Abstract
In this article, I readdress the issue of rationality, which has been so far considered in western liberal democracies and in planning theory as procedural, and more recently as post-political in the post-foundational approach, aiming to show how it can gain a substantive and politicising character. I first discuss the problems and limits of the treatment of rational thinking as well as rational consensus-seeking as merely procedural and post-political. Secondly, utilising the notion of Realrationalität of Flyvbjerg, I discuss how rationality attains a politicising role due to its strong relationship with power. Using the concept of planning rationality aiming at public interest, I present the general position and actions of professional organisations in Turkey, focusing on the Chamber of City Planners, as an example illustrative of my argument. I finally argue that rationality becomes a substantive issue that politicizes planning, when it is put forward as an alternative to authoritarian market logic. In doing so, I adopt the Rancièrian definition of the political, defined as disclosure of a wrong and staging of equality. In conclusion, I first emphasize the importance of avoiding quick rejections of the concepts of rationality and consensus in the framework of planning activity and planning theory and secondly, call for a broader definition of the political; the political that is not confined to conflict but is open to rational thinking and rational consensus.
Introduction
This article poses a renewed look at the concept of rationality, to show how it attains a substantive nature and can have a politicising role in policy-making in general, and urban planning in particular. Before unpacking this argument, I will start by explaining my motivation behind the article; an unrest about the contemporary understanding of democracy in conflict/power sensitive approaches that have been highly influential and even a trendsetter in the planning literature. In this understanding, democracy has been defined or assessed too much in terms of dichotomies such as consensus versus conflict; communicative/deliberative versus agonistic; procedure versus substance (or process vs outcome), episteme versus metis (or expert knowledge vs lay knowledge), etc. Many of them have attracted criticism for being counterproductive; the closely intertwined dichotomies of consensus versus conflict and communicative versus agonistic are criticized in a diverse range of studies (e.g. Beaumont and Loopmans, 2008; Bond, 2011; Fougère and Bond, 2018; Gualini, 2015; Inch, 2015; Legacy, 2017; McClymont, 2019; Özdemir-Ulutaş, 2019; Silver et al., 2010; Van Wymeersch et al., 2019, etc.); process versus outcome by mainly communicative planning theorists such as Healey (2003) and Innes and Booher (2015), episteme versus metis by Tironi (2015) and Innes and Booher (2015). The critics of consensus versus conflict dichotomy also included calls for acknowledging the need for both, to be able to conceptualize new ways of participation (Legacy et al., 2019). The dichotomy of passions/emotions versus rationality, originating from mainly Mouffe’s view on passions is not so much problematized as the others and perhaps less explicit than them. Although explaining societal phenomena using dichotomies, which is an effective tool of abstraction as well as criticism, I agree with the view that too strict dichotomies are counterproductive and sometimes do not reflect the reality. We sometimes get stuck in them and neglect the porosity between the two sides, both in theory and practice.
That being said, my problem in this article is beyond their strictness; it is more about the contemporary tendency of treatment of the former part of each dichotomy as a source of democratic deficit. It has become so far that, whatever involves the former part of the dichotomy is deemed inherently anti-democratic. Likewise, the latter is deemed more democratising and, in that sense, somewhat better than the former. In a manner of speaking, for democracy, conflict is deemed better than consensus, agonistic better than communicative, being passionate better than being rational and metis better than the episteme. This line of thought becomes hypo-critical in the sense that these ‘betters’ are, whether implicitly or explicitly, taken for granted. They are regarded almost as universal values independent of time and space, while their situatedness is ignored or not fully integrated into the analysis. This kind of thinking limits our understanding of the political, as if the political can emerge and be fostered only through conflict, passions, metis, agonism, while rational thinking, episteme, consensus are only to supress it. On the other hand, there are exceptions or attempts to find a middle ground such as the Mouffean concept of conflictual consensus (Mouffe, 2005: 52) -which I find unelaborate anyway. Despite such quests, there is a strong tendency to limit the political and democracy in the realm of only conflict in conflict/power sensitive approaches in general and the discussions in planning theory under their influence.
Each of these dichotomies or the concepts themselves can be problematized in detail. In this article, I choose the concept of rationality among those that have been tackled within dichotomies. I aim to challenge the view that it leads, by default, to democratic deficit. I will do this by showing how it attains a substantive character, as opposed to the dominant tendency to handle it as procedural in Western liberal democracies as well as in planning theory. Furthermore, in relation to this substantive character, I aim to disclose how it might become a source of politicisation or gain a politicising role especially in authoritatively neoliberal contexts. At this point, I refer to two examples of planning processes from Turkey to illustrate my argument. I finally call for a broader definition of politicisation of planning; politicisation that is not limited to conflict-sensitivity and passions but open to calmness too, and insistence on rational decision-making and greater levels of rational consensus-seeking.
The article is based on theoretical argumentation building on existing theory and refers to case-specific examples to illustrate its arguments. As the example is used for illustrative purposes, the empirical part is kept limited compared to an in-depth case study. I first critically analyse the existing literature on post-politics with a view to rationality and rational consensus as well as the relation between power and rationality, and in connection to this, the relation between rationality and public interest, and arrive at the argument that this relation endows the notion of rationality with a politicising role. In the second part of the article, I make a more focused critic of the aforementioned problems in the dichotomous thinking, centring on the concept of rationality and in relation to it, on the concepts of expert knowledge and rational consensus. I shed a critical light on the discussions on rationality and rational consensus-seeking in the context of urban planning and disclose their limitations. In doing so, I intend to reveal the limits of taking them only as post-political, disregarding their political potential. In the third part, dwelling upon the strong relationship between rationality and power and context-dependency of rationality, as demonstrated by Flyvbjerg (1998), I aim to show how rationality can play the role of a safeguard to protect the less powerful against the Realrationalität of the powerful. Given the fact that there are multiple rationalities, I first explain in a sub-section which rationality I mean. I then focus on the interaction between rationality and power as well as the relation between rationality and public interest in two additional sub-sections. In the fourth section, I use an example from Turkey to illustrate my arguments; the actions of the Chamber of City Planners, along with the rationale behind these actions. My knowledge on these actions and their rationales are driven from three sources; my general observations and experience about Turkish policy-making and planning environment and Chamber’s activities; specific documents such as press releases, reports and written principles of the Chamber; and narratives of Chamber representatives in my personal conversations with them. In the concluding section, I will explicate the need for a broader and situated understanding of the political and its implications for planning theory.
Rationality and rational consensus-seeking: Nothing but post-political?
Recent years have witnessed a growing association of the political and democracy with conflictuality, and in that sense with more respect to and a better accommodation of rival identities, multiple rationalities, different ways of knowing, differing desires and passions, whereas rationality and consensus are denounced as totalising, creating democratic deficits or reducing our capacity to think and act politically. Rationality is a broad concept with definitions of different and even competing types, yet it is taken in the framework of planning mainly as scientific, expert or technical rationality and by the same token, as a method of decision-making, where logical reasoning and expert modes of knowing dominate. In parallel, consensus is defined as a rational agreement on the solutions to the different problems in the society. One of the heaviest critical engagements on such expert-based rationality, consensus-seeking as well as expert modes of knowing comes from the thoughts on the post-political, of a number of important scholars such as Žižek (1999), Mouffe (1999, 2005), Rancière (1999, 2010) and Swyngedouw (2005, 2009). Post-political is taken here as the feature of a new era defined by the abandonment of ideological visions and political struggles, and their replacement by a managerial and technocratic collaboration based on a compromise in the guise of universal consensus through negotiation of interests (Žižek, 1999: 198). In this framework, consensus and rationality, both in its instrumental and communicative forms, are regarded as the pacification, containment and finally the foreclosure of the political, or, in other words, they are regarded as post-political.
Mouffe is one of the most influential scholars on the critical literature in urban planning, who thinks that rational thinking prevents one from posing political questions, and therefore suggests, as opposed to the rationalist framework, the agonistic model, where passionate and conflicting parties acknowledge that there is no rational solution to their conflict, yet recognise the legitimacy of each other. One of the main tenets of her critique is her distinction between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ (Mouffe, 2005: 8). She defines the political in terms of antagonisms and conflictuality, whereas politics ‘indicates the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions which seek to establish a certain order. . .’ (Mouffe, 2000: 15). In other words, the political is ‘a space of power, conflict and antagonism’, rather than a space of public deliberation and a search for rational consensus (Mouffe, 2005: 9) Here, she emphasizes a strong distinction between being rational and being passionate. For her, understanding democratic politics only in terms of reason, moderation and consensus and elimination of passion from politics is the sign of a lack of understanding of the dynamics of the political (Mouffe, 2005: 28). She is harsh against the consensus approach too; arguing that it is ‘profoundly mistaken’ and instead of contributing to a ‘democratisation of democracy’, it is at the origin of many of the problems that democratic institutions are currently facing’ (Mouffe, 2005: 2). Rancière problematizes the consensus approach too, by defining it as ‘the presupposition of inclusion of all parties and their problems that prohibits the political subjectification of a part of those who have no part’ (Rancière, 1999: 116). At this point, he makes a similar, yet a more elaborate distinction than Mouffe’s; a distinction between the police and the politics. The police refer to the institutions and set of procedures that reproduce the societal hierarchy; defining the ‘allocation of ways of doing, ways of being and ways of saying’ (Rancière, 1999: 29), while the political occurs when the police order is interrupted.
These insights have widely influenced the recent discussions in planning theory, especially criticisms against communicative/collaborative planning theory 1 for being unable to deal with conflictive issues that cannot easily be reduced to a rational argumentation. Two related focuses of these criticisms were communicative rationality and dependence on expert knowledge. Consensus-oriented communicative planning was criticized for trying to eliminate the conflicting differences between different groups’ conceptions of the good as negatives, rather than diverse values to be recognized in decision-processes (Hillier, 2003), and for rendering invisible the power relations and inequalities and ‘evading the political in planning’ (Legacy, 2017). Process versus outcome dichotomy also surfaced in these criticisms. Feinstein, for example, criticised communicative planning theory and processes for focusing on process rather than the outcome (Fainstein, 2005, 2010). As regards to expert knowledge, the critique continued mostly in an expert versus lay knowledge dichotomy. Although it has obviously never been argued that lay knowledge is more important than expert knowledge, but rather that the diversity of views, positions, and values cannot be supported by a singular type of knowledge (Gunder and Hillier, 2009, cited in Lysgård and Cruickshank, 2013), requiring a process of producing knowledge that is consistent with the fluidity and instability of the world (Hillier, 2008), the former part of the dichotomy, namely the expert knowledge, has mostly been considered as a source of the democratic deficit. In that sense, communicative planning theory is criticized, like rational comprehensive planning, valuing expert knowledge and for underestimating the challenges of asserting alternative forms (McGuirk, 2001; Nicholls and Uitermark, 2017). Reliance on expert knowledge and administration is regarded as the partition of the sensible, as opposed to the Rancierian principle of equality (May, 2008, cited in Swyngedouw, 2009), since experts have the status of ‘givers’, while non-experts can only be the ‘receivers’ of equality (May, 2009). Furthermore, essentialising the identity of scientists and planners as intrinsically rational, good and truth bearing was associated with an authoritarian logic (Hillier, 2003) and even with a police order that controls the disruptive political acts (Nicholls and Uitermark, 2017). In relation, urban planning processes are characterized as post-political, while rational consensus formation and prioritisation of expert knowledge over lay knowledge are deemed as a prominent dimension of this post-politicisation (see Davidson and Iveson, 2015; Fougère and Bond, 2018). As a way out of post-politicisation, new openings have been sought for more sensitivity and accommodativeness for conflicts and the political in urban planning. The quests have been defined slightly differently, such as ‘rediscovery of the political nature of planning’ (Mazza, 2002), ‘re-politicisation of urban planning’ (Gualini, 2015), ‘revitilising the political’ (McClymont, 2011), need for ‘fearless speech’ and ‘resistance to politics’ by planners (Grange, 2017), etc., all having a common goal that is a more political role for urban planners.
I argue that these kinds of dichotomous thinking, especially when applied in the field of planning, are problematic for placing rationality only to the realm of Mouffean politics or Rancièrian police; rendering it away from the realm of the political or even considering it as a means of surpassing the political. It is regarded as procedural, without any or much substantive meaning, providing answers only to the question of how decisions are made, rather than what these decisions are. In relation to this, Özdemir-Ulutaş (2019) shows the interaction between expert knowledge and the political, or more specifically how the expert knowledge can contribute to the politicisation of planning processes. Here, building on the Nietzsche and Foucault-informed in-depth local analyses of Flyvbjerg (1998), I further argue that, exactly because of its strong relation to power and its context-dependency, rationality is neither a mere procedural issue, nor can be confined to the realm of only politics or police; it has a very strong political and a potential politicising role, which can be realized in different contexts. More precisely, as Flyvbjerg shows, the power of rationality can oppose the rationality of power, that is, the rationality of powerful business interests, for the sake of societal and environmental concerns. This is where rationality gains a political dimension. In this regard, the post-political arises not out of expert knowledge and rationality based on it, as usually assumed in the post-political literature, but out of its manipulation to rationalize the agenda of the powerful. This manipulation is not to be blamed upon scientific, expert or technical rationality, but on a profit-oriented rationality and its lust for more power.
Rationality: Why substantive and political?
As stated in the previous section, I support my argument that rationality is not merely a procedural issue and has a potentially politicising role based mainly on Flyvbjerg’s analysis of the interaction between power and rationality. To elaborate my argument, I will also draw attention to the relationship between rationality and public interest, as an issue elevating rationality to a substantive level. Yet, beforehand, I will focus on the concept of rationality itself.
Which rationality?
There is obviously not one type of rationality. We know, among others, rationalities of different philosophical traditions (MacIntyre, 1998) or Weber’s four types of rationalities; practical, theoretical, substantive and formal (see Karlberg, 1980). Apart from these philosophical discussions, rationality is defined in Cambridge English Dictionary as ‘the quality of being based on clear thought and reason, or making decisions on clear thought and reason’. Oxford English Dictionary has a simpler definition: the quality of being based on or in accordance with reason or logic. The dictionary definition is also largely adopted in the urban planning literature. For example, when we say rational comprehensive planning, we mean planning based on reason and logic. Furthermore, due to the traditionally enlightenment oriented perspectives of planning theory (Allmendinger and Gunder, 2005) and the resulting dominance of scientific analysis in rational comprehensive planning, when the word ‘rationality’ is used on its own, what is meant is usually scientific, expert or technical rationality (e.g. see Healey, 2003: 113).
There is also the Habermasian distinction between ‘instrumental rationality’ and ‘communicative rationality’, the latter of which was put forward as an alternative to be able to continue to defend the planning project in a pluralist world (Healey, 1996). Yet Habermas had again a procedural understanding of rationality and was criticized both for that and for ignoring humans’ inevitable irrationality and selfishness (Horowitz, 2013). Communicative planning based on communicative rationality was criticized for validating expert forms of knowing/reasoning/valuing (McGuirk, 2001). On the other hand, aforementioned discussions on the post-politicisation of urban planning, or critics of communicative planning call for a more relational and situated approach to rationality by planning theory. Discussions on the topic enriched along issues such as the distinction between formal rationality and Realrationalität (Flyvbjerg, 1998), varied systems of knowledge and rationality introduced through inclusionary participation (McGuirk, 2001) and redefining the purpose of planning to handle multiple knowledges (Rydin, 2007), and etc. Likewise, more emphasis was put on issues which defy universal comprehension and cannot be resolved at a rational level, such as indigenous peoples’ spiritual issues (Hillier, 2000). In a word, recourse to any singular rationality has been denounced in general (Bäcklund and Mäntysalo, 2010) and a shift to more relational conceptions of rationality has been seen in planning theory (Harrison, 2006). In relation to this, the concept of ‘multiple rationalities’ has more recently been getting attention. Although this conception goes back to MacIntyre (1998), his ‘work is concerned largely with the multiple rationalities that co-exist within the broad framework of the Western Enlightenment’, whereas the more recent work is concerned manly with the critique of modernity (Harrison, 2006) including studies on the cities of global South (e.g. Harrison, 2006; Watson, 2003, etc). All in all, despite the thriving discussions on multiplicity and variety as regards to rationality, when one reads or hears the word ‘rationality’ in the framework of urban planning and in singular form, without any adjective or noun in front of it, what is meant is still, in general, scientific, expert or technical rationality. I argue that there are two problems in this ‘changing’ understanding of rationality.
First, the concept of multiple rationalities runs the risk of ending up with very narrow-minded rationalities that neglect the broader societal concerns. In this regard, if we recall the discussions on the concept of rationalisation, one of the main themes of Flyvbjerg (1998), what is meant by much of these multiple rationalities are in fact rationalisations. Flyvbjerg sees rationalisation mainly as the conduct of the powerful; it is for him the power that ‘blurs the dividing line between rationality and rationalisation’ and it is the power that presents rationalisation as rationality (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 2). The closer one is to political power, the less one makes use of technical documentation and rationality. For example, if one is talking about business rationality as one of these multiples, then at its core lies the production, modification, changing, manipulation etc. of ‘facts’ in line with the business interests, regardless of their conformity with the reality. Thus, if we put too much emphasis on multiple rationalities, then we also open the door wider for the powerful to make rationalisations. On the other hand, it should be added that it is not only the powerful, but also the less powerful who rationalize their actions and decisions. Take, for example, the poor people under the threat of top-down neoliberal urban renewal projects may act with individual property-based motivations, rather than opposing these projects with right-based motivations. There are many examples for this from Turkey (see Kuyucu and Ünsal, 2010; Özdemir-Ulutaş and Eraydın, 2012, 2017). Such behaviour is rationalized by these people for they also want to claim their share from the new rent generated, which is only to be expected in economies where the land rent is the main tool of wealth generation and distribution. Thus, we should accept and understand these multiple rationalities, or rationalisations, but avoid embracing them uncritically. Furthermore, these rationalisations are not only economical, but might be religious, spiritual, fatalist, etc, 2 which usually serve the rationality of power.
Second, there is a problem in associating rationality in planning only or mainly with science, expertise and technics. Planners’ knowledge is first of all not purely technical. Planning is in the first place the ideology of how we define and use space (Gunder, 2010). Although value-free knowledge was an essential doctrine of comprehensive rationalist planning (Bäcklund and Mäntysalo, 2010), there has long been a consensus in contemporary planning literature that the modern role of the planner is by no means only technical and analytical (Sager, 1995). It is now widely accepted that planners’ knowledge is not value free, but rather, value-infused (McGuirk, 2001), at the least. It should also be stressed that planners are different than many other types of experts, especially because of their more generalist approach requiring ‘being mobile between different, formal and informal levels of goals’ and the weakness of their technical knowledge (Mazza, 2002). Most other areas of expertise, such as engineering or medicine, is based on more specialized and technically stronger knowledge. Besides, planning processes not only require technical and quantitative, but also social and qualitative analysis and evaluations. Furthermore, planners are, in Foucauldian terms, among those ‘specific intellectuals, whose knowledge blurs the distinction between knowledge and practice’ (Uitermark and Nicholls, 2017). As a result, although rationality within the framework of planning is generally regarded as scientific or technical, it is wider than that, encompassing values and enriched with practical concerns. Exactly for these reasons, I find the term planning rationality useful within the scope of the discussion I make in this article. It can be defined, not as another one of the multiple rationalities framed by specific interests, but a value-oriented type of scientific/expert/technical rationality; rationality that is not singular and totalising thanks to its concern on societal problems and principles such as the public interest, which are manifold with respect to different situations and are mobilized in practice, as will be clarified in later sections, but broad enough and backed by scientific facts to transcend the specific and narrow interests. 3
Interaction between rationality and power
In Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice, Flyvbjerg makes an examination of the interaction between power and rationality, through a detailed analysis of a planning process that deals basically with the motorized traffic in centre of the Danish city of Aalborg. He demonstrates that rationality is context-dependent and that the context of rationality is power (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 2, 227). To begin with, in Flyvbjerg’s case study, power is represented by business groups organised under the Aalborg Chamber of Commerce, while rationality is the scientific/technical/expert rationality of planning professionals at the Municipality of Aalborg. He is, as explicitly stated by himself, concerned mainly with ‘the interaction between technical rationality and power’ (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 31), although he uses the term ‘normative rationality’, too (e.g. Flyvbjerg and Richardson, 2002). As mentioned in the previous section, I prefer to use the term planning rationality, to emphasize the value-orientation of the rationality in the framework of planning. In addition, despite the views that read such emphasis as a dualistic opposition of ‘rationality’ versus ‘power’ (e.g. Healey, 2003), Flyvbjerg’s point here is to draw attention to how rationality and power work or cannot work together; he does not argue that there is necessarily an opposition in between. Furthermore, although Flyvbjerg’s study is usually recognized in the relevant literature as another critique of communicative rationality, it is more than this. This section reveals why and how this is so.
Flyvbjerg analyses the interaction between power and rationality borrowing old concepts and connecting them with the ones he introduces. I first would like to emphasize his critical twin concepts of rationality of power and power of rationality. Rationality of power is the rationality of whoever holds the power. It is in his case the Chamber’s business rationality centred around the premise that, what is good for business is good for the city as a whole. Power of rationality, on the other hand, is used to denote the more limited power of the rationality, aiming in his case to limit the car traffic for public interest, supported by documented technical analysis, or in other words, the planning rationality. Using the example of Chamber misinterpreting or not fully sharing the data that is not in line with its aim to prevent any limitation on private car traffic in central Aalborg, he further shows how the rationality of power, borrowing from Foucault, uses rationalisation as a strategy to reach its aims. Here, rationalisation presented by power as the rationality itself is what he calls the Realrationalität. His study further shows how power, during the process of rationalisation, not only misinterprets the existing knowledge, but ‘supresses that knowledge and rationality for which it has no use’ and it is capable of this thanks to its power (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 36). Thus, by interpreting and using both rationality and rationalisation in its own service, power has a ‘freedom to define reality’ (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 37). This makes the powerful, the Chamber in his case, win in the end.
What is particular important within the framework of this article is the asymmetrical character of the interrelation between power and rationality, framed by Flyvbjerg throughout his book as ‘. . .the greater the power, the less the rationality’ (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 2, 37, 68, 80). An ‘unequal relation between rationality and power. . .’ (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 193) surfaces, resulting from the ‘. . .marginalisation of mind and intellect by power’ (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 230) in the process of rationalisation. In the specific case of Aalborg, the asymmetrical character favoured the specific interests of the members of Chamber located in central Aalborg, while disfavouring the general interests such as ‘maintaining the urban environment, improving traffic safety, and converting from private to public transportation’ (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 115). Put differently, the asymmetry favoured the rationality of power representing the business interests organised under the Chamber and disfavoured the planning rationality representing the interests of a wider public (those of the neighbourhood association in the area, cyclists, pedestrians and users of the public transportation.) As a result of this asymmetry, the planning process was finalized in favour of the rationality of power. In the framework of planning, this means that planning rationality is left as one of the few sources of power, which the less powerful can utilize or which can be utilized on its behalf. This is the critical aspect of the interaction between power and rationality that gives the latter a substantive and political nature. Rationality is not just a way of decision-making, and therefore not merely procedural, but a source of, or, in Flyvbjerg’s terms, a form of power that works for the less powerful. Here, the distinction between planning rationality in the pursuit of public interest and the rationality of the administration of a planning institution, such as the mayor, the aldermen or those ‘alienized’ planners in a Marxian sense (Penpecioğlu and Taşan-Kok, 2016) should be stressed, since the latter group usually acts in line with the objectives of the powerful. Put differently, there is an important difference between planning rationality as defined in this article and the rationality of the so-called ‘new managerialism’ (Imrie, 1999) or more recently defined ‘new urban technocracy’ (Savini and Raco, 2019) acting in an entrepreneurial spirit as a part of a neoliberal growth agenda. The latter type of rationality is in a position to support the rationality of power, whereas planning rationality struggles against it, or it is marginalized by it. This was evident in the Aalborg case due to the ‘. . .power-to-power meetings in which staff members with relevant professional knowledge are excluded’. (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 141). In this respect, it is not the planning rationality that has a hegemonic status against alternative ‘knowledge/reasoning forms’ (McGuirk, 2001); it is rather the rationality of power, mainly of the economic elites that holds such a status, while planning rationality becomes just one of the alternative forms. Put differently, as Brand and Gaffikin (2007) also argue, power of rationality is rather humble when confronted with the rationale of power. This also contradicts with the general tendency to treat planning rationality and economic rationality as twins in planning processes (see McGuirk, 2001). Hegemonic desires mentioned by Gunder (2005) such as sustainable, healthy, competitive or creative city and their staging as the public interest are not the desires of planning rationality, but rationality of power, or, more specifically, the economic rationality of the capital. In that regard, although planners might be powerful as opposed to the marginalized people thanks to their professional knowledge as argued by Uitermark and Nicholls (2017), when defending a planning rationality, they are themselves marginalized or powerless against the market or business rationality seeking profit maximisation. In a word, rationality targets the rules of the game that works in the benefit of the powerful and therefore, it not only provides an ideal to strive for (Flyvbjerg, 1998:2), but it is a guiding principle that planning needs to reembrace to defend the rights of the less powerful.
Relationship between planning rationality and public interest
There is a strong relationship between planning rationality and public interest, since planning rationality considers public interest as a fundamental principle, whereas each of the multiple rationalities mentioned in the previous section will, by definition, pursue the interests of whoever holds them. Public interest, on the other hand, is, as widely discussed, a contested concept. Its definition as the interests of not specific groups, but of a wider public or the public in general is where planning derives its legitimisation from (Alexander, 2002; Campbell and Marshall, 2000, 2002; Fainstein, 2010). In that regard, planning interventions should ensure that they account to public interest. Yet the challenges against this legitimisation abound, posing questions such as who this wider public is, how its interests can be defined by planners on its behalf, if it is possible to define a single public interest (Sandercock, 1998a, 1998b). Despite its contested nature, the idea of the public interest remains as the pivot around which discussions concerning the purpose and role of planning must turn, as Campbell and Marshall (2002) argues. Yet, more important than that, it should be reconsidered and reembraced as a notion whose defence is the main goal of planning rationality, which is an aspect of rationality that gives it a substantive and a political character. For such a reconsideration and re-embracement, first, the concept of public interest should be considered inherently as outcome-based, although there are, as Campbell and Marshall (2002) draws attention to, procedural as well as outcome focused conceptualisations of it. In other words, we should not only ‘redefine public interest in terms of the purposes and values which the planning system is seeking to fulfil and promote’ (Campbell and Marshall, 2000), but we should avoid conflating it with procedure (Lennon, 2017) and furthermore, challenge the very existence of a procedural understanding of it. Only if the aim is to reach just outcomes, rather than proper procedures, then we can talk about public interest. This implies that the assessment of public interest should be based on outcomes, rather than processes. For example, the implementation of local or national elections, public debates, participatory arrangements, etc. do not show that public interest is pursued, yet only the outcome of such implementations can show whether it is pursued or not. Second, public interest is neither only a philosophical concept, nor an abstract principle, but, as Chettiparamb (2016) shows, it is mobilised in practice. Furthermore, public interest becomes meaningful only if it is mobilised in practice. Consideration of real planning processes, as I do in the next section, will be valuable here, where public interest is not that undefinable, and the limits of the public is not so vague. In other words, although it is argued to be a device of mystification in general (Campbell and Marshall, 2000), in specific planning situations, it is it becomes rather a device of clarification. Public interest, as I will detail in the next section, is concretized, for example, as preservation of historical assets and collective memory, protection of environment, increasing air quality, a more just redistribution of increasing land rents and etc. In short, in concrete planning situations, we can find the wrong or the better, if not the rightest and the best. Coming back to rationality; its strong relation to public interest defined in terms of outcomes, bestows upon it not a procedural but a substantive character and politicising role.
Chamber of City Planners’ legal struggle for the power of rationality – against the rationality of power
The current situation and actions of professional organisations in Turkey and particularly those of the Chamber of City Planners are indicative of how scientific/expert/technical rationality in general and planning rationality in particular are not limited to procedure but have a substantive status and thereby gain a political nature. There are different types of professional organisations in Turkey, like in many other countries, that is, Chambers of City Planners, Chambers of Architects, Turkish Medical Association and affiliated chambers of medical doctors, chambers of many different types of engineering professions, Chambers of Pharmacists, bar associations for lawyers, etc; all of them established by law based on compulsory membership.
The main objective of these organisations in Turkey is not only to protect the professional rights of their members, but also to defend scientific/expert/technical rationality and protect the public interest as stated in many of their press releases or working reports. It is beyond the scope of this article to make a fully-fledged evaluation of these organisations in terms of their contribution to democratisation, yet it is necessary to stress that, by defending the power of rationality against the rationality of power, which is a part of the ongoing neoliberal authoritarian agenda of the government supported by the capitalist class, they have become significant oppositional forces in the society. Despite the aim of the current government (Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party – JDP) 4 and its supporters to limit the realm of politics into party politics by excluding such organisations and other actors of the civil society from politics, these organisations have become important political actors of the Turkish society. They are political in a Rancièrian sense, by exposing a wrong that is made usually within the framework of government policies, and demanding equality in these policies. Furthermore, they are politicized by defending scientific/expert /technical rationality for public interest within the framework of their own disciplines. Their members, each of them within their own area of specialisation, publish technical reports, reveal scientific data, share their expert views by writing in newspaper columns, making press releases, joining public debates on TV or in social media, etc. against governmental actions they see as not in line with the public interest. For example, the Turkish Medical Association states that the number of coronavirus infected citizens are much higher than what is declared by the government based on the data they gather from their members working in the field and calls the government to take more serious measures such as the closure of shopping malls and free corona virus tests for the poor. The Chamber of City Planners, the Chamber of Architects and the Chamber of Construction Engineers draw attention to how dense construction and loss of soil and green areas in cities increase the disaster risk, and how this affects usually the areas where poor people live.
I should also add that, many of the representatives of professional organisations are passionate in defending rationality as well as their professional principals and ethics. Particularly, medical doctors in the corona pandemia process and Bar Associations when they were opposing a recently adopted bill to establish a second association in large cities, have made passionate speeches on TV. The members of the Bar Association marched on the streets to the Turkish National Parliament to protest the bill, despite the harsh intervention from the police. 5 The Chamber of City Planners too was passionate in their meetings and demonstrations against the projects they did not see in line with the public interest. A language full of passion was used in many of their reports and press releases. On the other hand, these professional organisations sometimes prefer to stay still oppositional, yet calm and sue certain governmental decisions or projects at administrative courts using expert-based arguments. Reason and passion in their case do not contradict but support each other. In that respect, they have become important and effective oppositional actors, by both street level protest and challenging governmental actions at legal level.
In what follows, I will focus on a particular type of professional organisations, the Chamber of City Planners, After providing some background information on its structure and functioning, I will clarify how rationality is not adopted by it as a procedure to be followed, but becomes a matter of political choice of outcomes, either in favour of public interest or of specific and powerful interests.
The structure and the functioning of the Chamber of City Planners
The Chamber of City Planners (hereafter Chamber) is a professional organisation in Turkey and a member of the umbrella organisation, the Union of Chambers of Turkish Engineers and Architects, which was established by law in 1954. The Chamber has branches in twelve large cities across the country. Smaller cities have representative offices in one of these Chamber Branches within their closest vicinity. In the framework of the compulsory membership, to be able to practice their profession, all city planners in Turkey are obliged to be registered at the Chamber Branch at their closest vicinity. The General Assembly (GA) of the Chamber is the platform where the general principles of the Chamber, including the defence of the public interest, dependence on scientific knowledge, comprehensiveness, etc. is adopted. 6 The GA members are elected at the GA of each Chamber Branch, which are composed of all registered planners at that Branch. The GA also elects the members of the Board of Directors of the Chamber, which is the main decision-making body. Each Chamber Branch has also its own Board of Directors, elected by its own GA.
In what follows, I will focus on the Chamber in the neo-liberal authoritarian context of Turkey and its legal actions. Beforehand, however, it is important to underline that my aim here is neither to depict an idealized picture of the Chamber nor to put it as the safeguard of the ultimate public interest. First of all, the internal functioning and especially the abovementioned election system of the Chamber and Chambers of other professions is criticized by both left-leaning, oppositional groups (such as some planners themselves) and supporters of neoliberal and authoritarian government policies. For example, their elections are criticized for lacking public relations campaigns, so that local members get sufficient knowledge about the candidates for the above-mentioned bodies. Their leaders are also at times criticized for pursuing political power, if not material gains, which is a situation that can be observed in other types of membership-based organisations such as political parties and trade unions. All these issues deserve further in-depth studies beyond the scope and the purpose of this article. My aim here is limited to show how Chamber’s planning rationality defends public interest -not a general abstract public interest, but one that is mobilized and defined in practice- as opposed to the interests of the powerful, and thereby gains a substantive character and political role.
The Chamber’s position and actions in focus
Cities around the globe are prone to neoliberal rent-seeking interventions. In the Turkish case, these interventions can be grouped into three. First are urban renewal projects implemented in degraded and/or informal urban residential areas, resulting in new rent generation and its unequal distribution in the society (Demirtaş-Milz, 2013; Karaman, 2014; Kuyucu, 2014; Kuyucu and Ünsal, 2010; Özdemir-Ulutaş and Eraydın, 2017; Penpecioğlu, 2013). Second are urban renewal projects targeting public spaces, aiming to transform them into usually commercial spaces. Gezi protests of 2012, for example, had started as an opposition to such a project. A project-based neoliberal urbanisation, as defined for Europe (Swyngedouw et al., 2002) is relevant for Turkey too, yet in a more top-down manner (Penpecioğlu and Taşan-Kok, 2016; Geniş, 2020), due mainly to the general political condition in the country and the resulting high planning powers of the central state institutions. To this, one can add the piecemeal plan amendments, increasing the construction rights in one single building lot, belonging mainly to a powerful citizen or institution. These piecemeal amendments are regarded as one of the main problems decreasing the spatial quality in Turkish cities (Ünlü, 2006) and perpetuating the spatial injustice. They usually end up with buildings for commercial use or mosques. The Chamber, with its branches across Turkey, carry out a legal struggle against planning decisions that aim at such interventions, by suing them at administrative courts. The decision to take such legal action is made at the Chamber’s Board of Directors meeting and the Board of Directors entitles the Branches to execute the decision.
In doing so, the Chamber acts in the framework of planning rationality. In that respect, as explicitly stated by the President of the Chamber’s Ankara Branch (CP3) in 2019, they ‘aim to put the guidance of reason and knowledge instead of the guidance of the capital’. The 2016–2018 Activity Report of the Chamber’s Ankara Branch is further informative about what this planning rationality entails. In the report, the Board of Directors of the Chamber explicitly states that they confront ignorance with reason and knowledge and that, with their legal actions, they are in a struggle against;
- land rent policies that bolster the existing power relations,
- violation of the constitution and the rule of law,
- public policies that deepen the social inequalities and spatial contradictions,
- power competition that terrorize the spaces we live in and claim,
- destruction of the nature and public spaces,
- destruction of citizens’ collective memories,
- disrespect to science, technic and our profession,
- capitalists that increase their wealth by exploiting the labourers.
The report continued as follows showing how they combined the above-mentioned legal and street level struggle: ‘We made every effort to discuss, dream and produce altogether, without deviating from the right and progressive direction of science and professional ethics. We claimed our public spaces that constituted the ground where we can maintain our productivity, common cultural values that feed into our future dreams, natural assets that will strengthen our breath. We reminded the responsible authorities of their duties, pursued a legal struggle against those who are insistent on negligence. We went out to streets against disrespect to law’ (2016-2018 Activity Report of the Chamber of City Planners Ankara Branch, 2019).
The legal action of Chamber’s Ankara Branch against the privatisation and destruction of the largest public space in Ankara is a helpful example to better understand how its planning rationality is enacted and why it is not procedural but has a political dimension by exposing a wrong and demanding equality. The name of the public space is Atatürk Forest Farm, which has been an important inner-city area in Ankara, with the character of both an urban forest and an urban agricultural area. It was built in the early years of the Turkish Republic as an urban park of 102,000 decares (102 km2) including recreational areas, agricultural areas and small agricultural production units. From the date it was built, approximately 2/3 of this area has been privatised gradually, mostly in 1980s and after, when neoliberal urban policies began to be implemented in Turkey (Keleş, 2012). Total area of the park continued to decrease substantially with the construction of the Presidential Palace of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2014, and since then the palace is called Illegal Palace by the Chamber and Chamber of Architects too, for it was constructed despite the Council of State’s motion for stay of execution (Candan et al., 2015). Later, several new plans concerning different sections of the urban park was adopted by Ankara Metropolitan Municipality that would lead to a new project for the construction of a privately owned and managed amusement and theme park (Ankapark), which was said to be Europe’s largest. The Chamber sued these plans arguing that it was against public interest for destroying a 1st degree agricultural area according to all expert reports issued in the court processes. Although the Chamber won the cases, the construction of the park continued and the subsequent legal actions of the Chamber proved unsuccessful for the area was declared as ‘not any more a 1st degree agricultural area’ in the new plan (Activity Report of the Chamber, 2018). 7 This confirmed Flyvbjerg’s finding that, ‘. . . as power attempts to define rationality and reality, it can put even the law out of operation’ (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 138). Finally, the construction finished and Ankapark was officially opened in March 2019. The park was advertised by the then mayor himself that it would attract 10 million tourists a year. It is unknown whether this rationalisation was based on any confirming scientific analysis or data. It seems it was not, since the park, for which 750 million dollars of public money was spent according to the current mayor, was closed in early 2020, for there was no sufficient demand and the company that was in charge of the management of the park went bankrupt.
This example is informative for not only showing how planning rationality defended the public interest against the Realrationalität of the political elites, but also that public interest was not so difficult to define at practice level. The highly polished prestige project of Ankapark ended up with the destruction of a public space and a valuable agricultural and green area in a metropolitan area, and the loss of millions of dollars of public money for it was closed down less than a year after its opening.
Another example is a mosque construction, which is in fact a part of a series of rapid construction of Neo-Ottoman mosques in the country as a part of the unique coupling of neoliberalism and Islamism of the JDP government in all aspects of social life including urban development (Karaman, 2013). In the legal struggle of Chamber against the project, this time the public interest was defined mainly in terms of collective memory and historic preservation. Planning rationality confronted government’s populist political rationality aiming to consolidate its religious constituents and Islamist political rationality aiming to use the built environment in the making of an Islamist milieu (Batuman, 2018). In 2015, a public building, the building of Bank of Provinces, a state institution that supported small municipalities in their plan making processes that was built in the early years of the Turkish Republic (1937) in the historical centre of Ankara was demolished in the framework of a mosque construction. The state building, as a unique example of the modernist architecture was registered as cultural heritage and formed a unitary street facade with other registered buildings from the modernist era. It also had not completed its economic life. What is particularly interesting here is that the building was demolished not for the construction of the mosque, but to create a courtyard to it and according to the Activity Report of the Ankara Branch, to make it more visible in the city. Somewhat ironically, the whole operation was a huge construction necessitating demolition for new open space. Furthermore, according to the statistics of the Presidency of Religious Affairs, there are 3152 mosques in Ankara in 2019, which has a population of approximately 5,600,000. This number, as stated also in Chamber’s Report, reveals that, together with already existing historical mosques in the area that are under protection, there is practically no need for further mosque construction. Thus, both the Chamber and the Chamber of Architects opposed the demolition and carried out a campaign by organising meetings, visits to members of parliaments, using social media and making press releases. The Chamber’s Ankara Branch took legal action against the decision for demolition, yet the whole campaign including the court case was not successful and the building was finally demolished in 2016. A huge mosque was constructed in the square and the space left by the building is now a grass courtyard of the mosque.
There are numerous examples like the ones presented here in Turkey and obviously in many places in the world. Here I gave two examples to show that professionals and experts become important political actors and oppositional forces in the society against the rationality of power, when they defend planning rationality and action under the guidance of science and reason.
Concluding remarks and issues for further consideration
I aimed to reassert the value of rationality not in procedural, but in substantive terms. Because there is rationality of power, then we have to defend the power of rationality, as ‘one of the few forms of power the powerless still possesses’ (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 229). In relation to that, I showed that rationality, or planning rationality in the framework of planning, is not necessarily in confrontation with the political or more specifically with the political struggles as the post-political literature presupposes. By aiming at public interest defined in terms of outcomes, it is far beyond a decision-making procedure and can be a valuable source of politicisation and political struggles. There is obviously a process of rational opinion and will formation, yet this does not make rationality itself a procedural theme, for it can address inequalities and aim to prevent the final decisions being those of only the powerful, as I tried to show around the concept of planning rationality here. This also confirms the idea that ‘post-political closure and a “properly” radical democracy have to be conceived of as processes grounded in situated real life messy politics and therefore require a more empirical geographical reading’ (Bond et al., 2015). Rationality, expert-dependency and consensus-seeking can lead to post-politicisation in specific situations, especially in consensual political contexts, but it is not due to an inherent flaw in them, but based on global, national or local conditions. Thus, despite my disagreement on many issues including too much emphasis on conflictuality, I agree with Mouffe that ‘it is impossible to determine a priori what is social and what is political independently of any contextual reference’ (Mouffe, 2005: 17). I therefore call for a renewed and widened perspective on where and how the political might emerge, which is a fundamental question in itself (Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017). The political is not only about conflictuality, but may emerge out of rational thinking and the defence of rationality as well, as tried to show with examples in this article. What leads to politicisation in a specific context might well lead to politicisation in another.
There is a renewed interest in planning theory in politicising planning under the influence of mainly post-foundationalist approaches such as Mouffe’s. This is very valuable, but on the other hand, we should remember that ‘post-foundationalist approaches can critique the status quo for its practice and ontology, but do not offer substantive grounds for an alternative’ (McClymont, 2019), and that planning is very much engaged with developing and deciding on alternatives. This argument can be widened and modified to cover social sciences in general, which aim to explain societal phenomena, shed light into societal problems and, arguably to a lesser extent, propose solutions to them. Here I remember a presentation made on the occasion of a symposium organised by the Chamber on the occasion of World Town Planning Day in November, 8th, 2019. One of the paper presenters of the symposium, coming from the discipline of urban sociology, said that, as social scientists, their task was to ‘find’ the problems in the society, but not to ‘solve’ them. For her, solving problems was a planning task. Although I do not fully agree with this opinion, for proposing solutions is a task of social scientists too, and indeed many social scientists do that, I find her statement important to remind us the expectations from planners, at least in the social science academia. Problem solving is a fundamental task of planning. Furthermore, although we share with the other disciplines within social sciences the task of proposing solutions to societal problems, what makes planning different is the task of actual solving of the problem, namely implementation. Planning practice has to implement the solutions it suggests, and planning theory needs to shed light into this implementation. In other words, planners are required to act; this is what makes it different from geography (Porter, 2011) and other social sciences. The renewed interest in planning theory mentioned above needs to always keep this in mind, while obviously continuing to benefit from the critical energy of the post-foundationalist approaches. Put differently, to do better justice to this defining nature of planning activity, planning theory needs unsettling (Barry et al., 2018), but also resettling. It needs a reconsideration and resettlement with its so-called modernist principles and avoid a wholesale rejection of whatever comes from the modernist era. In that respect, it should not exclude rationality and consensus-seeking from scratch.
Lastly, there are two themes I would like to stress for further research. First, continued discussion on the issue based on in-depth analysis of local-level planning processes would be useful to find the possible tensions, not only within the Chamber but in the planning community in general, particularly with regard to the planning rationality, its adoption and implementation. Second, the non-Western experiences should be better integrated into the discussions on the political in general, and on the politicisation and democratisation of planning in particular. Such insights might especially be useful to see, perhaps even more clearly, the unwanted consequences of continuous conflict and lack of consensus-seeking as well as the possibilities/impossibilities of transforming antagonisms into agonisms. More generally, planning theory will benefit from such enrichment, since the planning problems across the globe are different, but sometimes also similar, and not at all incomparable.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Angelique Chettiparamb and four anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on an earlier version of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
