efficacy of planning in England, Scotland and Wales, this is both revealing and
disappointing – highlighting in this case a lack of resonance between grounded
beliefs and received theories.
The illustrative context from the United States is more colloquially expressed.
Friedmann (1987: 311) in a mid-text passage, Where Do We Stand, concludes: ‘And
Now a Secret Must Out. Talk to planners, and nine out of ten will describe their
work as a “failure” or of “little use”. They will say “we no longer know what to
do. Our solutions don’t work. Knowledge and action have come apart. The link
is broken.” ’ Again, disappointment highlighting a mismatch between idealism
and realism.
It could be that those who would plan delude themselves into attempting the
well-nigh impossible. From Klosterman’s perspective ‘Arguments for and Against
Planning’ (1985):
Planners’ concern with the physical city was viewed as overly restric-
tive; their perceptions of the urban development process seen as polit-
ically naive; their technical solutions found to reflect their Protestant
middle-class view of city life; their attempts to promote a collective
public interest revealed to serve primarily the needs of civic and busi-
ness elites; and [their] democratic comprehensive coordination of
public and private development proven to be organisationally and
politically impossible.In terms of these observations it is not contextually surprising that zoning is about
as successful as planned prescription (mainly for suburbs) has got in Anglo settler
societies because of its singular emphasis on property value protection (item 4 in
figure 2.1).
The land-based and water-covered platform resources furnish the spatial context
for cyclical human activities and enjoyments. Within-nation planning sets out to
achieve propinquity between four constituent parts of that terri-
torial habitat. It reaches beyond fixed land-water spatial limits,
embracing:firstand generally, the biospheric domain and all its
terrestrial components; secondand specifically, it is applied instru-
mentally to the humanized rural and urban landscape parts; third
it provides the working, schooling and recreational places and
provision for movement between those places; and fourthit iden-
tifies and conserves the cultural values, institutional beliefs and
nature-based inheritances of communities. In all of these there are
indications of ‘cyclicity’ and ‘connectedness’.
Information and documentation about the pursuit of planning
within these four constituent contexts is variously available,
although the professional skill to embody this into complete plans
is frequently lacking. As a consequence of ‘less than complete
plans’ and a constrained physical format, by the late 1980s the
planning movement became becalmed. Local government advis-
Knowledge Power Outcomes 43‘The only thing we can
be certain of is the
protean character of
cities, their resistance to
top-down planning or
prediction.’
Ken Warpole and Liz
Greenhalgh 1999- Doing a round of
professional and
developer courtesy calls
in downtown Auckland
brings to mind one
property investor
claiming that he had no
interest in the City Plan.
When a concept for a
project came up he
went straight to City
Hall to ‘kick it around’
with some officials he
felt he could work with,
and to then hand it over
to his lawyer to cut a
deal with the city
fathers!