tional skills to achieve what they understand to be worthy outcomes! It is a lineal
corporatist means–ends approach, which simplifies and structures operations on
a make-way-coming-through basis. Traditional planning seeks targetable physi-
cal results.
Traditional-lineal behaviour is rational and can be considered, analogously, in
the context of an everyday personal possibility: the case of a footloose employee
within a local government authority. This could well be a conservation officer or
a development planner seeking a promotional appointment in the service of
another local government agency or to move into private practice. The officer
makes out an appealing job application, is presented with a financially attractive
offer to move, then quits the employment in hand. What has taken place is rational
and realistic lineal behaviour which induces the officer to respond in accordance
with their own perceived best interest. The employee-officer has acted in
approved traditional-rational style, even though the future outcome for the com-
munity being departed from will have been trifled with. This example can be con-
sidered against the fuller Weberian (1947) understanding of ‘rationality in the
means-ends sense when (a person’s) action is guided by considerations of ends,
means and secondary consequences’. There is empathy here with Habermas’s
(1984)Theory of Communicative Action.At a stroke a failing with the ‘traditional-
lineal mode’ is identified – that it is generally self-serving, and lacking in vision-
ary breadth.
Traditional procedural development and conservancy plan-
ning of the ‘cookbook’ kind is still the dominant operational mode- the way through – for local and regional planning in settler soci-
eties, although once popular expressions such as ‘master plan’
and ‘blueprint planning’ are now passé.The practitioners of this
approach are technicist: those who get things going and have
works carried out – the engineers, surveyors, lawyers and archi-
tects who ‘traditionally’ rolled back the wilderness. They were
orthogonal in their two-dimension operational mode, working to
the precept that ‘development equals good’ and also that as
‘development equals change’ then ‘change’ was always ‘good’ as
well! According to Reade (1987: 92) it was inevitable that ‘in soci-
ological terms, developers and planners will come to develop a
shared sub-culture’ with an emphasis on development which
excluded conservation, and physical growth for developer profit
with minimum attention to community concerns or needs. Little
room, here, for mutual gains, the triple bottom line, connected-
ness and cyclicity.
The project-by-project traditional planning specialists got on
with the pursuit of development in a manner which mostly
excluded conservation and social outcomes. Not being overly
concerned either for spiritual cultural or ecological values, mistakes were made.
From Gerecke and Reid (1991) it has been identified that: ‘The ethic of profes-
sionalism in the 20th Century has been science and management. This has pro-
duced a false and very narrow sort of instrumental rationality, and while no one
54 Principles
‘Chunked’ into being,
settlements are hugely
influenced by their rural
roading and field
boundary inheritances.
At the time greenfields
are swallowed into
suburban tracts, the
extant rural road
pattern re-emerges as
part of the new street
pattern; and out of the
extant field pattern
emerges the new
zonings. The plots
assigned within the two-
dimensional zonings
then shape the buildings.
This should work the
other way around:
building setting being the
initiator rather than an
end-point installation.