Problem solvers and peacemakers

In designing our cities, town planners have had immense power in determining how and where people will live and work. Planners have created the spaces that shape our lives and have, quite literally, determined who lives on “the wrong side of the tracks”. Throughout the suburban expansion of cities across the global north in the 20th Century, it was a select few who were tasked with making these decisions on behalf of everyone.

Australian cities like Sydney and Melbourne, and North American cities like Chicago and Toronto, loosely based on the Burgess Urban Land Use Model, spread out almost concentrically from an employment centre, through a more populated inner-city, and out to spacious leafy suburbs. This approach established and enforced the connection between land use planning and socioeconomic development by separating the larger homes and white picket fences of the middle class from the CBD, leaving the dense inner-city zone to the working class.

However, neat as such modernist approaches might look on paper, so-called “blueprint planning”, based on the technical wisdom of generally white male engineers and road builders, failed to consider the complex needs and interactions of urban populations that were becoming increasingly diverse with the massive movements of peoples in the post-war era. Despite their technical skills, town planners of the time did not reflect or understand the citizens they planned for. Even when civic voices were heard, many urban dwellers did not have the time or the tools to participate. Therein began the drive in planning discourse for other voices to be heard.

The 1960s heralded a new era of “advocacy planning”, with urbanists like Paul Davidoff and Jane Jacobs acknowledging that the planning system did not represent all stakeholders equally, and that the opinions and needs of marginalised communities often went unheeded. The role of the planner evolved to include that of championing the interests of urban dwellers whose voices would not otherwise be heard.

As modernity ceded to postmodernity, planning became less about developing and executing a spatial vision, and more about facilitating a process to accommodate growth in which competing voices could be heard, and conflict mediated. At the same time, the dominance of neoliberal economics shifted planners from telling businesses where they could operate, to facilitating where businesses wanted to operate.

The skills of a planner needed to adapt. Following the thinking of Juergen Habermas, planners like Patsy Healey and Judith Innes developed communicative planning models with planners serving as active listeners, seeking to bring balance and equality to competing voices and interests in planning and development - to create “an ideal speech situation” - where the relative power and position of all actors is set aside, so that a genuine consensus might be achieved.  

Communication planning too, has been subject to evolution, with writers like Bent Flyvbjerg and John Forrester making the pragmatic point that the powerful do not readily abdicate their power, and that while good communicative practice might assist rational decision making, power has a rationality all of it’s own. In the real world of urban planning, there are inherent asymmetries of power that frame the way in which cities are shaped.

Increasingly, planners have to accept the politics of power and how this can influence planning outcomes. Planners need to acknowledge and manage these intrinsic power imbalances and interests across the broader community. This goes beyond partisan politics and reaches into neighbourhood politics, varying commercial interests, and the politics of property ownership.

As our cities become even larger and more complex, and as urban regions span across states, provinces and even nation states, the role of planners as problem solvers and peacemakers will become even more important. Planners will be technical experts, advocates, mediators, diplomats and, increasingly, prophets - expected to predict how urbanites will respond to changing social, economic, and climatic realities.

Rob Stokes, NSW Planning and Public Spaces Minister

This article originally appeared in New Planner – the journal of the New South Wales planning profession – published by the Planning Institute of Australia.