Planning Theory

This purpose of this article is to look at the potential benefit to planning practice of engaging with spatial capital – a concept derived from the social theory of Bourdieu. Doubt is expressed about the theoretical basis for spatial capital; nevertheless, it is argued that it may have merit as a trope for planning practitioners. Spatial capital has a strong empirical basis, making it accessible to planning practice and offering a new means for interpreting and communicating the combined effects of a range of individual urban events such as the gating of communities, differing mobilities and schooling tactics. By focussing on the interplay of social positioning within place, it emphasises the joined-up nature of disadvantage and highlights the limits of environmental determinism. However, its use is not without possible drawbacks. Here, the experience of social capital is informative, as this has been appropriated by groups with quite different readings of its implications for policy.

In this article, we aim to understand how planning theory and practice should approach new urban entities and their transforming meanings. We argue that planning practice has difficulties in identifying and recognising developmental processes where the human attachment to the local environment gradually changes the identity and use of an area. Instead, these processes are interpreted as disruptions in the planned course of action. We illustrate our viewpoint with an empirical example from Finland. The case is about a significant spot of biodiversity in a completely man-made environment. The study serves as an example of how artefacts actively co-shape the events and environment around them and thus create a relationship between humans and their surroundings. Drawing on a science and technology studies-inspired perspective on the relationships between human and non-human actors, we stress the importance of artefacts, local setting and processual development in urban planning.

The ‘public interest’ has long been used as a concept to justify planning activity. However, attempts to specify how to determine the public interest have been so plagued with problems that the concept has been effectively abandoned by academia in recent years. This article stresses the ongoing relevance of the public interest concept in planning but does so in a way that reconceives what it entails. This article argues that central to the concept of the public interest is how ‘the subject’ is conceived. It is contended that the currently prevalent collaborative and agonistic approaches to planning present a deficient understanding of the subject as one detached from the intersubjectively formed moral frameworks that provide understanding of context and supply bearing for action. This article seeks to address this deficit by introducing the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre to a planning audience. MacIntyre’s communitarian perspective offers an alternative view of the subject by stressing how an evaluation of what constitutes the public interest is unavoidably undertaken from within a shared tradition of moral reasoning. Thus, from a MacIntyrean position, the public interest should not be assumed to simply constitute the end product of correct procedures. This article highlights the importance of acknowledging how identifying the public interest demands situated ethical judgement. The concluding section of this article details the dangers for planning theory and practice of failing to acknowledge this phenomenon.

The metropolis can be understood as a complex adaptive system made up of complex adaptive subsystems that agglomerated to help create the city’s strength, resilience and dynamism. In particular, the accumulated strength and dynamism of the individual neighbourhoods that form and evolve its districts and the districts that form its regions have major impacts on the organisation and evolution of the metropolis. This article discusses the subsystems of the city, in particular its regional, district and neighbourhood transaction places or activity centres. While all metropolitan areas are complex adaptive systems, many urban subsystems constructed in the post–World War II period are not. They are instead chaotic or controlled by mechanical order. It will be argued that only the traditional ‘commons’ has the principles required of complex adaptive systems and that being such confers many benefits to the communities they serve.

Without power and political authority, planning theorists’ advice for planners to be politically astute is of little help. The politically astute planners could do little in the face of political pressure. In this context, the logical advice for planners would be to join politics and acquire the political authority that they need to materialize their plans. This article, through case studies from the United States, Brazil, and Nepal, shows that the planners who joined politics were able to accomplish some of the most difficult planning tasks in their towns and suggests that planners should take up elected position as and when possible.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the development of new theoretical and methodological resources for analysing power dynamics in planning studies. Our overarching aim is to demystify the concept of ‘power’ and what it purports to be describing, making those practices grouped under this label more tangible and, hence, also more readily contestable. Investigating how the effects we label as power are produced, instead of using ‘power’ as an all-covering explanation of societal events, demands a conceptualization of power as the outcome of social processes rather than as a causal variable behind them. An empirical study of a referendum regarding a major urban development in a Swedish suburban municipality illustrates how strong assumptions regarding the dominance of, for example, pre-existing powerful actor-constellations or purely economic relations are not always very helpful, highlighting the need for more acute attentiveness to the micro-physics of power.