7 Where Do We Stand?

(sifra,nisa)
Our historical survey of planning thought is now complete. Across a complex and
difficult terrain, it has brought us, over a span of two centuries, to our present situation.
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. The problems are mounting.” If they are right—and who would
quarrel with them?—we are forced to conclude that mainstream planning is in crisis.
Knowledge and action have come apart. The link is broken.
This crisis, of course, is not merely a tumor disfiguring an otherwise still healthy
body. Wherever we turn today, the sense of crisis is pervasive. This is nowhere more
evident than in the Third World. In country after country, Third World planners are unable
to satisfy even the most basic needs of their population. On average, people eat less today
than they did ten years ago; their real incomes are lower; there is less work; violence has
increased. A small minority in each country continue to live well. But even this relative
prosperity is tenuous, resting, as it does, on the repressive apparatus of the state. Material
conditions are better in the First World of Western Europe, North America, Australasia,
and Japan, but the fate of the First World is intertwined with that of the Third, even as the
loss of direction is manifested in other ways—in the behavior of young people, for
example, or in the paranoia of national leadership.
I do not wish to claim that the rupture between knowledge and action is responsible
for the crisis of the world system as a whole. But there must be a connection. Action
divorced from knowledge does not know where to turn next. It becomes blind action. And
so, in this chapter, I will speak mainly of the crisis in planning, keeping in mind, however,
that it is part of a larger set of circumstances that seems to be veering out of control.
In speaking of a crisis in planning, I have in mind mainstream planning by the state.
It is fundamentally a crisis in the idea of societal guidance.Some would call it a crisis of
the state. More precisely, it is a crisis in the state’s ability to satisfy the legitimate needs of
the people.
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(edmun,fadlir)
There are at least three reasons for this crisis in planning. The first is a crisis of
knowing. In knowledge about society, the certainties of positivism have suddenly become
undone. Comte’s disciples now speak in many tongues and have long given up on the
discovery of universal “social laws.” Even economics, that last stronghold of positivism,
has fallen into disarray. Amid all the confusion, there is a search for alternatives. One
increasingly popular alternative is hermeneutics, or the “science” of interpretation. In
hermeneutics, what counts is not the putative social law, or the empirical regularity, but the
meaning of an event in relation to the actors who are directly involved in it (Giddens
1982). The human subject is thus reintroduced into our theoretical discourses about
society. As subjects, we choose to act. But the point of the action is not to be rational in the
technical sense. What human subjects strive for is meaningful action.
As human subjectivity enters, knowledge becomes discursive and dialogical.
Human subjects, grounded in their own implicit understandings of the world, “talk back”
to students of society as well as to planners. Through this “talking back,” knowledge
becomes essentially transactive. It can no longer be addressed exclusively to other social
scientists but must speak to actors who, for the most part, are found in the households,
institutions, and social movements of civil society.
The result is that the process of knowledge-formation becomes increasingly fluid.
What Habermas called “communicative acts” are at its core. Theorists who are obliged to
speak plainly come face to face with ordinary citizens who have their own ideas. And in
this confrontation, planning ceases to be a more or less humble “scientific endeavor” and
assumes the characteristics of a craft.
The second reason for the crisis in planning is the accelerated pace of historical
events. Mainstream planning requires a certain stability in its environment. How can there
be forethought without it? How can plans be made, when exogenous events are forever
upsetting the conditions that would make them possible, or even appropriate? Information
must be filtered up to the center, where it is classified, analyzed, interpreted, and integrated
into policies, plans, and programs. But all this is a timeconsuming process. Budgets are on
an annual cycle. Medium-term plans are projected for a period of Eve or six years. Longer-
term strategic plans maylook ahead a couple of decades. And while all this planning is
going on, the world continues to change. Just now it seems to be changing more rapidly
than at any other time in history—so fast, in fact, that when the plans and projects are
ready for implementation, they are no longer appropriate (assuming that, at the time of
their conception, they responded to a correct interpretation of the world). Central plans
have become obsolete even before they are announced. And, contrary to the puff about
them, computers are no help at all, since they can order information but are incapable of
interpreting the data. Computers can give us neither theory nor meaning.
The third reason for the crisis in planning is the unprecedented nature of the events
we face. There may indeed be structural “laws” that “explain” the behavior of historically
contingent institutions, but these laws do not help us come to grips with problems that we
have never before encountered: the massive environmental degradation from deforestation,
salinization, and acid rain; the management of mega-cities with thirty or more million
people; our ability to unleash the destructive fury of hydrogen bombs equal in energy to
the sun; the environmental limits to a mode of production that thrives on the unlimited
expansion of production. These are all first-time problems, and we have only recently
become aware of them.
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(sasnia,rizal)
It is not, however, the sheer magnitude of these perils that is the central problem
but the lack of any genuine knowledge about them. Given enough time, we might
eventually get a handle on them. But planning cannot afford to wait. And so the experts
throw up their hands in despair, even as they offer us another of their ad hoc theories in
order to save face. The state is in retreat.
Four escape routes are open. The most popular is salvation by technology.
According to a widespread belief, scientists and engineers will come to the rescue in the
nick of time. The micro-chip, the laser beam, the artificial heart, genetic modification,
breeding in vitro—these point the way to the promised land. As a last resort, we shall
colonize space. The Strategic Defense Initiative has already captured people’s imagination
as the magic shield that will banish the specter of Armaggedon forever.
Escape route number two is salvation by unfettered enterprise: the free market. In
this belief, the state is generally regarded as being part of the problem and, indeed, its
principal part. Reduce the state’s involvement in economic relations, advocates of this
view assert, and all will be well. Growth will be recovered. Everyone who wants a job will
find one. And thepleasant ascent up the candy mountain of consumption will resume. What
those who would take this escape route fail to see is that it is precisely free, oligopolistic
markets—split up among a shrinking number of global banks anad corporations—that is
behind the many problems we confront: mounting indebtedness, hyper-inflation in the
Third World, environmental devastationjobless growth, and so on.
The third escape route, though common enough, is one that no one really wants to
take: propaganda and repression. Through propaganda and related techniques of
influencing consciousness, people are lulled into political inertia. Through police
repression (including official terrorism), remaining dissidents can be wiped out. Although
the route is unpopular, it can, for varying lengths of time, avoid the political consequences
of dealing with the very real problems that confront a country, and that often get worse
under the silence of repression. Without the feedback of an active polity, states are likely to
go beserk.1 And the worst rise to the top.
There remains yet a fourth route, which is the re-centering of political power in
civil society, mobilizing from below the countervailing actions of citizens, and recovering
the energies for a political community that will transform both the state and corporate
economy from within. The next three chapters propose to outline this path and show how
radical planners can help clear the way. It is in the recovery of political community and in
the transformative vision that underlies it that the knot between knowledge and action that
has come undone can be retied.
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(afi,habibah)
 We shall proceed as follows. In Chapter 8, we take a deeper look at the present
crisis and at some of the responses to it. As a project, the recovery of political community
is already underway, and we can learn from the experience. Central to the chapter is a
discussion of the public domain. Although there are strong arguments both for and against
the concept of a public domain, the recovery of political community requires that we
believe in the reality of common interests and, thus, in the possibility of the common good.
Failing this, we clear the way for a retreat into privatism that will leave the political terrain
undefended against an authoritarian and repressive state. There would be little sense in
writing this book in a world where the public domain is thought to be an illusion, or worse,
where it has fallen apart and more powerful neighbors have moved in to seize control, as in
Lebanon and Northern Ireland.
Chapter 9 points to the recovery of political community as the central guiding
vision of a project of social reconstruction. The actors who can appropriate this vision
include neither the state and its related institutions nor the global corporation. We must
turn to the intimate sphere of the household instead. But, in their role as places of private
consumption, households have become enervated. What must be done, then, is to rethink
the household as a sociopolitical entity for the self-production of life. It is in a
reconstructed household economy, partially de-linked from the market and joined with
other households into local and regional networks, that the first steps must be taken for the
recovery of political community. In addition to the household economy, three arenas of
action are discussed: the regional nexus of work and play, the peasant periphery (or Third
World), and the global community. Thinking and acting must be done at all four levels
simultaneously if the present world crisis is to be surmounted.
In Chapter 10, we return to the question of a radical planning grounded in the
tradition of social mobilization. We are now ready to show radical planning as directly tied
into the project of social reconstruction in each of the four arenas where planning is geared
to transformative actions from below. 2 Radical planners must assume an ideological
position; they cannot remain neutral. Standing in opposition to hegemonic power, they put
their work in the service of emancipatory values and a strong political community.
Fundamental to radical planning is an epistemology beyond the stillentrenched
positivism of social science. In social learning we have such an epistemology. It is an
epistemology adaptable to the purposes of social transformations. A discursive mode of
knowing, including dialogue, is central to it. The chapter goes on to discuss, from a
normative perspective, what radical planners do. They focus, I will endeavor to show, on
processes of collective self-empowerment and self-reliance; on being able to “think
without frontiers”; on the recovery of meaning, purpose, and practical vision through
radical practice; on social processes of networking and coalition-building; on strategic
action; and on dialogue and mutual learning. The chapter concludes on a practical note,
with a discussion of some of the dilemmas faced by radical planners, including economic
survival.
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(nokia)
The final chapter takes the form of an epilogue that sums up the entire journey we
have taken.
1. By this, I mean launching a war against one’s own citizens or engaging in
foreign adventures. The recent case of Argentina under the Generals comes to mind.
Official terror took the lives of thirty thousand victims, and the Falklands imbroglio, while
less devastating in human terms, cost the country dearly in many other ways, not the least
of which was national pride.
2. The problem of planning in the peasant periphery is somewhat different. Here, a
stronger role for the state is essential. The function of radical planning—which is
necessarily an oppositional planning—is less clear in the Third World than in the First.