Chapter #9 Summary: New Directions in Planning Theory Essay

Chapter 9 Summary New Directions in Planning TheorySusan S. Fainstein Susan S. is professor of urban preparation and acting schedule director in Columbia University. In this article she discusses and literary criticisms contemporary preparedness speculation in terms of its ingestionfulness in addressing what I call back to be its defining question what is the possibility of consciously achieving widespread returns in the quality of human life within the context of a global capitalist political economy. She examines the three approaches referred to above under the rubrics of -(1) the communicatory stylel sometimes called the collaborative model, emphasizes the planners role in mediating among stakeholders within the planning situation-(2) the new urbanism frequently labeled neo-traditionalism, paints a physical picture of a desirable city to be obtained with planning -(3) and the just city, which derives from the political economy tradition, while also end point oriented, is more abstract than the new urbanism, presenting a model of spatial transaction based on equity.The Communicative ModelThe communicative model draws on two philosophical approaches American pragmatism as developed in the thought of John Dewey and Richard Rorty and the theory of communicative rationality as worked surface by Jurgen Habermas.5 The two strands differ somewhat in their methodologies. Neo-pragmatism tends toward empiricism. Theoretical and possible DeficienciesIn its effort to save planning from elitist tendencies, communicative planning theory runs into difficulties. The communicative model should non be faulted for its ideals of openness and diversity. Its vulnerability quite an lies in a tendency to substitute moral exhortation for analysis. Although their roots, via Habermas, be in critical theory, once the communicative theorists move away from review article and present a manual for action, their thought loses its edge. THE NEW URBANISMThe new urbanism refer s to a design-oriented approach to planned urban development. Developed primarily by architects and journalists, it is perchance more ideology than theory, and its message is carried non just by academics only if by planning practitioners and a popular movement. New urbanists have real considerable attention in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Great Britain.Their orientation resembles that of the early planning theoristsEbenezer Howard, Frederic Law Olmsted, Patrick Geddesin their lay of using spatial relations to name a close-knit brotherly community that allows diverse elements to interact. The new urbanists call for an urban design that includes a variety of building types, mixed uses, intermingling of housing for different income groups, and a besotted privileging of the public realm CritiqueThe new urbanism is vulnerable to the accusation that its proponents oversell their product, promoting an kafkaesque environmental determinism that has threaded its way throughout the history of physical planningTHE JUST CITYIn Socialism Utopian and Scientific Friedrich Engels (1935, p. 54) presents the Marxian critique of utopianism The final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in mens brains, not in mans better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. . . . For Marx and Engels, social transformation could occur only when the times were ripe, when part enabled the forces for social amelioration to attain their objectives. In their view utopian thinkers worry Robert Owen and Fourier could not succeed because they developed a social ideal that did not coincide with a material reality still dominated by capitalist interests. Only smashing the structure of class domination could create the conditions for achieving a just society. CONCLUSIONIn Her conclusion she defends the continued use of the just city mode and a modified form of the political-economy mo de of analysis that underlies it, exposit below The three types of planning theory described in this essay all embrace a social progressive outlook. They represent a move from the purely critical perspective that characterized oft theory in the seventies and eighties to one that once once again offers a promise of a better life.Whereas reaction to technocracy and positivism make planning theory of that period, more recent planning thought has responded to the repugn of post-modernism.