The power of Planning,Yiftachel o., Little J., Hedgcock D, Alexander I.
Yiftachel o., Little J., Hedgcock D, Alexander I. (2002), The Power of Planning : Spaces of Control and Transformation, Kluwer Academic Publishers, p.236
p.1
This introduction aims to construct a critical and conceptual foundation for the following chapters. It is not meant to offer a thorough review of the literature, but rather to delineate five key areas of deficiency in mainstream planning research, theory and thought. These include: (a) a confused demarcation of disciplinary boundaries; (b) a dominance of professional perspectives; (c) a privileging of process over substance; (d) a slighting of planning’s spatial dimensions; and (e) the unchallenged acceptance of planning’s benevolent power
The book seeks to openly study the power of planning to shape societal relations, and document and the manifold manifestations of that power: emancipatory, reformist, progressive, normalizing, legitimizing, regressive and oppressive.
p.3
Hence, for example, Italian scholars have often considered planning has part of the aesthetic design of cities; British scholars have often focused on the regulation of spatial development in cities and regions; and American scholars have often referred to planning as a loose concept, dealing mainly with policy efforts of disparate arms if government, or the efforts of voluntary, community, and semi-public bodies in the governance of (mainly local) communities.
Nowhere has this confusion been more evident than in planning theory, which has been unable to agree on the very subject of its study, and has therefore been sharply criticized (see/ Bureagard 1995; Flyvbjerg and Richardson, 1998; Scott and Roweis, 1977).
Therefore, it is defined here, after Lefbvre (1991), as shaping ‘the public production of space’, or in a similar vein after Friedmann (1998), as ‘the production of urban habitat’.. Adhering to these definition which emphasize the process of “’production’, planning is portrayed as as including both the procedural (decision-making) and substantive (material, spatial) aspects of planners’ work.
p.4
Planning here is both part of the formal planning system (namely agencies which directly produce urban plans), and the wider set of institutions, groups and authorities involved in the public regulation and development of space, including housing, engineering, environmental and development bodies.
p.5
Hence, planning is not an age-old discipline of relatively independent knowledge emerging from scientific endeavour, such as history, geography or philosophy, but rather part of the consolidation of the modern nation-state, with its dominant capitalist and national motives to control and regulate space (Yiftachel, 1998). These motives are often shaped and buttressed through the association of the state with stabilizing societal elements, such as the professional middle-classes. Thus, state interests are often articulated by professional organizations and institutions, including urban and regional planning. This emergence of most writing with a claim to ‘theory’ in the planning field, has thus been bound with the institutionalization of planning the need of professional circles to develop bodies of knowledge in order to give the field depth and legitimacy.
It is argued here that this institutional and intellectual straightjacket caused planning scholarship to focus on prescriptive, normative and procedural theories to the detriment of the explanatory and substantive theories appears to have hampered the development of a fundational bodies of knowledge.
This meant that the realms of theory in urban and regional education and thinking have been increasingly devoted to planning method, processes and interactions, and far less to the substantive nature and consequences of that activity.
p.6
From 1960s to 1980s- the rational planning model reigned supreme, claiming to provide theoretical, professional and methodological foundation.
During the 1970s and 1980s when materialist theories (mainly Marxist, but also Weberian and other traditions) gained some prominence in the texts and discourses of planning theorists (see Hague, 1984; Taylor, 1998), ‘communicative planning’ became the dominant approach
p.7
This approach tends to focus on important components of the policy processes such as democracy, decision-making, citizen empowerments and the limit to state intervention. But the generic nature of this literature raise a question: ‘what makes this knowledge specifically relevant to urban and regional planning?’ Despite the powerful tradition of generic, a-spatial, planning literature, its space-less nature presents a weakness, mainly because it divorces planning theories from fully engaging with the arena in which planners operate, namely cities and regions.
Therefore, planning is treated here as a specifically spatial practice that is related to the state and the production of space.
p.9
A further deficiency evident in previous planning scholarship is a somewhat narrow and analytically limited, assumption about the societal power of planning. The general story planners are told by the historian and conceptual architects of the discipline is that it emerged out of the unacceptable and inhuman living conditions prevalent in the rapidly expanding industrial cities of the 18th and 19th centuries. The emergence of planning was intimately linked to a broader reform movement, which sought to redress the ills of unconstrained capitalism, through changes to the politics, economy and geography of cities (see Hall 1988).
This was not always fully or explicit articulated, but has nonetheless been ever present in both scholarly and professional circles, attaching fundamentally positive, reformist and even emancipatory qualities to urban and regional planning.
p.10
This brand of critical scholarship has several origins, mainly Marxist, feminist, Foucaldian and ethnic/cultural, which converge over a critique of the relative neglect of power as topic of analysis by mainstream planning scholarship. Here the title of a vastly influential book, John Forester’s Planning in the Face of Power (1989) says: power is portrayed as being an entity against which planners work. It is somewhat external to planning and planers. Of course, it is not claimed that planning is omnipotent, but rather that the aims and practices involved in the public production of space is constantly intertwined with the exercise of power. Yet the a-priori assumption of the benevolence of planning project allows the work of most planning scholars to comfortably focus in issues such as : planner-client relations, technical or design solutions, or methods of achieving a consensus of urban futures (see; Innes and Brooker, 1999). But the power that shape the urban environment can be, and often are, repressive and exploitive. This calls for a broader framework within which to analyze planning, not merely as a reformist profession, but as a set of institutions, practices and discourses, enmeshed within the ‘grid of power’ which shape cities and regions (see Massey, 1994).
Further, planning’s adverse power may also lie in its normalizing effects: it introduces a set of procedures, practices and performances which render the goals and visions of plan neutral and necessary, and adds ‘layers’ of regulation and surveillance to the lives of communities and individuals (Huxley, 1994). In short, planning introduces various dimension of social control into the project of governance of cities and region.
p.11
Therefore, the study of controlling power in general, and ‘planning as control’ in particular, maps the main social interest of the place and period in question, and traces their practices in the actual process of spatial change (Foucault, 1991). Such analysis would cut through legitimizing ideologies and narratives, and search below the inevitable, and ever-existing, ambiguities of urban and regional policy. Examining the material political can reveal much of the long-term role of such policies on social relations.
The realization about the multi-faceted nature of planning is not new. The use and abuse of power by and for planning has been documented in many foundational studies (see: Meyerson and Banfield, 1995; Hall, 1978; Harvey, 1973; Marcuse, 1978; Marcuse, 1978; Sandercock and Forsyth, 1992; Flyvbjerg, 1998)
p.12
While critical scholarship can, and should, explore its ‘darker side’, the very power of public authorities including the state, to reshape cities and regions is itself contested. This is the result of a recent weakening and transformation of the state in what is often defined as the late-modern, post-fordist era (Held, 1990; Sassen, 1998). State power is challenged first and foremost by the logic of a globalizing economy, but also by minorities and deprived groups, which either mobilize to increase their share of public resources (of which planning is one), or lose faith in the state-building project, preferring alternative routes of development, identity and empowerment (see Friedmann, 1992; Marcuse and Kempen, 1999).
The need to ‘step outside’ and view planning with social science tools as an arm of the state and dominant societal interests was already advanced by early critical thinkers. Their works have been crucially important for contemporary critical scholarship. These emrged from Marxist ( for example, Harvey, 1973; Castells, 1978: Hague, 1984) and later frim feminist (see for example, Huxley, 1988; Sandercock and Forsyth, 1992; Wilson, 1991) and multicultural, ethnic and racial critiques (see H. Thomas, 1995; J. Thomas, 1996; Yiftachel , 1994; Young, 1990).
The editorial team decided to design the book according to four main ‘prisms’ which reflect common sites of interaction between planning and the fabric of social life: communities, gendern social polarisation and ethnicity/race. Each of these offers an important arena where planning policies, practices, discourses and material reality have a significant influence on people’s lives. The four perspectives cut cross the three foci of analysis critiqued earlier as lacking in previous planning scholarship: (a) explanatory and descriptive accounts; (b) ‘bringing back’ the material reality (‘substance’) within which planning procedure operate; and (c) re-emphasizing the role of space in the analysis of urban and regional planning; and (d) openly examining the nature of planning power.
p.15
In chapter 2, Shlomo Hasson accounts for the mobilization of of four main Jerusalem communities vis-à-vis the urban policies of the state and the city. He shows vividly how the history and geography of city spawned the mergence of communities and movements on the basis of different set of oppositions, namely ethnic-nationality (Palestinian-Zionist), religiosity (Orthodox- secular Jews), ethno-class (Mizrahi- Ashkenazi Jews; that is eastern and western Jews, respectively) and life-style (ecological preservation- development). But the public arena in which these segregated communities operate is in a state of flux, as they resist the spatio-political order imposed by the state, but also struggle with one another. Planning in Jerusalem thus involves the constant challenging of the city’s geographical and power matrix, generating a space of regular conflict and inter-communal tension. The immense importance of urban planning is highlighted here by Hasson’s conclusion that “Jerusalem is a violent city rifle with tensions and conflicts…associated with control over land.”
The section is closed by Chapter 3 in which Phil McManus critically evaluates the notion of ‘community’ as used in England and British planning. McManus shows how the seemingly objective unit of ‘community’ has been used by government policy directives to further a set of economic and political interests, all in the name of a desired, an notionally progressive, interest in local communities. However, McManus illustrates clearly how, like most social categories and terms, ‘community’ is a contested, contextual and multifaceted term, and its use by planners must be aware of its use and abuse by societal powers. McManus details clearly how during the 17 year reign of the Conservatives in the UK the discourse of ‘community’ overlaid a neo-liberal economic agenda, often using the vehicle of the Urban Development Corporations. The latter used ‘planning for communities’ as a (thin) legitimizing veil for urban development objectives, which have worked to destabilize and segregate many inner city collectivities.
In chapter 5, Tovi Fenster analyses the critical link between power and knowledge (and ‘mis-knowledge’) – as expressed in housing and settlement policies—on the life chances of minority women in Israel. These women exist in a position of double marginality, vis-à-vis dominant men in their own communities, as well as the dominant, and often alien, ethnic majority. Fenster’s analysis of the impact of planning on Ethiopian and Bedouin women in Israel peripheral regions, clearly shows the oppressive potential of planning, and the multiple faces of this oppression, which reaches the home, the private and the local. But Fenster’s account also harbors new possibilities, premised on the ability of planners to attuned to the various voices and needs rising from each minority community, and a shift towards planning which is sensitive to both cultural and gender considerations.
p.16
In chapter 8, Oran Yiftachel examines the consequences of Israeli urban planning, by evaluating one of the country most ambitious planning projects – the establishment of 28 new towns (know as ‘development towns’) during the 1950s. The towns were mainly built in Israel’s ‘frontier’ regions as part of the Zionist Judaization program, which has been a center-piece of the political geography of what he terms ‘the Israel-Jewish ethnocracy’. In the towns the state settled manly Mizrahi Jews of low socioeconomic standing, who arrived in Israel from the Muslim world and lacked cultural contacts or political influence. Yiftachel traces the long-term impact of this planning project, and finds that it generally caused geographical isolation, economic deprivation, political dependence and stigmatized identity for the town dwellers. Planning has thus been used as an instrument of social control, through which socio-spatial structures worked to preserve and even deepen social inequalities, with the discursive and legal legitimacy of the settling state. Yet, this structure on control has not remained unchallenged, and Yiftachel shows how the residents of the towns have rallied in recent years in search of new identity and greater equality, and how the Mizrahi ethno-class identity emerging in the town continues to form a source of inter-group tension and social instability.
p.17
In chapter 11, Hubert Law Yone and Rachel Kalus analyse the degree of segregation in Israel regions and cities. They show convincingly the manner in which Israeli space has been divided and stratified on the basis of persisting segregation between the country’s various ethno-classes. The authors thus demonstrate the power of planning to create long-term socioeconomic structures. Despite a very dynamic population movement which typifies Israel, law-Yone and Kalus show that the lines of speparation between Arabsn Mizrahi, Ashkenazi and most recent Russian-Speaking Israelis, is linked directly to the planning and housing programs of Israeli government, and to the manner in which Zionist project changed the geography of Israel/Palestine. They show further how prevalent planning discourses systematically obscure the oppressive effects of state strategies and hegemonic spatial practices.
p.1
This introduction aims to construct a critical and conceptual foundation for the following chapters. It is not meant to offer a thorough review of the literature, but rather to delineate five key areas of deficiency in mainstream planning research, theory and thought. These include: (a) a confused demarcation of disciplinary boundaries; (b) a dominance of professional perspectives; (c) a privileging of process over substance; (d) a slighting of planning’s spatial dimensions; and (e) the unchallenged acceptance of planning’s benevolent power
The book seeks to openly study the power of planning to shape societal relations, and document and the manifold manifestations of that power: emancipatory, reformist, progressive, normalizing, legitimizing, regressive and oppressive.
p.3
Hence, for example, Italian scholars have often considered planning has part of the aesthetic design of cities; British scholars have often focused on the regulation of spatial development in cities and regions; and American scholars have often referred to planning as a loose concept, dealing mainly with policy efforts of disparate arms if government, or the efforts of voluntary, community, and semi-public bodies in the governance of (mainly local) communities.
Nowhere has this confusion been more evident than in planning theory, which has been unable to agree on the very subject of its study, and has therefore been sharply criticized (see/ Bureagard 1995; Flyvbjerg and Richardson, 1998; Scott and Roweis, 1977).
Therefore, it is defined here, after Lefbvre (1991), as shaping ‘the public production of space’, or in a similar vein after Friedmann (1998), as ‘the production of urban habitat’.. Adhering to these definition which emphasize the process of “’production’, planning is portrayed as as including both the procedural (decision-making) and substantive (material, spatial) aspects of planners’ work.
p.4
Planning here is both part of the formal planning system (namely agencies which directly produce urban plans), and the wider set of institutions, groups and authorities involved in the public regulation and development of space, including housing, engineering, environmental and development bodies.
p.5
Hence, planning is not an age-old discipline of relatively independent knowledge emerging from scientific endeavour, such as history, geography or philosophy, but rather part of the consolidation of the modern nation-state, with its dominant capitalist and national motives to control and regulate space (Yiftachel, 1998). These motives are often shaped and buttressed through the association of the state with stabilizing societal elements, such as the professional middle-classes. Thus, state interests are often articulated by professional organizations and institutions, including urban and regional planning. This emergence of most writing with a claim to ‘theory’ in the planning field, has thus been bound with the institutionalization of planning the need of professional circles to develop bodies of knowledge in order to give the field depth and legitimacy.
It is argued here that this institutional and intellectual straightjacket caused planning scholarship to focus on prescriptive, normative and procedural theories to the detriment of the explanatory and substantive theories appears to have hampered the development of a fundational bodies of knowledge.
This meant that the realms of theory in urban and regional education and thinking have been increasingly devoted to planning method, processes and interactions, and far less to the substantive nature and consequences of that activity.
p.6
From 1960s to 1980s- the rational planning model reigned supreme, claiming to provide theoretical, professional and methodological foundation.
During the 1970s and 1980s when materialist theories (mainly Marxist, but also Weberian and other traditions) gained some prominence in the texts and discourses of planning theorists (see Hague, 1984; Taylor, 1998), ‘communicative planning’ became the dominant approach
p.7
This approach tends to focus on important components of the policy processes such as democracy, decision-making, citizen empowerments and the limit to state intervention. But the generic nature of this literature raise a question: ‘what makes this knowledge specifically relevant to urban and regional planning?’ Despite the powerful tradition of generic, a-spatial, planning literature, its space-less nature presents a weakness, mainly because it divorces planning theories from fully engaging with the arena in which planners operate, namely cities and regions.
Therefore, planning is treated here as a specifically spatial practice that is related to the state and the production of space.
p.9
A further deficiency evident in previous planning scholarship is a somewhat narrow and analytically limited, assumption about the societal power of planning. The general story planners are told by the historian and conceptual architects of the discipline is that it emerged out of the unacceptable and inhuman living conditions prevalent in the rapidly expanding industrial cities of the 18th and 19th centuries. The emergence of planning was intimately linked to a broader reform movement, which sought to redress the ills of unconstrained capitalism, through changes to the politics, economy and geography of cities (see Hall 1988).
This was not always fully or explicit articulated, but has nonetheless been ever present in both scholarly and professional circles, attaching fundamentally positive, reformist and even emancipatory qualities to urban and regional planning.
p.10
This brand of critical scholarship has several origins, mainly Marxist, feminist, Foucaldian and ethnic/cultural, which converge over a critique of the relative neglect of power as topic of analysis by mainstream planning scholarship. Here the title of a vastly influential book, John Forester’s Planning in the Face of Power (1989) says: power is portrayed as being an entity against which planners work. It is somewhat external to planning and planers. Of course, it is not claimed that planning is omnipotent, but rather that the aims and practices involved in the public production of space is constantly intertwined with the exercise of power. Yet the a-priori assumption of the benevolence of planning project allows the work of most planning scholars to comfortably focus in issues such as : planner-client relations, technical or design solutions, or methods of achieving a consensus of urban futures (see; Innes and Brooker, 1999). But the power that shape the urban environment can be, and often are, repressive and exploitive. This calls for a broader framework within which to analyze planning, not merely as a reformist profession, but as a set of institutions, practices and discourses, enmeshed within the ‘grid of power’ which shape cities and regions (see Massey, 1994).
Further, planning’s adverse power may also lie in its normalizing effects: it introduces a set of procedures, practices and performances which render the goals and visions of plan neutral and necessary, and adds ‘layers’ of regulation and surveillance to the lives of communities and individuals (Huxley, 1994). In short, planning introduces various dimension of social control into the project of governance of cities and region.
p.11
Therefore, the study of controlling power in general, and ‘planning as control’ in particular, maps the main social interest of the place and period in question, and traces their practices in the actual process of spatial change (Foucault, 1991). Such analysis would cut through legitimizing ideologies and narratives, and search below the inevitable, and ever-existing, ambiguities of urban and regional policy. Examining the material political can reveal much of the long-term role of such policies on social relations.
The realization about the multi-faceted nature of planning is not new. The use and abuse of power by and for planning has been documented in many foundational studies (see: Meyerson and Banfield, 1995; Hall, 1978; Harvey, 1973; Marcuse, 1978; Marcuse, 1978; Sandercock and Forsyth, 1992; Flyvbjerg, 1998)
p.12
While critical scholarship can, and should, explore its ‘darker side’, the very power of public authorities including the state, to reshape cities and regions is itself contested. This is the result of a recent weakening and transformation of the state in what is often defined as the late-modern, post-fordist era (Held, 1990; Sassen, 1998). State power is challenged first and foremost by the logic of a globalizing economy, but also by minorities and deprived groups, which either mobilize to increase their share of public resources (of which planning is one), or lose faith in the state-building project, preferring alternative routes of development, identity and empowerment (see Friedmann, 1992; Marcuse and Kempen, 1999).
The need to ‘step outside’ and view planning with social science tools as an arm of the state and dominant societal interests was already advanced by early critical thinkers. Their works have been crucially important for contemporary critical scholarship. These emrged from Marxist ( for example, Harvey, 1973; Castells, 1978: Hague, 1984) and later frim feminist (see for example, Huxley, 1988; Sandercock and Forsyth, 1992; Wilson, 1991) and multicultural, ethnic and racial critiques (see H. Thomas, 1995; J. Thomas, 1996; Yiftachel , 1994; Young, 1990).
The editorial team decided to design the book according to four main ‘prisms’ which reflect common sites of interaction between planning and the fabric of social life: communities, gendern social polarisation and ethnicity/race. Each of these offers an important arena where planning policies, practices, discourses and material reality have a significant influence on people’s lives. The four perspectives cut cross the three foci of analysis critiqued earlier as lacking in previous planning scholarship: (a) explanatory and descriptive accounts; (b) ‘bringing back’ the material reality (‘substance’) within which planning procedure operate; and (c) re-emphasizing the role of space in the analysis of urban and regional planning; and (d) openly examining the nature of planning power.
p.15
In chapter 2, Shlomo Hasson accounts for the mobilization of of four main Jerusalem communities vis-à-vis the urban policies of the state and the city. He shows vividly how the history and geography of city spawned the mergence of communities and movements on the basis of different set of oppositions, namely ethnic-nationality (Palestinian-Zionist), religiosity (Orthodox- secular Jews), ethno-class (Mizrahi- Ashkenazi Jews; that is eastern and western Jews, respectively) and life-style (ecological preservation- development). But the public arena in which these segregated communities operate is in a state of flux, as they resist the spatio-political order imposed by the state, but also struggle with one another. Planning in Jerusalem thus involves the constant challenging of the city’s geographical and power matrix, generating a space of regular conflict and inter-communal tension. The immense importance of urban planning is highlighted here by Hasson’s conclusion that “Jerusalem is a violent city rifle with tensions and conflicts…associated with control over land.”
The section is closed by Chapter 3 in which Phil McManus critically evaluates the notion of ‘community’ as used in England and British planning. McManus shows how the seemingly objective unit of ‘community’ has been used by government policy directives to further a set of economic and political interests, all in the name of a desired, an notionally progressive, interest in local communities. However, McManus illustrates clearly how, like most social categories and terms, ‘community’ is a contested, contextual and multifaceted term, and its use by planners must be aware of its use and abuse by societal powers. McManus details clearly how during the 17 year reign of the Conservatives in the UK the discourse of ‘community’ overlaid a neo-liberal economic agenda, often using the vehicle of the Urban Development Corporations. The latter used ‘planning for communities’ as a (thin) legitimizing veil for urban development objectives, which have worked to destabilize and segregate many inner city collectivities.
In chapter 5, Tovi Fenster analyses the critical link between power and knowledge (and ‘mis-knowledge’) – as expressed in housing and settlement policies—on the life chances of minority women in Israel. These women exist in a position of double marginality, vis-à-vis dominant men in their own communities, as well as the dominant, and often alien, ethnic majority. Fenster’s analysis of the impact of planning on Ethiopian and Bedouin women in Israel peripheral regions, clearly shows the oppressive potential of planning, and the multiple faces of this oppression, which reaches the home, the private and the local. But Fenster’s account also harbors new possibilities, premised on the ability of planners to attuned to the various voices and needs rising from each minority community, and a shift towards planning which is sensitive to both cultural and gender considerations.
p.16
In chapter 8, Oran Yiftachel examines the consequences of Israeli urban planning, by evaluating one of the country most ambitious planning projects – the establishment of 28 new towns (know as ‘development towns’) during the 1950s. The towns were mainly built in Israel’s ‘frontier’ regions as part of the Zionist Judaization program, which has been a center-piece of the political geography of what he terms ‘the Israel-Jewish ethnocracy’. In the towns the state settled manly Mizrahi Jews of low socioeconomic standing, who arrived in Israel from the Muslim world and lacked cultural contacts or political influence. Yiftachel traces the long-term impact of this planning project, and finds that it generally caused geographical isolation, economic deprivation, political dependence and stigmatized identity for the town dwellers. Planning has thus been used as an instrument of social control, through which socio-spatial structures worked to preserve and even deepen social inequalities, with the discursive and legal legitimacy of the settling state. Yet, this structure on control has not remained unchallenged, and Yiftachel shows how the residents of the towns have rallied in recent years in search of new identity and greater equality, and how the Mizrahi ethno-class identity emerging in the town continues to form a source of inter-group tension and social instability.
p.17
In chapter 11, Hubert Law Yone and Rachel Kalus analyse the degree of segregation in Israel regions and cities. They show convincingly the manner in which Israeli space has been divided and stratified on the basis of persisting segregation between the country’s various ethno-classes. The authors thus demonstrate the power of planning to create long-term socioeconomic structures. Despite a very dynamic population movement which typifies Israel, law-Yone and Kalus show that the lines of speparation between Arabsn Mizrahi, Ashkenazi and most recent Russian-Speaking Israelis, is linked directly to the planning and housing programs of Israeli government, and to the manner in which Zionist project changed the geography of Israel/Palestine. They show further how prevalent planning discourses systematically obscure the oppressive effects of state strategies and hegemonic spatial practices.
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