Sustainable Urban Planning

households and neighbourhoods into development and conservancy projects, in
accordance with Harper and Stein’s ‘Wide Reflective Equilibrium’ (1993).
The less-than-revolutionary yet identifiably radical sustainable urban planning
paradigm is also bound into cyclicity and connectedness. The agents from below
are principally the ‘participants’ and the ‘technocrats’ who work for community
improvement. They often accept that their contribution is more an ‘input of time’
rather than the reward of an ‘income’. Those who are purely angry, and lacking
in creative and sustainable vision, are of little utility to the radical-multiplex
process.

Radical planning implicates design. Furthermore it is always political. Patsey
Healey (1995: 255) views ‘The preparation and use of a plan [as] much more than
a technical bureaucratic exercise. It is inherently an arena of political struggle.’ If
a purportedly planned activity does not so identify, then the activity being
pursued is really little more than a ‘technical fix’ like status quo zoning. It also
applies social and economic power with improving effect; bringing about struc-
tural changes through the linking of ‘knowledge to power’ and thence to ‘control’
and eventually to ‘outcome’. This, for radical sustainable planning, is the direc-
tional ‘what’. The remaining question is one of ‘how’ this substantive ideal can
be rendered operational?

A start can be made by objectifying the components involved in neomodern sus-
tainable and concomitant development with conservation practice. As with all
planning,poweris the lever; and power lies with those who have the knowledge;
and those who have ‘knowledge andpower’ can influenceoutcomes.Emphases
already identified include connectiveness and cyclicity, to which can be added
sensitivity, empowerment, variety and choice. The priority laid on ‘knowledge
being the key’ underlines further the designerand themediatorbasis to effective
conservancy with development. This identifies a set of skills criteria, along with
a set of performance criteria.
The skills set criteriaare no different, in a listing, than the portrayal of talents
required for ‘traditional’ planning; although the sensitivity of the facilitative skills
identified for ‘radical’ planning are different in style and and
complexity. These have been collated in box 2.2 as a Radical-
multiplex skills set.
It is design capability which most enhances excellence of
outcome. In these terms, relative to the Formulation of proposals
(Step 7 in figure 2.6, the ’11-step sequential progression’) an item-
ization of alternative approaches to the creative leap synthesis
(which is the design step) would include the following:

• Brainstorming, a usually collegiate, creative-leap technique
  which suspends initial judgment in favour of a flow of policy
  and design suggestions; leading over the course of time to a
  mediated recommendation.

Knowledge Power Outcomes 61

The generative

‘brainstorming’ reference

is Osborn’s (1954)

Applied Imagination,

which should be read in

conjunction with the

authoritative OECD

output, Jantsch’s

Technological

Forecasting in

Perspective(1967).

Brainstorming has

proved useful for clearly

focused projects; and

less useful for resolving

complex issues.