Arguing, Community and Planning

This weeks reading was presented by Dan and Sarad and strongly focused on the role of arguing and community in the world of planning. The paper presents Professor Healeys take on the future of planning and the way in which she believes it would successfully create sustainable planning.

There were two waves of planning that swept across the world in the second half of this century. These included:

The comprehensive rational planning process of the 60s and 70s which was largely methodological and institutional and the political economy of urban regions in the 80s which was aggressively critical.

Through the reading she is proposing a communicative argumentative approach to planning which would be based  on a new wave of ideas sweeping over the field of planning and policy analysis. The system would be principle based and designed to build a consensus through economic and social relationships. She is more or less proposing to get as many people in community meetings as possible and talking till an agreement is made.

So are arguements beneficial to decision making ? Some would say that if you argue strongly for something and you are passionate about it then it displays that you are genuinely interested about the issue and you are going to contribute effectively to the decision making process. While on the other hand most would say that arguing just creates contradiction and heated exchanges that lead to no real avail.

Some of the benefits involved with the approach proposed by Prof Healey include reinventing stale ideas, recogonising diversity and is very inclusive as all attempts to keep people in the loop of what is happening are made. Despite this I believe the disadvantages out weigh the benefits.

Someone cannot vigorously argue about an issue if they know next to nothing about planning, how could they possibly influence a professional when they might not be a planning professional themselves. The process of arguing is never guaranteed to reach a compromise and finally while it would be nice to include everyone, the chances of this happening are very small, there will always be someone who misses out.

This approach was designed as a set of questions to challange and provoke our school of thought, it involves a cyclical strategy which is based around reviewing ideas, inventing or developing new ideas and monitoring these into the near future.