For this topic I made a group presentation in class where we analysed and explained Healey's document. Rather than writing a post I thought I would share with you the presentation. Unfortunately there are some elements of the presentation that are missing, for example the final case study which we conducted on Canberra Airport.
Communicative Planning - Rachelle Hardaker and Angus Easthope
Communicative planning is about engaging and interacting
with those involved in a planning process. It requires planners to reach out to
the public and ask for their wants, opinions and suggestions in terms of their
environment. The document Angus and I
will be focusing on today by P. Healey is called The Communicative Turn in Planning Theory and its Implications for
Spatial Strategy Formation.’ It focuses on how communicative planning came
about and how it can be applied to the planning process. It begins my putting the need for communicative planning into
context, by outlining the questions that were not being answered sufficiently
without public participation. The document then begins to address the history
of planning and the two main paradigm shifts of education and power of which
began to influence the turn towards communicative planning. As a need to
communicate with the public was identified, Healey begins discussing the
development of research towards achieving public participation. Healey then
points out why planners should use communicative argumentation, and what
benefits will come when planners consult with the community rather than
assuming or guessing their wants. A six step guide delivered from basic
questions was developed to be able to work alongside a community in the
planning process. Participation in the planning process is critical if
the goal is to develop an environment that is suited to a community’s needs and
values.
Context
Healey discusses how during the Post War Era there was a
growing lack of consistency within urban spaces. Healey states; ‘In their
place, urban regions have become containers within which coexist a diversity of
social and economic relations, linking people in a place with those in other
places, but not necessarily with those in the same place.’ This result in a
less communal environment with those in the same area, and the mixing of values
between places and networks create tension and conflicts. Over time there was a
loss of a clear pattern of development, urban areas became ‘less interrelated
and less understandable’. Planning models didn’t apply to the sprawl that had
developed and there was inconsistency and inequality between urban regions.
There was then set competitions between urban areas, as to
who offered the best capacity to resolve conflicts, reduce tension, had the
best resources, locations and who could deliver an environmentally friendly,
healthy living environment. There are questions that begun being asked due to
the detrimental effects from the loss of confidence in the political system.
How are we to
arrive at a spatial strategy? How do we get to understand the complex and
diffused dynamics of urban regions? How do we get to agree on what the problems
are, and on what we want to promote and safeguard? How can we translate
agreement into influence on the ongoing flow of activities through which our
regions are continually being reshaped? This persuaded a change in the way
planning engaged with the people.
Planning in the second half of the last century experienced
two paradigm shifts; which are changes in the pattern or model of what society
deems normal. The first wave of change introduced the typical strategic
planning processes language that was based on modelling and dynamics of urban
systems. This new vocabulary and education on planning models was used
throughout the 1960s and 1970s. It focused on developing urban areas
consistently and introducing equality and normality throughout all planning
designs. The second wave introduced criticism to the planning
community of policies and activity through a shift of power relations in
communities. This shift developed from a need to reanalyse the layering of
demographics though planning, and look at the vulnerability of some economies.
Power struggles occurred ‘between capital and community, between fractions of
capital, between economic growth and environmental quality’. This power shift influences an escape from
strategic formal planning by recognising the diverse people amongst
communities. The question was then asked; ‘Faced with such diversity and
difference, how then can we come to any agreement over what collectively
experienced problems we have and what to do about them? How can we get to share
in a process of working out how to coexist in shared spaces?’ This led to the
development of communicative planning.
Development of Communicative Argumentation
Habermas (1984), discussed the need to reconstruct planning
policy to allow for outcomes that reflect the diversity of values and
demographics amongst communities. Habermas believed that ‘our sense of
ourselves and of our interests is constituted through our relations with
others; through communicative practices. Our ideas about ourselves, our
interests, and our values are socially constructed through our communication
with others and the collaborative work this involves.’ If this is true, then
our skills developed from this communication can be applied to a discussion
about environmental and planning issues that concern us. Planning practice
began moving away from tradition to more inclusionary argumentation, which is a
more participatory method of debate. By including the public in decision making
it introduced a greater array of issues that needed attention, and more ideas
as to resolve those issues.
There are also different levels of which participation
amongst the community is reached. The International Association of Public
Participation outlines the five levels of participation. These begin with
- 1. Informing – keeping the community up to date with plans through fact sheets, websites. This is the lowest form of public participation and is hardly interactive.
- 2. Consultation – this is done with surveys, where the community is asked about if they like the plans.
- 3. Involving – whereby the community can suggest ideas in workshops or can have a say through voting.
- 4. Collaborate – where planners are working alongside the public and with stakeholders.
- 5. Empower – the community calls the shots through juries and delegated decisions.
The IAP2 work by these 7 core values of which can also apply
to communicative planning, and highlight the benefits to the community by
involving themselves in the process of decision making.
- 1. Public participation is based on the belief that those who are affected by a decision have a right to be involved in the decision-making process.
- 2. Public participation includes the promise that the public's contribution will influence the decision.
- 3. Public participation promotes sustainable decisions by recognising and communicating the needs and interests of all participants, including decision makers.
- 4. Public participation seeks out and facilitates the involvement of those potentially affected by or interested in a decision.
- 5. Public participation seeks input from participants in designing how they participate.
- 6. Public participation provides participants with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way.
- 7. Public participation communicates to participants how their input affected the decision.
These values are
relevant to communicative planning and can be used by planners to navigate
their way around community involvement. However, to be able to develop a
higher level of public participation in the planning process it is important to
identify some key factors that allow communicative planning to begin underway.
Spatial Strategy Formation Through Communication
Attempting to create new spatial strategies can be a
challenging and difficult task, and to this this while making the inclusion of
communities a primary objective is even more so. Promoting Planning objectives and problems or
managing the small details in changing communities fills a large proportion of
work in spatial and environmental planning. When working in the area of
planning, actions and movements taken often make multiple assumptions about the
current environment and community. When the flow of management in planning
continues it is common for assumptions to not change and remain constant.
Basically urban regions have fine grain economic and social relations and if
planning actions are irrelevant or opposing it creates a divide between what
the region needs and what the plan wants. Planning systems can lead to an
uneven share of influence towards the most powerful groups leaving little
decision making to others. Providing a voice and respect for all members of the
urban region, even when many can’t be present in a discussion is a crucial
aspect of spatial strategy and requires sorting through a range of information.
To sort through this mass of issues, problems, arguments, ideas and policy
discussion requires the planner to be an experimental learner finding new ways
to think and what to care about and ultimately what actions to take. Healey
stated in her paper “it seems almost an impossible challenge in our dynamic,
differentiated, complex and conflicting urban regions”. In order to conceptualize a plan to tackle this challenge of
communication, Healey created a 5 part strategic planning process. Each part is
centralized on an important step in the communicative approach to spatial
strategy formation. The following steps will help us understand how to use
communication as an important tool in planning.
- 1. Where is the discussion to take place, in what forums and arenas; how are the community members to get access to it?
- 2. In what style will the discussion take place? What styles will most likely be able to ‘open out’ discussion to enable the diversity of ‘languages’ among community members to find expression
- 3. How can the jumble of issues, arguments, claims for attention, and ideas about what to do which arise in discussion be sorted out?
- 4. How can a strategy be created that becomes a new discourse about how spatial and environmental change in urban regions could be managed?
- 5. How can a political community get to agree on a strategy, and maintain that agreement over time while continually subjecting it to critique.
The parts listed should be taken not as tasks to complete
but questions which a community can contemplate.
1.
Arenas for communication
The first step in forging a consensus among different
viewpoints is to create arenas of argumentation, which can significantly aid in
providing and receiving information from participants. Previous arguments of
where the creation of policy should take place heavily lied within political
and legal systems. These systems are great at creating a formal and structured
way of allocating speaking rights and debate, although these administrative
systems can also give some participants more privileges than others, leaving
the less privileged with a smaller voice. The main values that should be taken
from these more traditional approaches are the targeting of attention on how
arenas are designed and constructed and were the origins of authority come from.
Spatial strategy comes from the appropriate situation where
there is a moment of opportunity for change. This could be in something like a
“crack in power relations” or a conflict and contradiction of different ideas.
When the appropriate situation arises it can make people realize they need to
involve a different process and work with a different range of people within
the urban region. In this early stage of communication it is up to the planner
to have a unique ability to see these opportunities of doing thing differently,
reading the breaks in power and to turn the tables into potential change. The
people who start this change don’t necessarily have to be in a formal position
of leadership and could arise from any setting but they usually have a good
understanding and sense of the local economic, social and political relations
and structural dynamics within that region.
Once a new opportunity for change is found, which could be
at any level of institution, careful thought about the correct system that is
going to be accommodate for the arena is crucial. Existing organisations often already
exist though government and can be very effectively used as an arena for
argumentation. The difference of “inclusionary argumentation” is that it has
stepped ahead of the power of bureaucratic systems and no longer focuses on
having a winner and loser.
In Canberra, the system in place to address what the
community’s wants are community councils, these groups are made up of members
that represent the views of their local geographic community, for example there
is the inner north, inner south, Tuggeranong, Woden, Belconnen etc. They meet
monthly and prior to applications for development, the applicant must get
approval from the council. These community groups are great at addressing that
particular urban region although sometimes councils can be very difficult to
adjust from a narrow range of interests.
Healey broke the word community into two parts; the first
part being focused on the spatial aspect, which is all the people residing in
that geographic or spatial position that share a concern due to a change
directly affecting that area. The second part being the involvement of stake
holders; stake holders can be directly or indirectly affiliated with what is
happening in that particular urban region. They care about what people are
doing in that place. This could be anyone who shops there, too caring about the
local environment and history. In order to conduct spatial strategy formation
both of these parts of the community should be addressed. Mapping the
stakeholders in a region is a good idea when trying to move a strategic
planning process in a forward direction. The Mapping of stake holders involves
monitoring new and incoming stakeholders to that area and opening to the idea
that new stakeholders will be discovered in the future processes. Often
discussion begins before political community members have found out what kind
of arenas are preferred and even who all the stakeholders are. Moves and
decisions that are made before an arena has been set up correctly can result in
a proportionate amount of power being allocated towards one group.
To help reduce the negative effects of these initial first
moves two ideas have been created. The first is based on ethical inclusion or
in other words, picking the right groups that should be included. Questions
must be raised such as who are members of the political community, how are they
to gain access to the arena in a way that their opinions can be respected and
what stake do they have in the process and outcome. There needs to be recognition
of diversity, moving beyond the term that everyone has an equal standing. “All
groupings of people should have equal ability to put over their views” (Young,
1990). To enable a moral duty of diversity there needs to be knowledge of the
backgrounds of each of the community members and how each of the members can
constructively contribute to a discussion.
The second idea is that where should discussion take place.
The discussion can shift the different arenas to different levels of
institution and at different times. By encouraging discussion in more than one
institutional place it helps gather a broader perspective on the different
values and actions. The locations can range from schools, business clubs and
council chambers etc. The arenas change as the discussion develops and
progresses and as long as the original concerns are not lost the discussion may
‘open out’ and become more productive. An inclusionary approach uses its style
and ethics to bring forward a greater awareness of the range of stakeholders
and lets multiple claims for attention to be addressed in arenas.
2.
Style and scope
The scope and style of discourse is a second set of considerations
that concerns what actually get discussed and how. This stage is also
traditionally known as the survey stage which identifies what is going on and
what the issues are within an urban region, although Healy refers to it as
‘scoping’ or environmental appraisal. Healy uses the word scoping to help open
out issues and to see what the issues mean to different people and whether they
are actually what they are meant out to be. It involves removing previous
practices and assumptions of communities to open up and see an issue in a new
light.
The survey stage if conducted for only one particular group
of people can reinforce stereotypes and alienate or disregard stakeholders or
parties. If the scope takes into account the idea mentioned previously of inclusionary
commitment it can move issues past cultural differences and help people learn
about each other’s opinions and concerns. Although this is easy to do in small
groups within set up arenas, there are many more arising challenges and
complexities that must be faced when dealing with the future of much larger
urban regions systems.
As mentioned before there is a very potential chance of
misunderstanding when scoping urban regions to find out what people don’t like and
the causes of unrest. Both Healy and another planner hillier state that the
amount of productivity that can come out of this stage is based off how people
prepare themselves, how rooms are arranged, how communicative routines can be
set up or who is to speak at a particular time, how the discussion is
concluded, remembered and then reviewed. Many people have different routines
and expectations from this stage. For example a participant coming from a labor
union might have a different perspective of how a discussion should be set up
compared to someone from company management. This means that the style of the discussion should use a
inclusionary approach and recognize that not everyone will be comfortable with
how the discussion begins.
Once the style of the discussion is laid down there can still
be problems and differences with the way people express there different
opinions which brings us to another concern of the language. People who have different backgrounds and cultures may
use unfamiliar ironic expression, statements with economic and scientific
reasoning or be accustomed to a certain belief or political asserssion of
rights. As a result one point made or reference made will have meaning for some
and seem strange to another. To successfully use language all arguments should
be recognized even if translation is needed.
In order to spread involvement multiple meeting groups can
often be set up and this can help include as many participants as possible.
increased involvement also demands increased respect, because no matter how much enthusiasm goes towards
involving everyone if the ability to maintain levels of respect is not present
it can restrict people’s desire to contribute or provide expression towards the
discussion. Even when a participant can’t fully be active and involved, they
should not be ignored.
A quote from Healy states that” The inclusionary challenge
is to prevent those ‘not present’ being absent from the discussion.”
Micheal Pilbrow listed some points about how to deal with a
community in a communicative approach. He came as a guest speaker last Tuesday
gave a great example were he had to go into a foreign country and apply some of
the techniques that I previously talked about to solve the various problems.
The style and language of the discussion differed from what is familiar to most
of us and I’m sure allot of adaptation would have been required. The ability to
set ap an arena for a very different culture would have been difficult due to
not knowing who should be involved and who holds allot of power in that
community.
3.
Sorting through arguments
With the inclusion of an ‘open style’ discussion a multitude
of points, opinions and argument are brought to attention, and having an
ability to sort though and find the most appropriate requires not an abstract
technical process but an active operation in collective sorting. Strategic
spatial planners should take into account not just the point made but the
levels of expression and language they use to express themselves, this can help
determine the level of passion and urgency behind their argument. It can most
importantly display the various values that the community hold.
In allot of strategic planning exercises the material
gathered will be filtered in a manner that reduces peoples speech to a single
point, which can join to other participants points to form a sort of structured
framework where a planner can understand the discussion and make sense of it.
Sorting is a component of ‘inclusionary argumentation’ and involves knowing
when to start sorting through arguments in a formal matter, when to link the
different points and when to pin point the various patterns.
4.
Creating a new discourse
Choosing what strategies and policies to implement is a long
process, particularly with a large variety of community input. The selected
strategy must manage to meet the majority of the public’s main issues raised,
their needs and their wants. As Healey explained; ‘It requires a capacity to
reach some agreement across differences as to what the issues are, the purposes
of action, and the way the consequences, the costs and benefits of action,
should be assessed.’ When analysing all the suggested plans and policies it is
important to scrutinise, but to also be open minded to new ways of thinking
about issues. It is important for planners to remember that what they are doing
is for the community, and that they need to avoid the ‘planning for planners’
syndrome, where planners will do what is best theoretically, but not
legitimately. It is important to provide reasons for avoiding or ignoring some
suggestions, values or claims, as some things are not necessarily of importance
to the majority of people, or it is irrelevant. ‘The challenge for an
inclusionary approach to strategic spatial planning is to experiment with and
test out strategic ideas in initially tentative ways, to open out possibilities
for both evaluation and invention of better alternatives, before allowing a
preferred discourse to emerge, and crowd out the alternatives.’ Basically it is
important to keep an open mind to new ideas, and not focus on what is first
suggested or thought as the answer. Taking use in the communities input and
ensuring that their ideas are included creates an informed and interested
community, it also develops an interest amongst the community and a sense of
ownership in the discourse that is finally developed.
5.
Agreement and critique
The chosen spatial strategy needs to convey positive ways
forward and should bring benefits to as many community members as possible.
However, it is very likely that there will be participants that will not be happy
with the outcome, and will continue to have objections once the final process
has been chosen. In these cases follow up processes that should be undertaken,
including keeping these unhappy community members in review, and asking what
else can be done to meet their needs. Community members should be able to
confront those involved in the final decision making and enquire what has been
done in terms of their issue. Dealing with these sorts of objections and
disagreements can be repetitive, as all participants have the right to
criticise and as it is ‘an essential underpinning of inclusionary
consensus-building strategies.’
It is important to assess what constraints or barriers the
chosen strategy my produce and how it can reflect on the dynamics of social,
political and economic relations. Future
implications can alter the effectiveness of the strategy, including changes of
power holders, whether the strategy is still relevant to the current times and
whether it still is benefitting the community. To avoid becoming a useless
strategy, it needs to adapt to changes through continual reflexive critique. By
monitoring the relevance of the strategy it can continue being implemented.
Periodic reviewing of its usefulness should be undertaken by the community, to
analyse whether the strategy is creating a positive effect. The community
should decide if the policy needs to be changed or if it should be removed.
References
Habermas, J., 1984, The
Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalisation of
Society, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Healey, P., 1995, The
Communicative Turn in Planning Theory and its Implications for Spatial Strategy
Formation, Department of Town and Country Planning, Newcastle.
International Association of Public Participation, 2014, Public Participation Spectrum, visited
9/9/2014, http://www.iap2.org.au/documents/item/84.
