or used (token consultations, unused pocket parks). Con-
versely, sustainable urban planning serves society very well
when it enriches life through the provision of enhanced places,
sense of security, and when it establishes an improvement in
the overall landscape ecology (habitat). These are all broadly
social outcomes achieved through sound policies and thought-
ful design. Of course consumer enhancement comes into the
picture, but not as a stand-alone factor. The challenge this
social emphasis passes on involves a multiplicity (variety,
security, diversity, connectedness, enjoyment, capacity fulfil-
ment) in contexts where the previous notable outcomes were
constructions of solely physical utilities (roads, bridges,
suburbs, sewerage plants).
Plan-makinginvokes the future, involves change, and implicates
causation;in other words it engages human knowledge, con-
sciously, to reach improving decisions which lead to worthy
outcomes.A flaw in this reasoning is that it is perceived as
serving a client or clients, who or which frequently elude iden-
tification – not least because many are inarticulate about these
matters. Important in this are the consulting, designing and
delivery processes leading to planned change.
The operational complexities of sustainable urban planning
are challenging because of the number of ‘actors’ and ‘agendas’
implicated. Contrast this with corporate business which
primarily takes decisions for a profit-making purpose,
where the bottom line is explicit – a sentiment expressed by
William Fischell (1985) in these terms: ‘The profit motive of
landowners forces them to consider many alternative uses
and to compare each use with the others. No planner has a
similarly powerful motive to gather information for each
parcel in the city.’ Also in business there are the PPBS (plan-
ning programming budgeting system), and the MBO (man-
agement by objectives) procedures. In contrast, planning
decisions of the neomodern sustainable urban kind are continuing, cyclical, non-
routine, and seldom profit-focused.
Two other complexities can be identified: firstthat contemporary and future
development with conservancy decisions are of the ‘wickedly difficult’ variety;
secondthat the ‘economic social environmental’ decision-taking process is not
merely multiple, but ‘radical’ in terms of the discourse, mediation and work-
around approach and ethic it calls into being. This highlights the further need for
‘creativity’ ‘design’ and ‘concomitance’.It is important that planning practitioners comprehend the theory which under-
pins the service they provide, because if there is no theory-logic, then their service
will be judged wholly technical. The ‘traditional’ and ‘radical’ connotations (box
2.1) are now revisited in figure 2.3 as an ethical-attitudinal Configuration of
traditional and radical theories.50 Principles
Varietal complexity in
planning can be
represented as
CDSf[P.A.T.M.I.]
where there occurs a
Consequence of
Development (CD)
which is a function of
the sum of:
P (population)
A (affluence),
T (technology)
M (management)
I (ideology)
with, of course, some
synergies!The parameters of
socio-economic-
physical development
are varied....- Temporally (past-
present-future) - Spatially (three
dimensional) - Functional-to-
aesthetic - Selective-to-
comprehensive - Secretive-to-open
- Formal-to-flexible
- Conformist-to-
enabalist