re-configuring of governance forms and capacities that is so strongly evident in the contemporary period. Whatever the definition of “governance” used, and this, as Gualini argues, is a much contested term, planning researchers and practitioners are increasingly aware of the emergence of new relations of policy-making and new practices developed to address collective action problems. These connect the spheres of state, market, and civil society in new ways, which supplement and sometimes challenge or replace the institutions of the traditional democratic state. For the urban and regional planning field, a key dimension of this re-configuration is the disruption of established connections between governance institutions and formal territorial jurisdictions. Planners have always been frustrated by the way that the boundaries of municipalities, provinces, regions, and nation states create barriers to addressing critical spatial connectivities, such as the place–work–movement links of cities, metropolitan regions and river basin management. The development of the governance capacity to address such challenges has become even more acute in our present times. This arises not just because of the broad issues affecting formal government systems such as fiscal crisis and organizational inertia. As emphasized in earlier sections of this book, social and economic relations are increasingly stretched in space and time, with the result that the webs of relations that transect a place – neighborhood, city, region – may have very variable associations with the territories they pass through. In this context, a focus on networks may provide a useful window through which to explore the re-configuring of governance forms and dynamics, especially as regards the development of governance capacity to address critical issues of territorial development.
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The chapters in this section of the book make very different kinds of contribution to exploring the value of a “network” perspective on governance change. Webster and Lai focus on the widespread emergence of private governance mechanisms to manage new residential neighborhoods and condominiums, using the lens of transaction cost theory to do so. Sager and Ravlum use a similar perspective to explore the development of collaborative governance relations among public agencies in the transport field in Norway. Both Webster and Lai, and Sager and Ravlum position the concept of “networks,” at least initially, within the familiar triad of “hierarchy, market, and network” forms of organizing collective action. Van Ark and Edelenbos draw on more sociological approaches from the planning and management literatures to explore the role of “trust” in binding together a territorially focused collaborative “network” that emerged from struggles against the plans of a higher tier of government. Gualini addresses directly the value of the “network concept” to understanding governance change. He draws on a sociological variant of the institutionalist perspectives developing within policy analysis and planning to provide a clear positioning of the concept of policy networks within debate on the nature and dynamics of emergent governance forms. In this Commentary, I focus on two issues that cut through the chapters. First, what can be learned from the chapters about the development of new governance capacities, especially as regards the capacity for “place governance”? Second, how far does the network concept help in evaluating emergent capacities? Building New Governance Capacities As the authors all acknowledge, there is a substantial literature across many disciplines relating the emergence of new governance dynamics and forms to changing economic imperatives, changing social expectations, the crises in twentieth-century state forms, and the experience of the weak steering capacity of both fragmented and strong state government. What clues do they offer as to the nature of emergent governance forms and the significance of a focus on “place” within them? None of the authors accepts the value of a simple typology of hierarchy, market, and network to describe the morphology of governance. Webster and Lai consider that, if a “network” form of governance arises, it is transitional from one consolidated organizational form to another. For them, the dual opposition between state and market forms of collective action still has value. Their chapter raises the definitional issues of the distinction between a network and a specific organizational form. They describe how new organizational forms, both physically and organizationally “gated,” are arising to manage the microenvironments of private residential developments, grounded in private contract law. These are not entirely new and many examples can be found historically of such arrangements. But to what extent are such organizational forms the equivalent of “networks”? Members of such organizations may connect to
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residents through various networks. They may connect to other agencies with resources needed by a residential complex through particular networks. But is the organization as such a network? An organization has a formal, usually legal, existence, clear structures and boundaries. A network is a web of social relations constituted by norms, values, and practices, with more or less fluid dynamics and variable degrees of boundedness (Berry et al. 2004; Booher and Innes 2002; Hajer 2003; Kickert et al. 1997; Roberts 2004). A more relevant question as regards emerging governance capacity might be how and how far these new private neighborhood management organizations connect to deliberation about, and influence over, wider place management issues, such as transport provision or water management. Does their proliferation impede or enhance civic engagement at a higher scale? Does the degree of such engagement depend on the nature of the organizational form as such? Or is it linked to the quality of the social networks connecting residents of such areas to the wider public realm? Sager and Ravlum focus on the capacity for coordination among governance agencies. Their analysis of the attempt to bring together different organizations in the transport field in Norway provides an example of a national initiative to create inter-organizational networks through which to deliberate on policy priorities. This initiative was impeded by the different orientations of the agencies, the different spatial scales of their focus and their prior experience of collaborative strategy-making. They also differed in their organizational dynamics, some operating in more hierarchical ways, others responding primarily to market signals, with evidence of transversal working co-existing with both hierarchy and market. The authors argue that inter-agency networks cannot be created just by policy edict. In their case, interests and perspectives were too far apart to generate significant mutual dependency. This suggests that governance initiatives that aim to encourage the formation of more transversal, web-like coordination networks need to pay careful attention to both prior experience and to the incentive structure for cooperation. This confirms findings from a range of examples elsewhere (Hajer and Wagenaar 2003a; Innes and Booher 1999). Van Ark and Edelenbos provide a contrasting case where the struggle against a higher level policy initiative develops a mutual interest among diverse local organizations that had previously been in conflict with each other. From struggle with each other, participants turned to building collective capacity, first to confront the province government and then to work with the province government. Through this capacity, bonded by the glue of “trust,” issues that had been log-jammed for a long time as well as new challenges arising over time could be addressed. In this case, state, market, and civil society actors mingle together, building a transversal and multi-level governance capacity. This case adds to the, by now substantial, array of cases illustrating the power of collaborative processes, in specific contexts, to generate enduring governance capacity. Gualini draws the discussion on governance capacity together. He emphasizes that most forms of governance activity which deal with place-related collective action issues typically link civil society, market, and state in some
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way. Networks as such are thus not a new governance form, displacing hierarchy and market. Instead, a focus on networks concentrates attention on the forms and dynamics of linkages, on network morphology and architecture, on network norms, values and practices, and on the institutional work these perform. Gualini issues a strong challenge to over-generalization about emergent governance forms and capacities. He argues that emerging governance forms are highly context-dependent and located in specific institutional dynamics. If so, then the “network” metaphor needs to be used with great care in analyzing emerging governance forms and capacities and in shaping policy initiatives to encourage the emergence of particular forms. Following this argument, it is not the existence of “networks” of social relations in governance dynamics that is new. Governance activity has always operated through complex webs of relations through which formal arrangements are brought to life. What is distinctive in the current period is the analytical and policy focus on networks and connectivities, rather than formal procedures and organizational forms or self-interested strategic action. Such a focus may be particularly valuable in periods of governance re-configuration, where strategic actors may seek to develop “transversal” linkages, mobilizing attention around issues that cut across the established landscape of governance organizations. Urban and regional planners are likely to be interested in, and active in creating, such transversal linkages around a policy focus on place qualities and territorial development.
Evaluating Emergent Governance Networks As Gualini argues, attention to networks in governance contexts may have an analytical focus or a normative one. Analytically, researchers sometimes aim to map a landscape of policy networks, using concepts of policy communities, epistemic communities, and “communities of practice” (Rhodes 1997; Haas 1992; Wenger 1998). A second research focus explores the relational dynamics of policy networks, as they re-configure their connectivities in a changing governance context. Sager and Ravlum’s chapter provides an example of this second approach. A third research focus is on the internal dynamics through which diverse stakeholders come together in new arenas – partnerships, collaboratives, platforms, and working groups, and seek to build new relations of understanding and trust through which governance issues that had proved difficult in the past could be addressed (Healey 1998a; Booher and Innes 2002; Huxham 1996; Innes and Booher 1999; Lois and Smutny 2001). Van Ark and Edelenbos’ chapter provides an example of this third approach, with valuable insights for the second as well. All three areas of research contribute to developing an understanding of the relation between institutional context, existing governance practices, and the generative force of new governance initiatives. Normatively, these three areas of research throw some light on the policy question of when it may be desirable to encourage the emergence of new forms of governance network, and how to foster particular qualities within them. The
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second and third approaches also suggest criteria for assessing how to develop particular qualities, such as greater knowledgeability, inclusivity, and leverage. None of these approaches give support for the promotion of a generalized concept of “network governance” as a normative proposition. Webster and Lai, and Gualini explicitly reject this idea. Instead, as Gualini argues, the most useful contribution of the “network” metaphor is as a descriptive tool, to encourage a focus on the relational dynamics and connectivities of governance processes and forms. There is no necessary reason why an informal policy network should perform better at undertaking a particular collective action task than a formal government organization. Such a network may or may not reduce risk, reduce transaction costs, build trust, advance understanding, operate more inclusively, and promote sustainability. Without evaluating precisely what institutional work a particular array of social networks involved in governance activity actually performs in a specific situation, we can make no statement about the quality of governance “networks,” still less of “network governance.” The preoccupation with networks in governance contexts thus holds out no special promise to planners that “new times” are arriving when more attention is given to territorially tricky policy issues, and when old bastions of sectoral government are re-configured into more fluid relations, with a more flexible, nimble capacity to solve complex collective action problems at the urban and regional scale. Instead, the interest in networks should help to concentrate planners’ minds on understanding the dynamics of the institutional landscape in which they operate, help in identifying where new connectivities are worth developing, and suggest how to enrich the qualities of such new relational dynamics. Thus, while the “network society” as used by Castells (1996) may stand as a general metaphor for a social world in which global connectivities are very apparent, at the level of urban and regional governance the network concept is most helpful as a unit of analysis (relational qualities) in research and a consideration in institutional design (qualities of linkages) in policy development. Rather than a distinct governance form, building networks, “networking,” may be considered as a strategy to create transversal linkages that cut across the formal structures, practices, and boundaries of established organizations, creating linkages in the interstices between them. In periods of intense governance re-configuration, it may well be that such transversal linkages become of greater significance than traditional organizations in terms of the collective action work they perform. But without some anchoring in law or in legitimate political structures, interstitial, transversal networks are inherently unstable. A proliferation of networks uncertainly linked to formal structures may unsettle the legitimacy of governance processes and lead to major problems of efficiency. And new networks over time may endure to become the old networks others struggle to displace at a later date. A governance landscape dominated by efforts to create informal, transversal networks may signal a newly emerging dynamic mode of governance forms and practices to another. It is certainly important that the research effort on the relational capacities of governance activity continues to explore the nature of newly emerging networks, and their impact on the governance dimensions of urban and regional development.
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INDEX
Aalborg, Denmark 129, 130 activist mediation 144 activist planning 180 adjectival city 24–7, 30–1, 33, 59–60 advocacy coalitions 82–3 aesthetics of mobility 71 African-Americans 140, 212 Agnelli, Umberto 90 Albrechts, L. 45, 149 Alexander, Christopher 115, 122 Alexander, E.R. 246, 251 Amsterdam 162; transport planning 68–73, 76–8 Ansell, C.K. 46, 47–8, 49 Appadurai, A. 108 Arrow, Kenneth 237 assimilation 216–17 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning 1 Association of European Schools of Planning 1 Atkinson, M. 296 Australia, discourse network and urban transport 50–3, 54–5, 59 authority 146, 153, 155
Berry, F.S. 3, 57 Bertolini, Luca 121 best practices 32, 284 Bhaskar, R. 55 Bladerunner (film) 135, 140 Bolter, J. 95, 96 Bomberg, E.E. 82, 83, 85, 121 bonding 189, 191, 219, 220 Booher, D.E. 146 Börzel, T.A. 82 boundary shift 216–18, 219, 220 bounded space 285 Bourdieu, Pierre 144n8 Brail, R.K. 129 Brazil, community networks 183, 184, 185, 186, 189–90, 193–4, 222 bridging 186, 189, 191, 219, 220 Brint, S. 188–9, 190–1 Broadacre City 115, 120 Brosius, Peter 23n15 Buchanan, James 229, 235, 243, 244 Buell, Lawrence 134, 135, 136, 139, 163 bureaucracy 2, 4, 27, 49, 223 Burton, R.M. 246 business literature, networks 58, 59
Bagnasco, A. 300 Baltimore, MD 141, 170–5, 222 Bangkok 231, 238 Barabási, A.-L. 113, 118 Bartholomew, Harland 135 Baum, Howell 141, 221 Bauman, Zygmunt 55, 189 Belgium, planning culture 149 Bellah, Robert 191 Benz, A. 81 Berger, John 131 Berlin 107, 136
Caldeira, T. 234 California 40, 41, 218; see also Los Angeles; San Francisco Callon, M. 52 Calvert, R.L. 269n1 Cambridge, UK 155, 162 Campbell, D. 247 Campbell, Scott 134 capacity-building 223, 300, 301, 308–10 Capello, Roberta 229 capitalism 135 Cassidy, John 101
339
Index
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Castells, Manuel 2, 3, 5–6, 9, 10, 11, 13–22, 28, 36, 41–2, 45, 46, 48, 56n1, 59, 81, 95, 128, 146, 184, 187, 192, 193, 194, 198, 208, 209, 224, 240, 244, 311 center/periphery 120–2 Central America, disaster recovery 197–210 central place theory 28 Cerdà, I. 115 Certeau, Michel de 136 Chicago, IL 38–9, 129, 130, 131 Chicago School of Urban Sociology 26, 217, 220 China, private planning and governance 231, 233–4, 238 choice 181 Christaller, Walter 28 citizen participation 179; see also participation civic culture 194 civil society 5, 10–11, 17–19, 21, 22, 61, 169, 187, 194, 195, 196, 286, 287, 297, 307, 309, 310 Cleveland 180 clubs 229–45 coalition-building 154, 304 Coase, Ronald 242, 244 co-existence 216 Coleman, W. 296 collaboration 183, 186; Netherlands 271–83, 308, 309; Norwegian transport 246–70, 308, 309; see also synergy collective action 186, 189, 195, 210, 240, 245, 298, 300–1, 303, 304, 307, 308, 310, 311; see also community action Commission of the European Communities White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness, and Employment 87 commitment 271–83, 273, 279–80 common interest developments 229–45, 308–9 common urban narratives 132, 133, 136–42, 144, 161 communalism 22 communications code formation 198 communicative action 9–23, 32, 33, 59 communicative planning 247 communitarianism 32 communities of practice 310 community 57, 141, 169–70, 182, 184, 223 community action 169–82, 188 community networks 183–96, 222, 223–4; disaster recovery 197–210, 223
340
community participation 179 community stories see common urban narratives competition 258, 269, 289 competitive cities 237–8 complexity thinking 59 connectivity 72–3, 310, 311 Considine, M. 270n4 context 127 contract 241–2, 247, 274–5, 280–1, 282, 283 contract theory 270n6 Cooley, Charles 169 cooperation see collaboration coordination 246–9, 309 Cornes, Richard 229 corridors 150, 151, 259–60 Cosgrove, Denis 100 critical theory 12, 234 cross-cutting loyalties 216, 218–19, 220 cross-cutting networks 224 Crowston, K. 246 cyberspace see ICT Dasgupta, P. 274 Davis, Joseph E. 141 Davis, M. 234 Deakin, S. 248 Dear, Michael J. 25, 128, 144n7 decentralization 2, 72, 73 DeLeon, R.E. 127 deliberative democracy 21, 33, 59, 61 dematerialization 72 democracy 2–3, 11, 21, 33, 81, 82, 135; developing countries 184, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195; networked polity 48, 49, 55, 56, 59, 61 demonstration 2 density 120, 121, 122 Denzau, A.T. 49, 51, 54, 56 deregulation 189, 286 Derrida, Jacques 55 design 106–7, 116–17, 119 deterritorialization 3, 285, 305 developing countries, ICT-enforced community networks 183–96, 223, 224–5 Dewey, John 19, 21, 22n3 digital technologies 143 disasters, recovery from 197–210, 223 discourse 83–4 discourse networks 45–56, 59 Dupuy, G. 111–12, 114, 117
Index
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Easterling, Keller 95 Eckersley, R. 47, 56 Eckstein, Barbara 132–3, 138, 143 ecological modernization 84, 87, 92 economic geography 300 economic sociology 270n6, 288 economy: and place 34; and urbanity 68–70, 72 education, community action 171–5, 177–8, 180, 181, 222 El Salvador, disaster recovery 198, 200, 202, 209, 210n3 end of city accounts 96–103 end of history 135 environment 67, 84, 131; discourse networks 46–7, 51, 55 environmentalism 13, 14, 17, 18, 20, 42, 54, 140 epistemic communities 1, 5, 50, 82–3, 146, 310 ethnic identity 13, 220 European Center for Infrastructure Studies (ECIS) 90 European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT) 87 European Investment Bank (EIB) 88, 90 European Planning Studies 93n1 European Railway Agency 91 European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) 88 European Research Advisory Council (ERRAC) 92 European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) 85–7, 91 European Spatial Planning 105 European Union: government/governance and High-speed Rail System 81–94; social diversity 212 European Union Urban Initiative 119 Evans, Peter 216 evolutionary approach 74, 79, 121 experience 15, 18 Finnigan, Ruth 131, 136, 137, 139, 144n2 Fischer, Claude 57 Fischer, F. 84 Fishkin, J.S. 56 Fishman, R. 115 Florida, Richard 144n10 Flyvbjerg, B. 55, 84, 129, 130 Foldvary, F. 234 Forester, John 12, 84, 138–9
Foucault, M. 84, 163 fractal geometry 122 France 84–5, 89, 148 Frankfurt School 12, 16, 17 Frenchman, Dennis 107 Friedmann, John 29, 128 Friend, Y. 246 Frissen, P. 2 Fürst, D. 296 Galloway, G.B. 246 game theory 265, 270n6 gated city 25 gated communities 230–45 Geddes, Patrick 71, 161 Germany 84–5, 148, 212; see also Berlin Geuss, Raymond 12, 13 Giddens, A. 10, 17, 18, 290 Gleeson, B.J. 52 Glendon, Mary 12 global city 28, 29, 130–1 global/local 36, 41, 43, 290 globalization 15, 19, 57, 128, 131, 147, 194, 284, 287, 311 glocalization 285, 299 good practices 32, 284 governance 47, 54, 268, 307–11; and coordination 246–9; and government 5, 271, 286, 298; local 284–306; and network complexity 146–60; networks as 82, 239–40; rail transport 93; strategic spatial planning 152–60, 161–4; strategies for network city 104; urban and regional research 284, 285–99; see also networked polity government: cooperative transport networks 246–70, 308, 309; and governance 5, 271, 286, 298; and local community networks 187, 191, 194, 196; and network complexity 146, 153–5; US planning culture 180–1; see also local government; state Graham, Stephen 3, 29, 111, 231 Gramsci, A. 10, 21 Granovetter, M. 239, 241 graph theory 122 Grossman, P. 49, 54 Grusin, R. 95, 96 Haas, P.M. 82–3 Habermas, Jürgen 10, 11–13, 15–22, 48, 59, 248–9
341
Index
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habitus 144n8 Hajer, Maarten A. 50, 51, 52, 84 Hardin, Russell 270n5, 272–3 Harding, A. 288 Harris, D. 247 Harvard structuralists 57–8 Harvey, David 14, 128, 135–6 Haythornthwaite, C. 95 Healey, Patsy 105–6, 129 Heclo, H. 293 Hendriks, J. 277, 278 hierarchy 2, 4, 287; inter-agency transport planning 257–9, 264, 265, 266, 268, 269; and networked polity 45, 47, 49, 56, 59; and networks 27, 32, 82, 188, 190, 230, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 247–9, 271, 272, 308, 309; private planning and governance 230, 236, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245 Honduras, disaster recovery 198, 199, 200, 202, 203–4 Horton, John 218 Houben, Francine 71 housing 40, 49 Howard, Ebenezer 32, 161 hubs 46 Husserl, Edmund 11 ICT 3, 57, 58; developing countries 190–6, 224–5; and network city 110–19; strategies 95–109 ICT clubs 240 identity 13, 14–15, 17, 19–21, 141, 220, 290; and locality 36, 41–2, 43 Ideologiekritik 12–13, 16, 20 India, cross-cutting loyalties 219 individualism 178–80, 181, 189 industry, networking 82, 85–7, 91, 92, 93 informal networks 236, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 308–9, 311; see also social networks information age 2, 96, 101–2, 244 infrastructure: networks as 239–40; see also transport Innes, J.E. 5, 146 institutions: local governance capacity 284–306, 308; networked polity 53–6, 59; strategic spatial planning 146–64 integration concept 270n2 interactivity 193 inter-agency cooperative networks 246–70, 308, 309
342
interdependence 215, 271, 280, 294; see also synergy interdisciplinarity 4, 60 interests 5, 186–7, 190, 292; inter-agency transport planning in Norway 265–8; networking in EU 82, 85–7, 91, 92, 93 intergovernmentalism 83 International Monetary Fund 32 international organizations: disaster recovery 199, 202, 203–4, 205, 206; EU rail policy 91–2 International Planning Studies 93n1 international scale 73 Internet 3–4, 95, 97, 99, 100, 106, 112–14, 119, 122, 169; developing countries 184, 191, 193, 194, 195, 225 Islamic civil society 212 issue networks 293 Italy 52, 148; see also Milan James, William 19, 20 Japan, business culture 241–2 Jersey City, NJ 116 Jessop, B. 102, 287 John, P. 293, 296 Jones, C. 243 Jordan, A.G. 293 Kant, Immanuel 23n12 Kickert, W.J.M. 258 Kilper, H. 296 Klosterman, R.E. 129 Kotre, John 141 Krumholz, Norman 180 Kuhn, T. 54 Kumar, K. 22n9 Ladd, Brian 134 land use 117, 120; regulation 151; transport planning 67, 74–6, 79; US city planning 176, 177–8, 180–1 Latour, Bruno 52, 144n8 Le Corbusier 120, 135 Le Galès, P. 287, 288, 289, 295, 297, 300, 303 legitimacy 14, 55, 146, 153, 154, 155, 195 legitimation crisis 11–12 Leitner, H. 28, 31 Lerup, L. 106 Leuven Congress (2003) 1, 5–6 Lewis, J.M. 270n4
Index
1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111p
liberal planning, and network society 175–82 lifestyle enclaves 191 Lille Metropolitan Development Agency 103 Lipnack, J. 4 lobe city 71 local communities: developing countries 183–96, 222, 223–4; disaster recovery 197–210, 223 local governance, urban and regional research 284–306, 310 local government 194, 196, 290; disaster control 201, 204, 205 localities, in network society 34–44, 60 local networks 222–5 local politics 294–7, 303 local public sphere 71–2, 193 Locke, John 179, 180 Logan, J. 139 Los Angeles, CA 38–9, 40, 140 Lösch, August 28 Lowndes, V. 187 Lozano-Hemmer, Rafael 107 Lynch, K. 116 Maastricht Treaty 85, 92, 93 McKenzie, Evan 230, 234 Madrid 120 Malone, T.W. 246 Manchester anthropologists 57 Mansbridge, J. 249 March, J.G. 270n3 market(s) 177, 180, 181, 286, 287, 297, 298, 307; inter-agency transport planning 257–9, 264, 265, 266, 268, 269; and networked polity 45, 47, 48, 55, 56, 59; and networks 82, 188, 190, 223, 230, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244–5, 247–9, 308, 309, 310; private planning and governance 231, 232–3, 236, 238–9, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244–5 Markusen, Ann 223 Marvin, S. 29, 111, 231 Marx, Karl and Marxism 12, 225 Mastop, H. 246 Mayer, M. 185 mayors 157 Mazza, L. 52 mediatization 48, 49, 54 Ménard, C. 246 metaphor 26, 59–60, 82, 161
methodological individualism 233 Mexico, disaster recovery 198, 199, 200, 202, 203, 206–9 Mexico City 107 migration 34, 38–9, 131, 135, 211–12 Milan 106, 156 Milgram, Stanley 213 Mill, John Stuart 55 Milton Keynes 137, 138 minimal state 185, 194, 286; US planning 180–1 Mitchell, Bill 106 mobility: and localities 38–9; transport planning 71, 72, 74–9; and urbanization 96–7 Molotch, H. 41, 139 Muller, P. 293 multiculturalism 19, 211–21 multi-level governance 81, 88 multi-level government 153 multiple stories 127–8 multi-vocality 154 narrative approach 42–3, 125–45, 161–4 national planning cultures 148–50 nation-state 14; see also state neo-classical economics 244 neofunctionalism 83 neoliberalism 26, 135, 148–9, 185, 189, 194, 289, 291, 293; and information age 101–2, 104; network city 28, 33 Netherlands: design-oriented research 116–17; network complexity and imaginative power 148, 149–51, 162; Teylingen Pact and trust 275–83, 309; see also Amsterdam Netherlands Fifth National Policy Document on Spatial Planning 105, 150–1 network city 24–33, 59–60; in ICT age 110–19; strategies for 95–109 networked polity 45–56, 59 network governance 230, 239–44, 311 networks and networking 2, 45, 57–61, 81–4, 120–2, 239–40, 305, 310; of cities 27–30; classic thought about 114–16, 119; and clubs 229–34; complexity 146–60, 162–3; European High-speed Rail System 81–94; ideal type 27–8; inter-agency cooperation 246–70, 308, 309; and multiculturalism 211–21, 224; three intellectual traditions 57–8; uncertainty 271–83; research 60,
343
Index
1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111
284–306; usefulness of analysis 223–5; see also community networks network society 2, 311; Castells’ theory 13–21; characteristics 2–4; and communicative action 9–23, 59; community action 169–82; and localities 34–44, 60; as new context for planning 4; planning as persuasive storytelling 125–45; research agenda 4–6 new institutionalism 53–4, 83, 244, 302 New Public Management 247, 258, 269 new social movements 17, 18–19, 20, 21 New York 38–9 NGOs: developing countries 186, 194, 196; disaster recovery 197, 199, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206–7, 209; EU High-speed Rail System 91–2 Nicaragua, disaster recovery 198, 200, 202, 204–6, 209 NIMBYism 42 node-place model of urban mobility 75–8 nodes 2, 46, 52, 68, 110, 113, 120, 121, 128, 136, 151 Nolen, John 32 normative commitments 49 North, D.C. 49, 51, 54, 56 Northern Ireland: planning culture 149; Regional Development Strategy 105–6, 151, 154–5, 156 Norway, inter-agency transport planning 247, 249–70, 308, 309 Obel, B. 246 Offe, C. 247 Olsen, J.P. 270n3 Olson, Mancur 243 optimization 74 Organization of American States 198 organizations, form and choice 242, 244–5, 308–9 Ostrom, E. 58, 302 Page, S. 107, 116, 118 Pakistan 14 Papadopoulos, Y. 81 participation 2, 33, 40, 153, 179, 183, 184–7, 190, 193, 194, 195 partnership 153, 154, 156 path dependence 54–5, 56, 83, 219 PBKAL high-speed train 89–90 Peirce, Charles 19, 22n3 Peterson, J. 82, 83, 85, 121
344
Phillips, B. 107, 116 physical networks 120–2 Pichierri, A. 301 Pierson, C. 10 Pierson, Paul 54 Piodi, F. 87 place 46, 99–100, 121; attachment to 57; future of localities 34–44; and local governance 284–306; multidimensionality 134–6 place-connectedness 134–5, 136, 137, 139, 163 planned city 31 planning: challenge of network society to 2, 35, 39–43, 103–9, 175–82; fragmentation vs holism 177–8; and governance 307, 310; imagining urban transformation 161–4; national cultures 148–50, 176–81; network city 115, 117–19; new context 4; orientation to the locality 35–6; as persuasive storytelling 42–3, 125–45, 161–4; research agenda 4–6; see also strategic spatial planning planning education 142–4, 181–2 planning legislation 157 planning theory 21–2, 246, 301; conceptualization of city 24–33; discourse network 55; localities and network society 57–61 policy analysis 300 policy communities 146, 293, 310 policy networks 1, 5, 82, 222–5, 285, 291–7, 308; Netherlands 271–83, 308, 309; Norway 246–70, 308 political economy 286–7 political science 53, 58, 286–7, 288, 297 politics 5, 284; critique of storytelling 129–30; European networking 82; and ICTs 102–3; local 294–7, 303; networked polity 46–50, 55 Poole, Steven 101 Popper, Frank 38 Portugal 156 postmodern city 25–6, 130 postmodernism 23n11 post-structuralism 233 Powell, W.W. 247, 248 power 15, 18, 82, 295; developing countries 190, 192; and network complexity 146, 153, 159; and storytelling 125, 128, 129–30, 142, 163
Index
1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111p
pragmatism 10, 19–22 Pretoria 238 private enterprise 177, 180 private planning and governance 229–45, 308–9 privatization 189, 286 Privatopias 230 production 15, 18 progressive networks 28, 31, 33 public administration 58 public policy 217, 284–5, 286–7, 307; strategies for network city 104–5 public private partnerships 90 Pumain, D. 27 Putnam, Hilary 19 Putnam, Robert 184, 274 rail transport: European High-speed Rail System 81–94; inter-agency cooperation in Norway 247, 249–70 rational-choice paradigm 272–3 reader-response theory 127 reflexive life-planning 10, 17–19, 20, 22 region(s): and place 37–8; Teylingen Pact in Netherlands 275–83; and transport planning in Amsterdam 70, 71, 73 regionalization approach 296 regional networks 200 regional research, local governance capacity 284–306, 307, 310 regulation approach 287, 291 relativism 55 remediation 95–6 rescaling 285 reterritorialization 285, 290, 305 revanchist city 26 Rhodes, R.A.W. 82, 292 Richardson, J.J. 293 Richardson, Keith 86 Richardson, Tim 86 risk 272, 311 Rittel, H. 55 road transport: EU policy 88; inter-agency cooperation in Norway 247, 249–70 Robinson, Kim Stanley 135 Robinson, N. 82 Rogers, Sir Richard 25 Rorty, Richard 55 Rotella, C. 144n11 Roy, Rana 89 Rydin,Y. 52
Sabatier, P.A. 50, 82–3 Salingaros, N. 115–16 Samaritan’s Purse 203–4 Samuelson, Paul 229 Sandercock, Leonie 138, 145n12, 216 Sandler, Todd 229 San Francisco, CA 127 Santiago 238 Sassen, Saskia 128 Sawhney, H. 99 scalar consciousness 150–1 Scandinavia, planning culture 148 Schutz, Alfred 11 Scott, James C. 144n3, 147 Self/Net tension 10, 13–17, 22 Seoul 106–7 Sheller, Mimi 107 Sheppard, E. 28, 31 Simmel, George 218 Singer, Edgar A. 20 Smith, Michael P. 130, 131, 136 Smith, Neil 26 social capital 184–7, 188, 193, 194, 195, 209, 220, 222–5; trust as 274 social cohesion 60, 187, 289 social diversity, networks and 211–21, 223 social exclusion 187, 222, 223, 224 social inclusion 159, 183–96, 216, 220, 311 social inequality 193 social justice 159 social movements 186, 187; new 17, 18–19, 20, 21 social networks: developing countries 187–90, 193, 194; see also informal networks social regulation 285–6, 287, 288, 291, 293, 297, 298 social relations 2; network complexity and imaginative power 153–5; networks as 239, 309 social sciences 297 social self-improvement 45 social values 243 society 2–3; atomistic view 178–80; transformation 2, 197; uncertainty 189 sociology 57, 58, 79, 300, 308 sociometry 57, 58 Soja, Edward 128, 131, 133 solidarity 186, 193, 249 Soria y Mata, Arturo 120 South America, disaster recovery 197–210
345
Index
1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111
space 178, 307; ICT and 3, 193; of flows 3, 28, 73, 192, 224; and local governance 284–306; of places 4 spatial imagination 147–52 specialization 33 splintering urbanism 111 Stamps, J. 4 state: developing countries 194, 222; disaster control 197, 201, 203, 204, 205, 208; and governance 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 291, 297, 298, 307, 309, 310; and private planning and governance 233–4, 237, 308; social exclusion 222, 223; see also government; minimal state Stevenson, N. 22n9 storylines 50–3, 59, 84 storytelling 42, 125–45, 161–4 strategic spatial planning 300; imaginative power of 146–64 structuralism 57–8, 233, 293 subsidiarity 38 Sum, N.-L. 102 Sunstein, C. 21 Surel, Y. 293 sustainability 51, 67, 84, 87–8, 91, 211, 311 sustainable city 26 sustainable development 183–96 sustainable places 133, 134 Sweden 212 synergy 29–30, 215–16, 220 synthesis 33 system/lifeworld dialectic 11–12, 15–17, 21, 22 systems 27, 28 Taylor, Charles 19 TEN-T projects 85, 86–92 territorial citizenship 154 territorial governance 155–6, 158–60, 284–5, 287–91 territorial identities 41 Teylingen Pact 275–83 Thatcher, M. 46 Thomas, June Manning 140 Thompson, G.F. 243 Throgmorton, James A. 42, 43 Tiebout, Charles 237–8 time 119, 178, 307; ICT and 193 tolerance 216, 218, 219, 220, 224 Tomlinson, Richard 32 Torfing, J. 54 Touraine, Alain 20
346
Townsend, Anthony 97 traditional networks 208, 209 transaction cost theory 270n6, 308; private cities 234–9 transnational city 130 transnationalization 287, 293 transport 82, 117–18; discourse networks and networked polity 46, 49, 50–3, 54–5, 59; European High-speed Rail System 81–94; ICTs 100; inter-agency cooperation in policy networks 246–70, 308, 309; new approaches to planning 67–80, 122 trust 241–2, 243, 246, 247, 248, 249, 271–83, 308, 309, 311 United Kingdom: Prince’s Foundation 116; strategic spatial planning 148, 149, 150, 155; transport politics 52 United States: common interest developments 230, 233, 236, 238, 239; common urban narratives 140, 141; liberal planning and community action 170–82, 222; multicultural city 212, 217; network city 116, 118–19; social capital 185, 274; see also California; Chicago; Los Angeles; San Francisco urban development 101–2; Amsterdam 68–80 urban government 290 urbanity concept 67–73, 79, 110 urban regimes 300–1 urban research, local governance capacity 284–306, 307, 310 urban theory, planning as storytelling 130–1, 136–41 Varshney, Ashutosh 218–19 Verhaaren, F. 277, 278 Vigar, G. 52 virtual cities 100, 112 virtuality: critique 97–8; ICT-enforced community networks 190–1, 193, 195 virtualization 3–4 virtual places 135 visioning 40 Wallace Roberts & Todd 118–19 Wallerstein, Immanuel 14 Warren, Robert 102 Watson, Vanessa 129
Index
1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111p
Watts, Duncan 214 Webber, Melvin 55, 122 Weber, Adna 25 Weber, Max 27 welfare state 11, 194, 289 Wellman, B. 95 Western Europe, immigration 217–18 White, H.C. 249 White, H.V. 26 Williamson, Oliver 242 Wilson, D. 187
Wolfe, Jeanne 130, 131 Wood, Denis 144n3 Woolthuis, R.K. 274, 275 World Bank 32 world systems 14, 28 Wright, Frank Lloyd 115, 120 Zand, D.E. 275 zoning 110, 115, 121, 176 Zook, Matthew 97 Zucker, L. 274
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