ers were overawed by landowner, developer and political collusion. They ended
up with nothing more in place than neutral trend zoning as the only acceptable
pan-community public imposition upon private lands, achieved mainly because
of that general protection which zoning gave to property values.
Planning can be identified as notworking when it is uncon-
nected to community preferences and day-to-day processes, and
directly exploits and tacitly excludes minority and weak-voiced
sections of society (Collin and Collin 2001). Planning operatives
find it difficult to figure out and keep up with the increased rate
of technological and social change which affect communities.
This has led to anti-planning formations and an operational orientation to straw-
activities (policy planning, forward planning, process planning) which appear to
be relevant activities even though they fail collectively to define the plan, the
planner, or planning. The certainties of step-by-step gradualist change undertaken
by divide-and-rule formulaic planning in the past has given way to multiplex
understandings and processes. This has brought officials and political leaders to
‘talk past each other’, generating confusion, anger and misunderstanding. Some
cyclicity and connectedness might emanate from their annual reports, but these
are seldom clearly profiled, let alone adhered to.How discourse is handled within a multiple belief society emerges as a matter
of significance to the enabling-empowering practice of planning. It is essential
for practitioners to find a way to ‘listen’ to the community they serve. They need
to heed those who ‘speak’ – including the ‘voices’ which come to them from
nature, and to ‘hear’ the narrative of places – andto strain conscientiously to relate
back to the community they serve. In a phrase, planners need to sustain a
dialogue; from the reasoning of Tett and Wolfe (1991: 199) to contemplate the
following:Do we speak or are we being spoken? Can we be both modernist in
our desire to create a future of choice, and [neo]modernist in our
recognition of the multiple discourses that shape that choice? Further,
can we as planners produce a discourse that is both accountable and
inclusive?What this indicates is that those who would practice ‘sustainable’
developmentwithconservation in the service of their client com-
munity need to be sensitive to the obtrusiveness of their own
language and reasoning. Again from Tett and Wolfe (1991: 196) to
guard against:- Passive non-transactive grammatical constructions.
- Suggestions that change is agent-less.
- The use of legality to fabricate a legitimacy.
- Simulacrous references to dialogue with the public.
44 Principles
Negotiating Environmental
Agreements: How to Avoid
Escalating Confrontation.
Lawrence Susskind with
others 2000.‘to create a more
transcendent and
universal politics....to
find a discourse that
unites the emancipatory
quest for social justice
with a strong
recognition that social
justice is impossible
without environmental
justice.’
David Harvey,
‘Environment of Justice’,
1995