Co-evolutions of planning and design: Risks and benefits of design perspectives in planning systems

Abstract

We develop an evolutionary perspective on spatial planning to investigate the potential contributions of design approaches to the coordination of spatial organization. After a re-articulation of the concepts of planning and design in this perspective, we distinguish six essential features of the planning/design dialectics in a community. These aspects ought to be understood when evaluating the risks and benefits of design perspectives in a planning system, and the potential for re-positioning design in planning. It is argued that relying on the rhetoric of any single actor or any single tradition of reflection on planning and design is deceptive, whereas the collective experience of learning and adaptation with actors and disciplines expands the scope of understanding and the pallet of possible adaptations.

Keywords

Adaptation design flexibility governance evolutions urban planning

Introduction

Carl Steinitz observed in 1968: “Neither form nor activity should dominate city design. Form does not always follow function, and functions are not always adaptable to forms” (p. 147). The same applies to planning, we would say. Steinitz’s insight can guide us in exploring the dialectics of planning and design in the organization of space.

Planning exists in many variations, in shapes and forms that differ with respect to many distinctions (Allmendinger, 2009; Mandelbaum et al., 1996). It can be more or less associated with government, with local governance, with scientific expertise, with planners and plans. It can be procedural or content-driven and dominated by political, economic, or legal actors in various combinations. In addition, it can codify a future spatial organization to different degrees and by different means. Various authors have elaborated on the relationship between planning and design and the specific position of different disciplines such as landscape architecture, architecture, and urban design in relation to each other (Banerjee, 2011; Childs, 2010; Gunder, 2011; Madanipour, 2006; Steiner, 2011). One can see design as an aspect of planning (e.g. Gunder, 2011), and one can emphasize the professional and disciplinary boundaries of the design disciplines, stressing their difference, possibly looking for essences of the disciplines and professions. All, however, agree that planning and design share a common ground in shaping and governing (urban and rural) spaces; that it is important to take into account normative goals of achieving economic, social, and environmental public good; and that design should go beyond merely esthetic issues (Gunder, 2011; Madanipour, 2006). We would argue that it is fruitful to understand their historical entanglement in order to see the potential contribution the different perspectives can make to each other.

We would further argue, and this locates us in poststructuralist methodologies, that essences of disciplines and professions do not exist. Practices and the scientific reflection on them are the product of series of power/knowledge transformations, contingent results of histories marked by (identity) politics, competition, adaptation, routines of repetition, and habits of innovation (Fuchs, 2001; Seabright, 2010). Naming practices are part and parcel of this evolution: they cannot be extricated from this environment of competing and evolving identities (Bal, 2002). Names of disciplines and professions can therefore not be linked to presumably essential pursuits, and each application of a disciplinary name, in a situation (“This is true urban design”) or to an organization (“Department of urban design”), should be analyzed against prevailing power/knowledge configurations. In terms of Fuchs (2001), it requires second-order observation, the observation of actors, or groups, making distinctions and defining themselves, using semantics, procedures, and images of relevant environments at their disposal. For that reason, we start from a basic distinction between naming practice (first-order observation) and observation of naming practice (second-order observation). Second, we deploy the already introduced distinction between profession and discipline, that is, the group active in planning and/or design under those labels, and the scientific community reflecting on, and possibly furthering, these practices. Third, we distinguish between disciplines and perspectives. Perspectives are theoretical constructs, our theoretical constructs, the result of second-order observation of the evolution of practices and reflections bearing various labels (architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, rural design, planning, etc.). We distinguish planning perspectives from design perspectives, with the aim to elucidate their dialectics later. Design perspectives, in this framing, can potentially not only be found with design practitioners and academics (bearing the name) but also in other disciplines and professions. We will gradually refine these definitions.

Our main goal in this article is to investigate the potential contribution of design perspectives to the functioning of a planning system, as the network of organizations that embodies the coordinated organization of space in a given community (Van Assche and Verschraegen, 2008). We take an evolutionary approach and draw upon a review of planning and design literature to reconstruct the historical development of the disciplines (and professions) in different places. We argue that such endeavor can be worthwhile and novel when deploying a perspective that is abstract enough to grasp the wide variety of empirical roles of planning, without defining a priori superior role distributions. We analyze key aspects of the dialectics between planning and design perspectives in the evolution of planning systems. It is demonstrated that the incorporation of design perspectives offers advantages to planning systems, as well as risks, and that evaluating the potential for new inclusions of design hinges on an understanding of key aspects of the planning/design dialectics. Each community will be marked by different dialectics and will represent an imperfect planning system, as perfect adaptation to changing internal and external environments is impossible and because simultaneous optimization for all values targeted is equally impossible.

Planning

Spatial planning is concerned with the ways in which people shape and govern spaces and takes into account social, economic, and environmental issues. Planning is both a set of practices as well as a scientific discipline reflecting upon those practices. At a more abstract level, we define spatial planning as the coordination of policy and practice affecting spatial organization (Van Assche and Verschraegen, 2008). Planning as such can focus on procedures, and on content, on a perfect way of organizing the process of planning, and on certain aspects of the result that are desirable (Allmendinger, 2009). Focus on content tends to blind people for procedural problems and vice versa. The web of organizations that is involved in this effort is called the planning system. Planning, thus, does not uniquely pertain to the domain of people labeled “planners,” and of state organizations called “planning departments.” Within a planning system, planning perspectives, as perspectives on the coordination of space, are unevenly distributed. More planning in this view is more coordination, not more planners and planning departments. Spatial planning can have many rationales, practical and ideological, legal, scientific, and economic, but we argue that the benefits of coordination in spatial organization can be defined as the possibility to envision and work on several problems at the same time and create new qualities or assets. (A traditional illustration is the twofold motivation to formalize planning in the United States of the early twentieth century: reducing health and safety problems and protecting property rights (cf. Platt 2003)). This is possible, we argue, because planning can bring together in one perspective the various users of a space with an image of the space itself. Both diversity of players and space itself generate insights in the combinatory possibilities of interests, conflicts, and assets.

Each community has its own planning system, and the development of large, centralized, and bureaucratic states since the renaissance in Europe brought at least part of the planning system under supervision of the state (Hillier, 2002; Scott, 1998). When those states became more democratic, the planning system followed, to various degrees and at various speeds (Flyvbjerg, 1998). As communities and their institutions evolve, governance evolves and so does planning. The planning system changes over time, and this means that different players will crystallize that in turn shape the future interactions in and of the planning system (Van Assche et al., 2010). Thus, the planning system and its pattern of organizations, rules, and actors are marked by strong path dependencies, but these never entirely halt the evolution of the system (Chettiparamb, 2006; Van Assche et al., 2011). Once certain actors or a certain perspective are in place, such configuration tends to reproduce itself (Seidl, 2005; cf. Luhmann, 1995).

This is not a trivial observation. Planning as coordination necessarily involves a number of players that ought to remain committed and rules that ought to maintain their credibility (Van Assche et al., 2012b). The cost of establishing coordination is high. It takes time, trust, and social capital. It involves trial and error, and a reigning set of institutions can thus not easily be replaced (Greif, 2006; Ostrom, 2005). Furthermore, a change of institutions could lead to a breakdown, and the costs of altering the arrangement are unpredictable and therefore to be avoided. Coordination of spatial organization is coordination of land use, carrying high political risks. One is tinkering with the everyday environment of voters. One should add economic risks (large investments) and legal risks (planning is often at the limit of what is constitutionally possible). For all these reasons, once an arrangement is found, it tends to remain in place.

There are certainly counter-forces. Within the planning system, positions of actors and perspectives can shift. We analyze underlying mechanisms when discussing the dialectics of planning and design. The shifts are reflected in (and sometimes influenced by) the academic debates about planning and design, where certain forms of planning and design are criticized and alternative role distributions are promoted (Anselin et al., 2011; Gunder, 2011; Madanipour, 2006). These debates focus on the tension between regulation and flexibility, about desired and undesired social and environmental effects of planning and design interventions, and on the relation between science and practice.

Design

The search for sense and attractiveness of place has been the subject of theory formation in architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and philosophy (e.g. Braunfels, 1990; Child, 2010; Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 1991; Lynch, 1981; Rossi, 1982). We will not engage deeply here with debates on the perfect architectural language or the precise importance of beauty, consistency, practicality, and sustainability in design (cf. Alberti, 1988; Vitruvius, 20BC). We are more interested in the dynamic position of design in the planning system. Different design ideologies do play a role in this positioning (Gunder, 2011).

When talking about design, we do not limit ourselves to the pursuit of beauty, nor to the individuals, organizations, and disciplines labeled as design-related (architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture). A spatial design perspective, we argue in line with Kevin Lynch (1981), is “the playful creation and strict evaluation of the possible forms of something, including how it is to be made” (p. 290). While a planning perspective, in our definition, entails an image of the place, and the presence of that image in decision making makes it easier to recombine interests, assets, and problems, a design perspective is marked by continuously entertaining the possibility to manipulate these images of place (and physical space further down the line). According to Sternberg (2000), urban design is the “manipulation of the concrete elements of distance, material, scale, view, vegetation, land area, water features, road alignment, building style” (p. 266).

Planning and design perspectives thus overlap. Manipulation of place images can be experimentation, followed by evaluation (cf. Lynch, 1981), in terms of the goals of players, perceived community interests, and problems and qualities. We argue (cf. infra) that the give-and-take that is necessarily a part of planning can generate more solutions and assets when the design perspective is never left, that is, when it accompanies spatial decision making, instead of finishing it, as part of “implementation.” Montgomery (1965), reflecting on Urban Renewal experiences, considers the best examples as the ones where, indeed, design is part of each step of the process. Chapman (2011) argues that urban design is the logical form of spatial planning at the smaller scale, not restricted to the implementation phase, and more in general, the best way to “localize” planning.

Planning-as-design, then, envisions the spatial referent from the beginning, reflects on its malleability, and generates design options every step of the process. The more complex the image of the place, the more variety in design options, and the better the implications of planning decisions can be envisioned (e.g. by operating on an image of landscape as a web of ecological and hydrological feedback loops). Bacon (1963) states,

The first step is to orient one’s mind to the fullest extent possible to the concept of space as the dominating element. One must be able to respond to space as the basic element in itself and to conceive abstractly in space. (p. 6)

Reflexive versions of spatial design can incorporate thinking on the selection of malleable and less-changeable features of the space under consideration. If, for example, for an environmental planning problem, the water system is not to be altered, design can still use hydrological knowledge to produce design options as variations of location within the water framework. In other cases, the manipulation of space can start earlier in the reasoning, and include more landscape features.

Planning focusing on procedures cannot be spatial design but planning focusing on content could be. Design can leave the domain of planning, entering decision spaces where few actors are involved in spatial interventions or when manipulation of the space hardens early in the planning process or dramatically reinterprets planning outcomes at the end. One can think of a garden design, with one person taking decisions on what comes where, and one can even imagine the design of the larger areas where just one designer and a willing patron are deciding.

The dialectics: a very brief history

Planning and design, as disciplines and (self-conscious and self-labeled) professions, have different histories. Planning in this sense is a product of the 20th century (Allmendinger, 2002; Platt, 2003), while design (first architecture) is self-identified at least since ancient Greek times. Planning and design perspectives, as defined above, are bound to be much older, as their emergence can plausibly be linked to Neolithic city formation, or the Neolithic revolution itself. Villages, agricultural land use, trade, and cities required specialization, role formation, diversification of land use, and much higher levels of spatial coordination (Luhmann, 1995; Seabright, 2010). The lineages of spatial planning and spatial design perspectives are quite different though. Although the complexity of coordination in spatial planning increased with the centralization of the state and later its democratization (involving more actors), the history of spatial design is also tied to state development, but more indirectly, through the increase of patronage. Complex cities produced rich citizens and proud city governments that could engage in private and public works that were the product of a design philosophy, with the sum of city space given higher consideration than the separate parts (Braunfels, 1990; Krieger, 2000; Mumford, 1961; Rios, 2008).

Architectural design and the reflection on it, architectural theory, were quickly accompanied by the practice and theory of urban design (Braunfels, 1990; Rossi, 1982; Vitruvius, 20BC), although a separate profession developed only much later. Landscape architecture came later, as its emergence required the removal of more conceptual obstacles (Waldheim, 2006). One can say that only during the renaissance, the concepts of landscape, the perception of human power, and the traditions of garden architecture and city design were developed far enough, and the political structures were centralized enough, to bring forth what we would call landscape architecture (Van Assche, 2004). It took an understanding of our surroundings as somehow unified, somehow structured, and an idea that people were allowed and capable of grasping and improving that structure (Hunt, 2000, 1992). The beauty of forests and meadows had been sung long before, but in the middle ages, it was inconceivable to design a picturesque rural landscape (Glacken, 1967; Hunt, 1992). Once landscape architecture became thinkable and practically possible, the tradition started to develop, accompanied by modes of reflection that brought styles, fashions, and disputes with them (Swaffield, 2002; Wimmer, 1989). At different points in time, architecture, poetry, philosophy, and painting infused the young discipline with new ideas (Hunt, 1992; Le Dantec and Le Dantec, 1993). Sternberg (2000), writing after a few centuries of capitalism, considers the essence of urban design (but the argument applies to landscape architecture as well) as the re-integration of the (concept of) human living environments, whose unity was fragmented by commodification and the ensuing spatial, economic, legal, and conceptual parceling.

The fashion of reflection on design that emerged in the renaissance, spurred the practice of design (Luhmann, 2000), while the intellectual ambitions of rulers became more and more visible in large-scale design interventions. It obviously required money, manpower, and expertise, and with economic growth and political consolidation in postrenaissance Europe, similar evolutions could be observed everywhere. The new nation states France and Spain developed city-design schemes that were not thinkable before the centralization of power and the intensification of reflection (Braunfels, 1990; Van Assche, 2004). In France, in the 18th century, engineering became an integral part of city planning, and city planning became the blend of design, science, and politics, which many still recognize as its essence (Gutkind, 1970; Van de Vijver, 2003). In the Europe of the baroque period, good design was seen as the application of universal rules and the judicious deviation from those (Hall, 1997; Choay, 1969). The rules were seen as rules of form, and application of the rules was expected to lead to a certain appearance.

City design became a part of both the scientific and artistic canons in the 17th century, the century of absolutism and centralized monarchies (Braunfels, 1990). There was little reflection on the coordination of actors and on planning as we defined it, but the practice of planning was emerging, as even in absolutist Europe, larger projects (with the exception of parks and palaces) did involve a variety of actors that did more than just following orders. The forms of civil governance and local democracy that rose to prominence in the city development of the 11th and 12th centuries survived the Middle Ages, and new designs were rarely unilaterally imposed on cities (Waterhouse, 1993). Cities had an independence, and their internal political ecology was still very much alive and very complex in the age of nationalism and centralization (Mumford, 1961).

Thus, one can speak of actors that had to look for some form of coordination and one can speak of planning. The strong family-likeness of Baroque and neoclassical designs tend to veil the case- and site-specific negotiations that are behind them. Architects, with a technical and artistic background, were responsible, and the same architects were schooled in the arts of politics and diplomacy since the Middle Ages (Benevolo, 1980), when the chief architect of large churches had to be a skilled politician amid a wealth of civil and religious organizations that all wanted something different.

While the practice of landscape architecture was born in 18^th-century England, once the design of large areas—transcending the size of private grounds and the language of geometry—was established, it took a hold on the European imagination very quickly (Hunt, 1992; Swaffield, 2002). The landscape architect as a role emerged, a tradition of reflection took off, and the practice of landscape architecture was transferred in the late 18th century to urban areas. First, the landscape architect was restricted to parks that were made to look more “natural,” but in the course of the 19th century, the whole city fabric became observable as a landscape that could be manipulated and improved. The difference with the older city design traditions was not only the possibility of more natural forms, a different design language (cf. Spirn, 1984), but the possibility to make visions that included old and new elements, natural and artificial elements, and the possibility to combine different languages of form in the same urban fabric (Madanipour, 1997; Rossi, 1982; Van Assche, 2004). Certainly older cities did have these features in reality, but they were not part of the imagination of the city designer.

In that same 19th century, nation states became fully consolidated and centralized, but these new strong containers of power were permeated by a new ideology, a combination of democratic empowerment and technoscientific control (Scott, 1998). Both citizens and the territory could be reshaped by scientific means, and the optimal functioning of the state and the elevation of the community required such combination of social and physical engineering (Gunder, 2010). In the United States, with its rapidly growing urban areas, park and parkway systems were widely applied, examples of large-scale landscape architecture under the auspices of the planning state (Mumford, 1961). In Europe, around the turn of the 20th century, many countries had developed various policies, plans, and departments that contributed to spatial planning (Hall, 2002; Sutcliffe, 1981). City planning transformed easily into rural planning, regional planning, and transportation planning, as design became less and less a consideration, and as scientific evidence and bureaucratic/procedural approaches took the upper hand. The scientific reflection on “planning” started to distinguish itself from early sociology, and from the more architecturally driven traditions of city design and landscape architecture (Hall, 2002; Handlin and Burchard, 1966).

What became called “urban design” in the second half of the 20th century (Cuthbert, 2010), practiced by architects, landscape architects, city planners, artists, and also by professionals opting for the new label, drew on a myriad of older traditions, including town planning (in its design orientation), landscape architecture, architecture, and art. Initially, the label referred mostly to esthetic approaches of small-scale city spaces (squares and street-scaping), but later, its semantics expanded, to include larger scale designs, environmental, social, and economic considerations—although Cuthbert (2007) observes that different professions and schools return to their own preferred definition, entailing that some versions still restrict the phenomenon to large-scale architecture. With the more inclusive definitions, the overlap with planning grew, as well as with landscape architecture and architecture (e.g. in the architecture urbaine tradition).

Even if these broad developments can be traced in European and American history, an understanding of the current roles of planning and design in a specific place, as well as transformation options, requires first of all a mapping of the evolutionary paths in the governance of a community. In other words, the actors, rules, and organizations developed differently in different communities, and the history of their interactions is what mostly shaped the current set of institutions (cf. Greif, 2006; Luhmann, 1995; North, 2005; Van Assche et al, 2011). It is in the broader history sketched that ideas, political structures, and scientific tools became available to shape the spatial environment. Which tools where used when, and by whom, is a product of political games and institutional evolutions at a smaller scale (cf. Cuthbert, 2006; Nielsen and Simonsen, 2003). In areas with very strong local governments (as in the United States), the deepest understanding can be gained by looking at local evolutions, while in Europe, where the nation state was clearly the essential container of power, the evolution of national administrations and policies has to be included more explicitly as a context for local games. In the words of Kunzmann (1999), “An Italian planner trained in Milan would not find herself comfortable in the Ruhr convincing traditional Labour governments that protecting the environment is more important than the development of industrial areas on virgin lands” (p. 512). The pathway of governance shapes the evolution of a planning arena (cf. Geddes, 1968[1915]; Harvey, 1989). In evolving governance, different actors vie for a position of power, for impact on spatial organization: different governmental organizations, scientific disciplines, professional roles, and an array of economic actors (Flyvbjerg, 1998; Hillier, 2002).

Mapping of actors, rules, policies, and documents is not enough to understand the dialectics of planning and design. It is essential to discern what the roles of these actors and documents are and which effects they have on spatial decision making. In addition, each actor creates its own perspective and interprets the history of the planning system and of society differently (Luhmann, 1995; Van Assche and Verschraegen, 2008). Talen (2009: 146) traces form-based coding back to the codex of Hammurabi, about 4000 years ago, a reconstruction of history that is not untrue but certainly framed by the contemporary design approach of new urbanism, and the associated identity politics. Consequently, actors tend to have a different image of their own present and future roles than what would be ascribed to them by other players (Gunder and Hillier, 2009). Cuthbert (2010), in an insightful overview of readers on urban design, duly notes that some consider the field to be born at Harvard circa 1950, tied to (small-scale) “project design” and carried out by architects, while others find “staking the claim for urban design on the basis of naming a phenomenon that has existed since Catal Huyuk, let us say 10 000 years, seems far-fetched to say the least” (p. 446).

In order to understand the evolution of specific roles of planning and design perspectives, we believe that the following six key aspects of the dialectics of planning and design require analysis: (1) institutionalization, (2) flexible policy integration, (3) professional and disciplinary traditions, (4) the role of esthetics, (5) overlap between planning and design, and (6) transformation capacity. Once again, we intend to delineate the dialectics between these two perspectives, not between the actors that bear their names.

Key aspects of a planning/design dialectics

Institutionalization

In the processes of institutionalization, planning is both enabled and delimited. A certain institutionalization influences which roles and which forms of planning are possible and to what extent spatial design can occur. It also determines which design discourse has access to the planning system. Vigier, writing in 1965, deplores the influence in planning of

the responses of a small group of aesthetically inclined individuals (architects, urban designers, planners, artists) who have tended to institutionalize their perhaps atypical reactions into intuitive formulae. The Greek and Renaissance fascination with the application of mathematics to architecture and, more recently, Le Corbusier’s Modulor are examples of these intuitive rationalizations. (p. 22)

If planning is not institutionalized in a community, spatial design is unlikely to be institutionalized. If spatial design has a strong impact on the organization of space, that is usually because there is a strong planning system (often in a social democracy) in which actors with a design perspective acquired a strong position (Carmona, 2009; Davis, 1999; Kostof, 1991). These actors can be labeled planners or designers, they can work directly for the government or for firms and others advising or subcontracting for governments. Planning becomes significantly easier in communities with a planning tradition (Van Assche and Djanibekov, 2012; Van Assche and Verschraegen, 2008), and in such traditions, spatial design can also emerge as a significant perspective. The Town and Country Planning Association, identifying with a spatial design perspective, was aware of it and lobbied intensely for the legislation that institutionalized planning, for example, the Town Planning Act of 1946.

If in the pathway of institutionalization of planning, property rights are the primary rules shaping spatial coordination, planning is likely to be reduced to the enforcement of property rights and the minimizing of risk in a society made up of players, each asserting rights that are sometimes contradictory (Jacobs, 1991; cf. North, 2005), or in the words of Moore (1978), to minimize market imperfections. It might still be possible to impose rules and zones that restrict the use of private property in the name of public safety, environmental quality, health, or other more easily agreed upon common goods (Platt, 2003), but since each restriction will have to be linked to these arguments, chances are slim that in such regime comprehensive visions are possible. The restricted possibilities to intervene in property rights makes planning with plans and planning-as-design unlikely (Van Assche and Leinfelder, 2008).

In such regimes, spatial design is usually restricted to places that are under a different form of governance, for example, a university or hospital campus, a state park, or a place that is under control of one private party, such as a new urbanism development (Falconer-Al Hindi and Staddon, 1997; Talen, 2011). If property rights are strong, and a large property is in the hands of one player, then, paradoxically, such a place can become the subject of design more easily than similar places under a strong planning regime. F.L. Olmsted was freer in the design of the Stanford University campus under Mr Stanford than he would have been under a city council assisted by a city planning department.

Flexible policy integration

We argue that design perspectives in planning systems tend to emerge in places with a tradition of spatial integration of policies. Indeed, spatial planning can be regarded as a privileged site of policy integration, and the requirements of spatial policy scream for policy integration (Van Assche and Djanibekov, 2012). Often, planning as a governmental activity emerged after the recognition of a need for policy integration (Platt, 2003). Everything takes place in space, and many policies have spatial effects, and so at a certain point, it became clear to governments that it would make sense to distinguish a task (and often create a department) especially for it, a planning department. Strong (1962) noted, “The necessities of our time have turned us to planning and to the establishment of planning agencies” (p. 99). Policy integration in a planning system is not necessarily flexible, as all sorts of planning, and also forms of design, that hinder planning as coordination can be codified and ossified into spatial policies. Kunzmann (1999) explicitly argues that a return to more design-oriented planning education in Europe would be disastrous, under the assumption that design dominance has traditionally caused too many blind spots in planning.

Policy integration in planning can take place in different ways and at different scales. It seems clear that communities that found ways to pursue spatial policy integration without relying exclusively on formal institutions (laws, procedures, or plans with legal status) can respond in more different ways to changing necessities (cf. North, 2005). Combinations of formal and informal institutions allow more flexibility in policy integration, and they also allow for more different policy options and more different design options to emerge (Roy, 2009). In the Soviet system, rural areas were organized by means of three parallel steering systems, each claiming comprehensiveness and authority in the organization of space. This apparent contradiction de facto created space for more flexible adaptation by means of informal institutions governing the selection of formal rules to be applied in particular cases (Eichholz et al., in press)

Spatial design, we argue, can only work and can only remain design, when it is not reduced to the application of rules and procedures (in line with Talen 2009; Madanipour, 2006). There are bound to be a variety of restrictions imposed by law, resources, and sensitivities, but if there is flexible policy integration, design can play a role.

Professional and disciplinary traditions

The design disciplines tend to exist semi-independent of the planning system in a given community. Self-images and aspirations of architects, landscape architects, and urban designers will differ everywhere, and these differences cannot be fully ascribed to differences between planning systems. In other words, how designers see themselves hinges on what is practically possible for them in the governance context (cf. Cuthbert, 2001; Forester, 1999; Gunder, 2011 ), but not entirely. Professions and disciplines can long and pine and reminisce for generations, weeping for a better past and hoping for a brighter future, with the past and future seen as places where they have a different role in society. Architects have been drawing perfect cities for centuries, often in times and places where implementation was out of the question (Rossi, 1982; Van Assche et al., 2009). One can think of the extensive collections of “paper architecture” now in Soviet archives, but just as well of contemporary architectural competitions, where planners, urban designers, landscape architects, as well as democratic and economic controls are often forgotten in a release of the architectural imagination that presents the city as an abstract composition (in the tradition of Le Corbusier).

The self-descriptions of the disciplines are partly shaped by the history of encounters with the other disciplines and professions. Only part of these encounters took place within the planning system (cf. Soja, 1996). Where there is a strong planning system with a long tradition, the self-definitions of the planning and design profession tend to be shaped largely by the games and encounters in the frame of the planning system. If certain functions were created for the planning system, competition opens within the system to fill new niches. The European Malta treaty obliged the signing countries to assign a place to archaeology in the planning system, and the result was an intense competition over that new spot, between archaeologists entering the system and older actors retooling and refashioning themselves as more attentive to cultural heritage (Duineveld, 2006). If functions were relinquished, the associated actors compete to take over other niches in the planning ecology. In the Netherlands, several years into the current economic crisis, and after a wave of liberalization that shrunk the planning system, real estate developers under pressure are redefining themselves as socially and ecologically sensitive comprehensive planners and designers.

As with any other group playing a role in governance, the self-definition will do the following:

Partly emerge out of a simple differentiation (we are different from a and b);

Partly emerge out of a delineation of core values (we are x because we believe in, know y);

Partly emerge as result of a history of strategizing and opposing (the political game); and

Partly emerge as a result of reflection in and on the profession (e.g. by the associated discipline)

Ladner Birch (2001) illustrates beautifully how the American planning profession originally shaped the academic planning discipline, but states that, in recent decades, a reverse movement can also be observed. She also shows that such academic influence can both harm and help the adaptation of the profession, and its status in the planning system. Depending on the context, a design perspective might be an asset or a liability. In systems where such perspective was already seen as an asset, but the actors most closely associated with such perspective abandon it, usually because of internal ideological struggles, this will create a niche (as in the Netherlands, where an entrepreneurial landscape architecture profession took over, since the 1980s, the practice of urban design from town planners—stedenbouwers—who had moved in the direction of socioeconomic programming (cf. Van Assche, 2004)). The expectation of the perspective by other actors will create an implicit demand, a pressure for others, either existing or new actors, to take over that role. If planners or urban designers abandon a design perspective where it previously existed, it might be taken over by landscape architects or urban designers.

Once a design perspective has conquered a place in the planning system, the actors representing it can change. Not only can actors shape, shift, and change perspectives, it can also happen that a particular approach to design loses support. This can apply to the procedure of designing, which can be considered outdated after a semantic shift (Luhmann, 2000), and to the result, the dominant geometries, or its functioning. Urban renewal in the American tradition was tied to a social democratic vision of society, an important role of spatial planning, and planning as design in a modernist esthetic. All three lost support after the results of urban renewal were found wanting (e.g. Jacobs, 1961).

The role of esthetics

Of particular importance, we believe, is the role of esthetics in the self-description of the actors professing a design perspective. Camillo Sitte’s (1965[1889]) seminal book speaks of city planning according to artistic principles, and Raymond Unwin’s 1909 treatise morphed the garden city idea into a vocabulary of esthetically pleasing form (later emulated by the New Urbanists). If the pursuit of beauty becomes the primary goal of these actors, this has a series of consequences, that are likely to dominate the relation between planning and design perspectives.

First, if design is mostly esthetics, then it is more likely that other considerations are not given much weight. When dealing with larger spaces, especially when those have to accommodate many different uses and users, design-as-esthetics is bound to create problems with use and maintenance, to negatively affect daily life (cf. De Certeau, 1984). This, in turn, will provoke resistance with users and soon after with other players within the planning system (Duany et al., 2008). Such esthetic emphasis also makes spatial design more susceptible to fashions and infatuations within the art world (compare Cuthbert, 2010). It increases the chance that designs and designers communicate implicitly with other designers and with art critics and architectural magazines, instead of with the end users and the other players that could enrich the resulting plan (Van Assche, 2004). Steiner (2011) understands why planners are wary of “an emphasis on the new and on personalities results in the elevation of ‘starchitects’ and on objects” (p. 213). If this ends up to be the case, then the intended meaning of the designed space will remain muted for most users, not schooled in the latest fashions in art and architecture (Madanipour, 1996; Van Assche et al., 2012a). Many new projects applauded in architecture magazines are therefore barely appreciated by residents, while many older celebrated projects survived neither changing professional tastes nor resident’s critiques. Punter (2007) states that “the tensions between professional and lay taste have to be constructively managed, and need to be explored through a variety of collaborative, consultative, educational and cultural programmes” (p. 188). However, the gap between “managing” and “exploring” the difference is a real one. It is also the site of politics.

The claim on the part of designers to be the only ones capable of understanding and using the language of space (cf. Gunder, 2011), to distinguish objectively good from objectively bad spatial structure, is de facto a claim to a monopoly position in the planning system. If such rhetoric is allowed to be persuasive, the results are problematic. If such claim of unique access to the language of space (e.g. Alexander, 1979; Cullen, 1961; Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 1991; Unwin, 1909) is honored, spatial design will still evolve, but this will be a matter of changing styles, not a matter of adaptation to changing environments and necessities (cf. Luhmann, 2000). In that sense, it makes the planning system rigid by rendering it immune to input from many players, by dismissing their arguments as irrelevant. In such a situation, spatial design stops to be spatial planning (Gunder, 2011). Coordination of interests and perspectives does not happen anymore, or it happens in a fashion that is opaque, removed from democratic controls.

The imposition of esthetics in the design process reduces not only the democratic legitimacy but also the capacity to enhance the planning process by looking for site-specific synergies. (Madanipour, 1996, 2004, 2006; Steiner, 2011). Earlier versions of New Urbanism suffered from this. They started from a repertoire of design elements and combinatory rules (e.g. Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 1991), but this proved too inflexible, and more recent versions of form-based coding (Talen, 2009) reduce rigidity by allowing the imposition of form on use schemes at varying times in the process and in more variations.

Overlap between planning and design

A further feature of the dialectics of planning and design that ought to be grasped is the pattern and intensity of their overlap as visible in the planning system. The rarity or abundance of these perspectives, and their position in a community, with certain actors holding certain powers, makes a substantial difference for the dialectics and the relative impact of planning and design.

Names of departments, actors, or documents do not necessarily coincide with what they do, nor do they coincide with the perspective dominant in their discourse and actions. If powerful players embrace a design perspective, a planning perspective, or a planning-as-design perspective, this will have an impact. If a number of major US real estate developers would adopt New Urbanism, this would likely trigger changes in local politics and planning and in architecture and planning schools. It is also possible that certain approaches are favored because they are embedded in rules and organizational structures inherited from the past (Booth, 1996; Schurch, 1999). If the chief planner is traditionally an architect (as in the former Soviet Union), this is likely to have an influence (Van Assche et al., 2010). If planning is de facto development planning and developers copy their designs from catalogs, this is likely to have a very different impact.

We argue that not only the location of these perspectives is relevant for understanding their interactions but also their overlaps. Overlap has two meanings here:

Overlaps between planning and design perspectives with the same actors

Overlaps between the perspectives of several actors within the planning system.

This distinction can help in understanding discursive migration from actor to actor, the pattern of transformation of actors, and the system as a whole. It also opens the doors to an understanding of transformation capacity and the options and limits for institutional (re)design.

Overlap creates cognitive openness and this enables discursive migration (Luhmann, 1990). Discursive migration then produces similar understandings of similar situations (cf. Bal, 2002) and makes it easier to compromise and coordinate. Yet, even in a system with a high degree of overlap between planning and design perspectives, each actor can embody different internal dialectics between planning and design (including a different version of a design discourse), and this will shape the overall dialectics within the planning system. In a Swedish planning process, architects, urban designers, landscape architects, and design-oriented environmental specialists can be around the table, all embracing the general idea of planning-as-design, but cherishing a different variation of the planning/design dialectics, inherited from their disciplines, from competition in the planning system, and derived from the basic need to identify and legitimize their presence.

Transformation capacity

We consider planning as necessarily adaptive (cf. Geddes, 1968[1915]; Montgomery, 1998). For the planning system to be adaptive to external changes, it requires the capacity to harvest its internal complexity: the diversity in perspectives, skills, and resources (cf. Luhmann, 1995; Seidl, 2005; Van Assche et al., 2011). It will also need the skills to reshuffle internal positions. Otherwise, political and economic pressures go unheeded and are likely to trigger less-manageable change later in time. The adaptive capacity can thus be described as a combination of learning capacity and transformative capacity (Forester, 1999; Forsyth, 2007; Vigier, 1965). These qualities are desirable for the individual actors and for the system as a whole. If the system can respond to change, for example, a different desire in society with regard to its spatial environment and with regard to heritage or pollution, this does not entail that each actor can adapt. In the internal competition, actors will disappear, be marginalized, or become more prominent. Adaptivity will be an asset in such internal competition (Harvey, 1989).

A very different competitive asset can be the claim to exclusive knowledge. Exclusive knowledge, especially knowledge that is deemed absolutely true, can bring dominance in planning games, and it is bound to introduce rigidity and problematic adaptation. This has been diagnosed as a problem in procedural planning and science-based planning (Gunder and Hillier, 2009; Van Assche, 2004), and it is a problem with certain versions of esthetic design (Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 1991; Gunder, 2011). Strong (1962), discussing “utopian surgeons” in city design, notes,

Following in the footsteps of Plato, he discovers to us the perfect form, the archetype, to which each actual city should conform, either by breaking the new ground of a Brasilia or Canberra or by transformation of San Francisco, Los Angeles, or other metropolis. (p. 100)

Rigidities in planning perspectives, like an ideology of planning as esthetic design, tend to undermine the learning capacity of the whole planning system. If planning is seen as the application of a timeless or otherwise superior language of form, with other actors and institutions merely facilitating this (e.g. Alexander, 1979; Lynch, 1981), then the dominant design actors and the system as a whole are unlikely to learn and transform. A more subtle form of monopolizing design (and hence planning) discourse and hindering genuine self-transformation is the “educating” of supposedly ignorant citizens in a supposedly objective design syntax. According to Greene (1992) “community design involves many different voices speaking in seemingly different languages. The taxonomy presented here attempts to resolve the confusion” (p. 186). Not only does this represent a major democratic deficit, it also means that the system will be inefficient, that it will create unobserved problems and will not observe problems acknowledged elsewhere in society. This represents a major risk of breakdown of coordination, after which players will pursue their interests at the expense of the common good (North, 2005; Verdery, 2003).

Dilemmas

The perfect planning system does not exist. We would go further, and say that it cannot exist. A number of reasons have been treated extensively in the planning literature already: planning always creates losers, it cannot be fully inclusive; it is driven by volatile political and economic games and unpredictable citizen preferences (Harvey, 1985; Hillier, 2002; Gunder, 2010; Madanipour et al., 2001). Citizens can be charmed, or blinded, by a certain approach that is then institutionalized without thoroughly discussing the drawbacks or without putting in place the structures and incentives to generate debate and adaptation—rules to change the rules (Garde, 2004). Such is a recipe for rigidity, and in time, for disaster. Based on the line of reasoning in this article, we would add a few other reasons why perfect planning is impossible.

First, from the perspective of planning as coordination, it transpires right away that coordination can never be perfect. Not all interests can be met at the same distance, not each common good can be approached to the same extent, and not every common good can be agreed upon or even articulated in the political and planning arenas. The same is true for design as spatial coordination. Moreover, planning-as-design has to struggle to balance different interests, and the often diverging goals of sustainability, attractiveness, practicality, and affordability (Breheny, 1992; Garde, 2004; Greene, 1992). A strong spatial structure that can accommodate many uses, users, and desires and stay within a series of constraints can never be optimized for all these factors at the same time. (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), the lobby for modernist planning apres Le Corbusier, collapsed for that reason, but that lesson is not remembered well.)

The form of coordination in planning can never be perfect, while the same is true for coordination in design. Furthermore, there is no perfect balance between planning and design perspectives in a planning system. The way the planning system is institutionalized represents a choice regarding that balance, but that configuration can never be perfectly adapted to any specific problem at hand. Moreover, optimization for perfect adaptability, stability, and predictability cannot be combined (Scott, 1998). In the Netherlands, once environmental design was established in the 1990s, cultural heritage specialists deplored the erasure of history, and when heritage design became more prominent after 2000, its lack of comprehensive environmental vision was criticized. Both approaches were selectively used and criticized by the real estate industry, optimizing according to different criteria. Finally, there is the fit between the planning system and society, where society changes at a different speed when compared with the planning system—usually faster, sometimes slower (Van Assche, 2004; Throgmorton, 1996). Expert groups within the planning system might finally have agreed on a balance between nature and culture, but that consensus might be rendered irrelevant if society at large has made a turn to the right (as in many European countries).

One can say that in the structure of the system, its institutionalization, the optimization for this or that is always an imperfection when dealing with a specific situation (cf. Luhmann, 1990, 1995). In the functioning of the system, where prudence has to complement institutions, the balancing between perspectives is a shifting between selections of blind spots. It is impossible to see everything at the same time, and an emphasis on planning as coordination of interests or content will yield different observations than an emphasis on planning-as-design. Within a design perspective, the emphasis can imperceptibly move to one of the embedded criteria (beauty, practicality, etc.), thus undermining the comprehensive character of the design, its synergetic and context-sensitive qualities (Carmona et al., 2002; Julier, 2005). If the emphasis of design comes to lay on esthetics, it quickly ceases to be planning. As Albrechts (2005) observes, creativity—and the preconditions of flexibility and openness for redefinition—is needed in all aspects of adaptive planning, from selection of actors over design of procedures to the production of visions.

The flexibility of the system, its ability to recombine perspectives according to the situation at hand, is essential. An inherent tension exists with the need for internal checks and balances. It might look like only formalization, only formal institutions, and thus a dominance of procedural planning, make checks and balances, and hence democratic planning, possible. Design reviews in such line of reasoning represent the answer to the instabilities introduced by design (cf. Dawson and Higgins, 2009; Donovan and Larkham, 1996; Nasar and Grannis, 1999; Punter, 2007). One can counter (in the line of Machiavelli) that democracies always combine formal and informal institutions, that the working of checks and balances always involves prudent leadership, active citizenship and habits, and traditions upholding them and making their enforcement possible (Mansfield, 1996). One cannot avoid responsibility and risk by full reliance on formalization. Planning, in its positioning of design, needs both formalized checks and balances and informal coordination mechanisms.

Checks and balances will be embodied in legal constraints and formalized procedures and documents. According to Punter (2007),

Arguably, design ambitions are best imbedded in a statutory plan such as a comprehensive, municipal structure or local development plan. Then they can become mainstream strategic planning objectives, can shape development in a more profound and constructive way, and be regularly monitored and updated. (p. 173)

Yet, informal institutions create space for leadership (Childs, 2010; Forester, 1999; Ladner Birch, 2001) and for creativity (Albrechts, 2005; Madanipour, 2006), and give a place to shifting combinations of perspectives (cf. Massey, 2005; Punter and Carmona, 1997). Embedding of design perspectives in a planning system is a starting point for the balancing of formal and informal coordination. Gaffikin et al (2010) observe that “carefully considered urban design, within the context of a strategic planning framework, can have a beneficial influence in a contested situation” (p. 508).

Conclusion

The relations between planning and design perspectives in a planning system are multifaceted, as they are usually spread over many different actors, and as the different forms of coordination represented by planning and design are internally varied. Planning-as-design can be regarded as a highly valuable perspective for a planning system, allowing it to capture the qualities of a specific place, to accommodate many different needs and inspire specific solutions. Planning-as-design can increase the efficiency of planning and improve the quality of its product, the resulting space. Planning can slide into blind procedure, and design can deteriorate into blind esthetics, but in each community, the search for a workable and unique balance between planning and design perspectives is an economic, political, and we would add, ecological, necessity.

A thorough familiarity with the structure and workings of the planning system, and more broadly, of governance, evolution, of the dialectics between formal and informal institutions and between planning and design perspectives, is a prerequisite when considering a modification of the planning system. If planning theorists or other scientific observers want to have an impact on planning practice, their analyses should at least start from the complexity of the current system. In many cases, the scientific observer will discern a need for a planning or design perspective to solve problems identified in and by the community. Introducing it at the very minimum requires seeing through the rhetoric and the self-descriptions of the current actors, and the rhetoric on the rules governing their interactions. In all likelihood, the help of the political system will be required to craft and implement a strategy that might remedy the absence of planning and/or design, and reintroduce those perspectives without increasing the rigidity of the planning system. Luckily, the history of the planning and design disciplines, as well as the history of wildly varying institutionalizations of planning and design perspectives, offer plenty of materials to craft such strategies.

Footnotes

Author biographies

Kristof Van Assche is a visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Innovation Studies at Wageningen University and research fellow at Bonn University’s Center for Development Research (ZEF). He is interested in the embeddings and entwinings of spatial planning and design in various communities.

Raoul Beunen is an Assistant Professor in spatial planning at Wageningen University. He worked extensively on the implementation of planning and environmental policies in different institutional settings and investigated the importance of path dependence in enabling new perspectives in policy landscapes.

Martijn Duineveld is an Assistant Professor at Wageningen University’s Department of Cultural Geography. Much of his work revolves around inclusion/exclusion, formation, and transformation of actors, objects, and knowledge in evolving governance.

Harro de Jong is the owner and principal of Buro Harro, an urban and landscape design firm active in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Eastern Europe. In 2011, he published Het groot Apeldoorns landschapskookboek, a citizen’s guide to landscape planning and design (Wageningen: Blauwdruk).

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