Planning for Community Phil Heywood

Visit to download the full and correct content document:

https://ebookmass.com/product/planning-for-community-phil-heywood/
Planning for Community
Planning for Community

Phil Heywood
Copyright © 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under
Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the
Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-­copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.,
222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-­8400, fax (978) 750-­4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com.
Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons,
Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-­6011, fax (201) 748-­6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/
permission.

Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/
or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other
trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or
vendor mentioned in this book.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing
this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of
this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No
warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies
contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate.
Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when
this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or
any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer
Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-­2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-­3993 or fax (317)
572-­4002.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be
available in electronic formats. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data:

Names: Heywood, Phil, author.

Title: Planning for community / Phil Heywood.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : John Wiley & Sons, [2023] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023032339 (print) | LCCN 2023032340 (ebook) | ISBN
9781394175710 (paperback) | ISBN 9781394175727 (adobe pdf) | ISBN
9781394175734 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Community life. | Communities—Planning. | Community
organization. | Community development—Planning.
Classification: LCC HM761 .H493 2023 (print) | LCC HM761 (ebook) | DDC
307—dc23/eng/20230802
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032339
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032340

Cover Design: Wiley

Cover Image: © qwertfak/Adobe Stock Photos
Contents

Prefacevii Integrating the many levels

Acknowledgementsix of community planning 65
Conclusions: mixed scanning
1 Promises and Problems for integrated community planning 68
of Community Life 1 Endnotes69
Introduction: the organisation References70
of the chapter 1
Part One, Current Cascades of Change 1 4 Human Values and Community Goals 72
Part Two, Community Life and Change  6 The place of values in planning72
Contemporary challenges to Value formation 72
community life 7 The value of prosperity 73
Part Three, Competing Interpretations The value of liberty 75
of Community Structure and Change 12 The values of social justice 77
The roles of communication and Values for sustainable communities
collaboration17 and environments 81
Applications of communication Relations among community values 87
in community planning 19 The impacts of prosperity 87
Part Four, The Roles of Collaboration 20 The impacts of liberty 89
Collaboration in practice 21 Social justice impacts 90
Conclusions25 The demands for sustainability 90
Endnotes26 Conclusions: how values can combine
References28 to solve problems and shape
creative plans 91
2 The Lives of Local Communities 33 Endnotes92
Scope and scales of community 33 References95
Social, economic and organisational
characteristics of local communities 33 5 Ways and Means 98
The strategies of social justice 40 Introduction: the roles of art, science
Planning places 43 and craft in community planning 98
Community participation and governance 47 Art and creativity in planning 98
Conclusion: the durability of local The creative roles of the written word 100
communities of place and contact 50 Creating wholeness within new and
Endnotes50 existing communities 101
References50 The contributions of Christopher
Alexander (1936–2022) 101
3 Communities of Interest and Interaction 54 Planning as a craft 103
Introduction: scales of community The four phases of planning 104
organisation and issues 54 The logic of scientific discovery 105
Cities as communities 54 Mistakes, problem-­solving and
Regional communities 57 human and social progress 107
National communities 59 Critical rationalist approach to planning 107
Supranational political communities 62 Common ground between scientific
Global communities 63 and planning method 108
vi Contents

Planning as craft and applied science 109 9 Places, Spaces and Community Design 185
Political control and community Introduction: organisation of the chapter 185
participation117 Places and their properties 185
Conclusions: values-­based methods Communal, collective and private
for value fulfilment 120 places and spaces 190
Endnotes120 The language of design and
References121 the vocabulary of space and place 196
Place-­making: designing to make life 200
6 Activities and Actions 124 City shapes 204
Introduction: the organisation of the Conclusion: bringing places to life 211
chapter124 Endnotes211
The relations among values, activities References212
and land uses 124
The contributions of systems thinking 10 Community Governance and
in managing activities 132 Participation Introduction: intentions
Activity systems analysis in practice 132 and organisation of the chapter214
Conclusions: defining needs and Governance, government and
exploring options for activity systems 137 community participation 214
Endnotes137 Roles and responsibilities
References138 in governance and participation 215
Issues of freedom and order 222
7 Homes and Communities 140 The roles of negotiation and
Introduction: the contributions partnership in resolving conflicts 227
of shelter to family and community life 140 The development and evaluation
Challenges of population change of policies, proposals and
in meeting global and local needs community initiatives 227
for shelter140 Service activities of local government 230
Impacts and contributions Scales of community and their roles
of changing technology 143 in governance and control 235
Funding shelter 145 Conclusion: the contributions
Balancing demands with supply of participation and governance
for shelter153 to community life 238
Conclusions: future directions for shelter 156 Endnotes240
Endnotes156 References243
References159
11 Conclusions: Community Planning
8 Facets of Community 162 Today and Tomorrow 246
Introduction and organisation of the Introduction: organisation and
chapter162 intentions of the chapter 246
Levels and justifications Themes, roles and future directions:
for community intervention 162 inclusion, negotiation, adaptation
The planning and organisation of work 164 and invention 246
Education: the place of learning The future of community planning 250
in community life and development 171 Endnotes254
The planning and delivery of health References255
services176
Conclusion: the many facets Index257
of community181
Endnotes181
References183
Preface
In the decade since the publication of the first
edition of this book as Community Planning:
Integrating Social and Physical Environments, reasons
to plan for the social, economic and physical well-
being of communities have multiplied at a remark-
able rate. These changes include the rapid growth
of urban populations, the increased levels and
urgency of global migration, the threats posed to
established environments by disasters of flood and
fire triggered by climate change, the problems of
health, work and travel resulting from mutating
pandemics and the collapse of consensus and con-
fidence in democratically elected governments in
many societies throughout the world. All of these
demand better and more effective ways to plan
and manage community life, and the scales of these
needs range from the local to the supranational.
Community planning has never been more chal-
lenging nor more needed.
This second edition is therefore designed to
meet the needs not only of students of urban and
regional planning, but also of practitioners and
activists in the wide range of activities making up
community life, including housing, health, educa-
tion, transport, design and governance. In the con-
temporary world of increasing interaction, none
of these activities can be satisfactorily planned in
isolation.
Running through the whole book are the twin
themes of planning to fulfil human values and to
advance personal and community inclusion. The role
of human values is essential to provide secure and
stable foundations for reaching valid decisions in
a world where rapid changes in ideas, technol-
ogy, politics and policies are dominating the fields
of health, productivity, well-­being and prosperity
and powerfully impacting contemporary com-
munity life. Values-­ based community planning
can offer reliable methods to shape the neces-
sary well-­informed choices, while involving both
long established and recently arrived members
and fellow citizens in developing these shared
futures. Planning approaches explored through-
out this book therefore link widely acknowledged
values, goals and objectives to appropriate activi-
ties to shape desired future outcomes and environ-
ments. In times when rising standards of education
are increasing the levels and intensity of public
debates, widespread social inclusion, which has
always been politically and morally desirable, is
also becoming practically essential.
A further theme running throughout the book
is the need for mixed scanning to understand and
integrate the mix of scales of both place and time
to promote realistic and responsible community
life. In times when instantaneous global commu-
nications and unprecedented rates of untested
innovations demand systematic evaluation, mixed
scanning, comparing impacts at local and wider
scales and over immediate and long-­ term time
horizons, has become esssential for good planning
and decision making.
Successive chapters consider these themes.
Chapter 1, Problems and Promises of Community Life,
reviews the promises, problems, trends and influ-
ences shaping contemporary community life. In
Chapter 2, The Life of Local Communities, their evo-
lution, characteristics and current challenges are
considered both in the developed nations of North
America, Europe and Australia, and throughout
the world. Chapter 3, Communities of Interest and
Interaction, extends these discussions to include
the increasingly significant communities of inter-
est emerging at urban, regional, national, supra-
national and even global scales. The central issues
of the driving values of community life, tran-
scending time and place, and including prosper-
ity, justice, liberty and sustainability are explored
in Chapter 4, Human Values and Community Goals.
This leads on to the discussions, in Chapter 5, Ways
and Means, of the contributions of values of art,
craft and science to developing creative, inclusive
and practical planning methods. The application
of these methods to the key activities of housing,
health, work, education and movement follows in
Chapters 6–8.
The overarching fields of both design and poli-
tics are critical to the effective delivery of sound and
imaginative plans for all of these activities. Chapter 9,
Places, Spaces, and Community Design, reviews and
explains the challenges and methods of placemak-
ing at scales from the neighbourhood to the metro-
politan region, illustrated by examples drawn from
classical, historical and contemporary contexts. The
crucial issues of social inclusion, devolution, account-
ability and governance are examined in Chapter 10,
Community Governance and Participation. Finally,
Chapter 11, Conclusions, Community Planning Today
viii Preface

and Tomorrow, summarises the book’s themes and beneficial lives for individuals and communities at
identifies the major contributions that community many scales.
planning can make at scales ranging from the daily
experience of the neighbourhood to the increas- Phil Heywood
ing impacts of the global community. The overall Brisbane
intention of the book is to encourage and empower April 2023
readers to play ever more effective roles in shaping
Acknowledgements
Of all stages of writing, acknowledgements are
among the most satisfying. There are major psy-
chological rewards in recollecting and recording
the contributions of family, friends and associates
whose assistance has shaped much of the life and
form of the work, recalling the many moments
of illumination, intellectual companionship, good
advice and thoughtful encouragement which have
been shared over the years.
First thanks are due to the friends and colleagues
whose ideas and insights have made major con-
tributions to my thinking. To John Taylor and Jon
Allison, organisers and companions of numerous
explorations through towns, cities, countryside
and the worlds of ideas go my deep appreciation
of their enquiring minds and reflective and crea-
tive spirits. To the late Ian Crowther, accomplished
regional planner, I am grateful for a lifetime of
friendship and examples of practical goodwill
and idealism. Chris Buckley, most enlightened
of planning practitioners and a good compan-
ion on planning delegations to Timor Loro S’ae
and on urban rambles and explorations around
South east Queensland, has provided a hearten-
ing example over many decades of how a clear
mind and a good heart can combine to make a
better world. I am equally grateful for the exam-
ples set by Fiona Caniglia and Vanessa Bennett,
whose insight, flair and skills of community devel-
opment and policy formation continue to advance
social inclusion throughout these times of rapid
change. Appreciation and thanks are also due to
generations of students and community activists
in England, Nigeria and Australia for their energy
and imagination. They have not only enriched my
teaching and work in community development but
also contributed greatly to the ideas to be found
in this book.
The overall scope, logic and writing of both
editions have benefitted from the generous time
and commentary of a number of family members,
friends and colleagues, who have reviewed numer-
ous drafts of chapters and sections. Between them,
my wife Sheila and daughters Lucy and Eileen
have read every word of both original and revised
texts and have applied their knowledge of the
fields of community health and policy, social
development, problem solving and appreciative
inquiry to improve its relevance. Lucy has read
numerous drafts and provided invaluable insights
on all chapters, particularly concerning the strong
bonds that should link community planning and
her own field of community development. Eileen’s
keen insights have kept me alerted to the crucial
questions of what matters now. The advice of my
old colleague, Peter Roberts, Founding Director of
the United Kingdom’s Homes and Communities
Academy, combining empathy and insight, proved
invaluable in clarifying intentions and structure.
Anna Hassett, Anne and Brian Hudson and Laurel
Johnson have provided valuable commentary at
different times and on many aspects.
Several others have made particular contribu-
tions of knowledge and research. My lifelong friend,
John Leatherdale, has kept me up to date with
recent developments in English Neighbourhood
Planning. David Cant, founding CEO of the
Brisbane Housing Company, has not only assisted
with commentary, information and photographs
for the chapter on Homes and Communities, but
also provided an inspiring example through his
energetic leadership of that organization from
2003 to 2018. Landscape Architect John Mongard’s
trail-­
blazing work on place making throughout
Australia has helped inform much of the content
and many of the illustrations of Chapters 4, Human
Values and Community Goals, and 9, Place, Space and
Community Design. Thanks also go to my son-­in-­
law Dean Saffron for his photographic skills. The
talented contributions made by Jessica Chatwin,
Justine Lacey, Mark Conlan, and Sherry She to
research, analysis and presentation of information
for the 1st edition, remain invaluable, transforming
sketchy ideas and information into clear diagrams
and figures.
In addition, Wiley and I are grateful to the fol-
lowing for permission to reproduce copyright
material:
John Mongard Landscape Architects (JMLA) for
Figure 4.2 Planting Day at Bingara’s Living
Classroom.
Figure 4.3. The Living Classroom in its rural setting.
Figure 9.14, Tolga Village Enhancement: new street
signage and historic fig tree;
Figure 9.15, Tinaroo Community Plan, showing
village centre, lake front access and conservation and
revegetation areas;
Figure 9.16 Community planning workshop with
local residents;
x Acknowledgements
Figure 9.17, Creating a culture of appreciation:
Atherton community sculptures, plan and vistas;
to the Brisbane Housing Company for
Figure 7.1 Conversion of former Richlands High
School teaching block for 26 affordable rental
dwellings, with small front garden spaces, nearing
completion, 2009.
Figure 7.2 Rear view with patio garden spaces,
conversion of former Richlands High School
teaching block for 26 affordable rental dwellings,
nearing completion, 2009
Figure 7.3 Earnshaw Haven, single-­ storey,
medium-­density affordable rental dwellings, with
small back garden spaces
Figure 7.4 Tony and Judy, affordable housing
residents at one of BHC’s inner-­ Brisbane high-­
density, mixed-­tenure rental complexes
Figure 7.5 Hartopp Street apartment block,
communal landscaped interior garden space high-­
density medium-­rise affordable rental dwellings
Figure 7.6 Hartopp Street interior of two-­
bedroom apartment block, high-­density, medium-­
rise, affordable rental dwellings
Figure 7.7 Musk Avenue, Kelvin Grove,
12 storey, affordable rental apartment block,
interior of one-­ bedroom apartment, with view
towards city centre.
Figure 7.8 Masters Street, Newstead inner city
apartment block under construction with city
centre in background
Figure 7.9, Fitzgibbon outer suburban green field
site previously owned by Queensland Housing
being developed for mixed rental and purchase
medium-­ priced and affordable dwellings, using
2008 Commonwealth Fiscal Stimulus funding;
John Hill and Creative Commons for Figure 9.7,
The Acropolis, and 9.10, The Jewish Memorial
Museum in Berlin.
and to Catherine Oakley for Figures 9.8, Alhambra
Palace and 9.9, Court of the Lions.
Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to Todd Green,
Executive Editor, and his colleagues Amy Odum,
Kelly Gomez, Monica Chandra Sekar and
Jeevaghan Devapal in the editorial and produc-
tion staff at Wiley, whose insight and guidance
have made the revision and writing of this exten-
sively updated 2nd edition both constructive and
rewarding.
Phil Heywood, Brisbane, April 2023
1 Promises and Problems
of Community Life
Introduction: the organisation
of the chapter
Part One, Current Cascades of Change, examines the
ways that a number of accelerating social and eco-
nomic factors are creating insistent needs for more
imaginative and effective community planning.
These pressures include:
• accelerating innovations in information and
communications;
• economic fluctuations;
• expanding transport technologies;
• radical administrative reorganisation;
• major political change;
• destabilised international relations;
• changing mindsets: increasing relativism and loss
of intellectual self-­confidence.
Part Two, Community Life and Change, relates
these challenges to contemporary community life
and outlines potential planning responses.
Part Three, Competing Interpretations of Com-
munity Structure and Change, delves into differing
interpretations of the nature of communities based
on the competing priorities of order, productivity,
control and cooperation.
Part Four, The Roles of Collaboration, reviews how
these themes illuminate the ways that people and
organisations can cooperate in planning their com-
munities and leads to Conclusions applying these
roles to the practices of collaborative planning.
Part One, Current Cascades
of Change
The justification for planning today extends
beyond the age-­old desire to create a better world.
New urgency is being injected by threats to our
continued security as a successful and sociable
species posed by increasingly volatile conditions
Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood.
© 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John
Wiley & Sons, Inc.
in the physical, economic and political environ-
ments. Because the best solutions to many of these
challenges are themselves contested, finding solu-
tions will demand inclusive discussions to shape
new agreements concerning values, actions and
distribution of costs and benefits. Coordinated
responses will have to match and manage impacts
resulting from a wide range of powerful drivers,
including climate change triggering spiralling
environmental instability; increased personal and
social mobility; economic uncertainty; impacts of
technological change; globalisation of production
and information exchange; and most recently, the
spiralling impacts of mutating global pandemics.
Coherent and responsive planning is also needed
to ensure that the solution to one problem does not
come at the cost of creating unmanageable impacts
on others.i
Because sustainable solutions in free societies
must ultimately be built upon communication and
collaboration, planning to meet these challenges
should involve bringing together not only vari-
ous technical experts, service providers and busi-
ness interests but also community members and
leaders. This is true across the world – as much,
for instance, in the flood-­ prone villages of the
Sundarbans of the Ganges delta, as in the socially
and ethnically divided communities of inner c­ ities
throughout the ‘rust belt’ areas of the United
States and England’s industrial north (Ghosh 2004;
Leeds University School of Sociology and Social
Policy 2019; Haldane 2021).
components of change
The last four decades can be viewed as a period
of widespread accelerated change, or ‘punctuated
equilibrium’ during which a number of very rapid
transformations have coincided and interacted to
create revolutionary situations across numerous
systems (Gould 1988). These global trends have
exerted potent impacts on the everyday lives of
local communities. In the physical environment,
climate change is producing threatening rises in
sea levels, exerting far-­
reaching and mounting
effects on coastal systems in low-­lying areas and
2 Planning for Community
affecting ecosystems, crop production, human
health, freshwater resources and settlement safety
and planning (Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-
mate Change 2014; Flannery 2020; National Aero
Space Administration (NASA) 2021). Economically,
the cumulative over consumption and production
that resulted in the 2007–2008 Global Financial Cri-
sis are producing continuing instability. In politics,
the massive global shifts in the balance of power
triggered by the end of the cold war are creating
continuing instability and mass flights of refugees
from places such as Syria, Ukraine and Afghani-
stan, seeking refuge throughout the world. In
human health, the Covid-­19 pandemic has resulted
worldwide in nearly 15 million deaths (World
Health Organisation 2022), restricted social inter-
action and discouraged previous trends towards
high-­density concentrations of living and work
spaces.
These converging crises in our physical, social
and economic environments pose challenging ques-
tions for community life and planning worldwide.
Earlier fears concerning border wars between
Western and Communist power blocks in Europe,
America and Africa have been re-­ ignited by
new crises of invasions of bordering countries
by continental powers, including Russia’s inva-
sion of Ukraine and constantly repeated claims
by mainland China over the territory of Taiwan.
Escalating local riots, reprisals and killings in com-
munities throughout Asia, Africa, Europe and the
Americas add to the sense that new, more inclu-
sive approaches are needed to enable communi-
ties to live together in harmony with each other
and with their neighbours. Earlier fears of a new
‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996) have been
renewed by rising tides of international terrorism
and global competition between the USA and
China, and the European Union and Russia. As a
result, in times of unprecedented physical mastery
and invention, humanity is stalked by escalating
threats of disasters resulting from failures to col-
laborate in the face of external changes or even to
coexist in cooperative communities, locally, region-
ally, nationally or globally.
Solutions will require not only continued inno-
vation but also improved collaboration at all scales
of community, which often involves challenging
mutual adjustment. Where widespread frustration,
anger and social resentments flare among people
having to face disruptions to their accustomed pat-
terns of life, policy making and leadership will
be required to recognise, manage and assuage
these reactions. People will need help and tools to
adjust their traditional lifestyles to accommodate
the ‘shock of the new’. Prominent among the roles
required of sensitive and sustainable community
planning will be assistance to individuals and
communities to identify and manage changes that
may seem to arrive without adequate warning or
fully understood causes. In each of a number of
arenas, discussed below, the forces of entropy, pull-
ing things apart, will have to be matched by con-
scious integration to hold them together.ii In such
situations, communities of all scales will need to
develop their capacities to interpret rapidly chang-
ing conditions; to agree collaborative responses to
radically changing circumstances; and to evalu-
ate options for unintended consequences – in
short, to plan.
accelerating innovation in information and
communications
Remarkable recent advances in information and
communications technology (ICT) have made the
contemporary world a place of instant and uni-
versal communication and greatly expanded the
potential scale of communities of association.
Consequences, both benign and damaging, have
been widespread and far reaching. On the positive
side, ‘Glocal’ awareness, transcending communi-
ties of place, is stimulating widely occurring and
loosely linked initiatives. These include carbon
reduction schemes adopted by many individuals,
local communities and governments throughout
developed countries (see, for example, ­Australian
Government Department of Energy, Science,
Industry and Resources 2021; lcarb 2022; Transi-
tion Towns 2022). Such networks of environmental
and social activism are also making good use of
instantaneous internet and email links to assemble
powerful coalitions of public, political and media
opinion formers to champion or oppose actions on
global issues. One such campaign in the early years
of this century successfully contested the proposed
extension by the World Trade Organization of the
global financial market into critical fields such as
local land ownership (Monbiot 2004).iii
Both local and larger-­ scale initiatives can be
influential. Where contact is daily and direct,
communities remain more intensively linked, but
where they are widespread and open-­ edged to
draw in newcomers, they frequently become even
more influential and may transcend boundaries
to help bolster actions in remote local societies.
For instance, in the United Kingdom, these have
given rise to the development and advocacy of
new strategies to help cope with the impacts of
global environmental change on food, water and

energy systems and security worldwide and in
advancing the role of science and research net-
works in a wide range of issues (Environmental
Change Institute 2022).
However, potentially negative impacts of instant
global communications are at least as significant.
They include manipulation of social media plat-
forms to interfere in the elections and political
lives of targeted countries and regimes; the ram-
pant spread of worldwide movements promoting
hate speech and misinformation and the ultimately
even more serious threat of the use of mass sur-
veillance techniques by repressive governments to
destroy the civil rights and personal freedom of
their own citizens. Russian interference in the 2016
United States presidential election, which gave
rise to a Congressional investigation, made use of
the global reach and proneness to manipulation
of social media, using the latest developments in
global communications (Wikipedia 2022). Equally
damaging on a more general, less targeted basis
is the use of these same media to promote con-
spiracy theories and hate speech, associated with
the worldwide ‘Alt Right’ movement (Grinnell
College 2022). Ultimately, most serious of all is the
rapidly expanding capacity of mass surveillance
to subject every moment of individuals’ lives to
the scrutiny of potentially repressive governments.
The People’s Republic of China, for instance, is cur-
rently introducing a system of social rewards and
punishments based on the evidence of compliance
with state policies as indicated by the results of this
kind of surveillance (Human Rights Watch 2022;
CBN News 2019). Active community advocacy
and empowerment at all scales are needed to
ensure that prudent regulations prevent the lat-
est developments in communications technology
from being used to fuel such abuses. Now, more
than ever, the price of individual freedom will be
eternal vigilance over abuses of centralised power.
economic fluctuations
Economics has become one of the most contested
fields of knowledge and interpretation in the lives
of local communities. The prevailing view of the
mid-­twentieth century that mixed and managed
economies could and should balance demand and
supply to produce full employment and avoid
inflation (Galbraith 1972) was challenged by the
militant ideas of supply-­ side economics associ-
ated with monetarist theorists like Milton Fried-
man (1968, 2008). Arguing that ‘a rising tide will
float all boats’ the monetarists advocated prior-
itising aggregate economic growth over working
Promises and Problems of Community Life 3
to promote individual wellbeing and just distri-
butions of wealth. That orthodoxy has now itself
been challenged by the effects of prolonged world
economic recessions and bouts of massive local-
ised unemployment, triggered by financial crises
and global pandemics. In mixed economies where
recurrent government funds and credibility are
required to bolster private sector financial insti-
tutions and transactions, opportunities may also
arise for well-­organised communities to play larger
roles in shaping their own destinies. In the wake
of pandemics and spasms of the global economic
system, support from central government fund-
ing can be channelled to tackle local problems like
shortage of affordable housing and to stimulate
local economies to combat future challenges.
Another example of the potential to use eco-
nomic levers to achieve beneficial results – in this
case, at the scale of the global community – comes
from the 2021 Rome Summit of the G20 group of
the world’s most economically developed nations,
which committed all members to ambitious pro-
grammes to combat climate change, apply taxation
incentives, increase development aid and promote
anti-­pandemic vaccination – all requiring concerted
action by or with communities at a variety of scales
from the local to the global (Guardian 2021a).
expanding transport technologies of sea and air
Movement of goods and people is also undergo-
ing dramatic change. The container revolution of
the last 40 years both revolutionised the spatial
patterns of port cities throughout the world and
advanced the international division of labour by
promoting routine long-­distance exchange of man-
ufactured products. From Baltimore and San Fran-
cisco to London and Rotterdam, dock locations
moved downstream to new deep-­water locations,
freeing large swathes of old central area docklands
for new commercial and residential development,
and often triggering gentrification in their neigh-
bouring communities.
International airports have also recently gone
through dramatic phases of development, ration-
alised by concepts such as the Aviopolis and the
Aerotropolis (Kasarda 2009). These developments
have seen very large and often privatised airport
expansions in cities as diverse as Tokyo, Bangkok,
Los Angeles, Amsterdam and London. They have
become major elements of the regional settle-
ment pattern and increasingly significant centres
of employment. Many have also generated new
regional shopping centres and large direct factory
outlets (DFOs), which compete with established
4 Planning for Community
metropolitan shopping centres, resulting in dis-
ruption of regional transport systems and daily
spasms of major traffic congestion. At the same
time, their noise and traffic impacts have caused
often bitter conflicts over proposals for new run-
ways, flight paths and night-­time curfews.
Prior to restrictions imposed by the spread of
Covid-­19, international trade and travel were bind-
ing together global networks ever more securely by
stamping out such giant footprints in key locations
across metropolitan regions, often on the fringes of
long-­established urban and rural communities. As
the prospect of recurrent and constantly mutating
global pandemics restricts the attractions and ease
of international movement that had reached their
peak in the first two decades of this century, the
continued growth of these related developments
appears increasingly uncertain. Careful commu-
nity consultation and planning will be required to
negotiate sustainable outcomes. These will have to
balance the needs and concerns of existing local and
regional communities with the uncertain future of
spaces originally dedicated to unlimited expansion
of supersonic communications. Community plan-
ning can make important contributions to the man-
agement of these impacts and spaces, and these are
discussed in more detail in Chapter 10, Community
Governance and Participation.
major political change
In many places, the established order has been
splintering and re-­forming. Centralised and polit­
ically regulated command economies, such as the
Communist regimes of the former USSR and East-
ern Europe, have failed, due as much to internal
rigidities and inefficiencies as to external com-
petition. Meanwhile, in the market and mixed
economies of the West, Monetarist attempts to
maximise profits by replacing political decision by
market mechanisms have often resulted in severe
disparities of wealth, social injustices and macro-­
economic spasms, making market capacities for
self-­regulation and social efficiency look increas-
ingly questionable (Monbiot 2004; Pinketty 2019).
Throughout democracies, mixed economy mecha-
nisms developed in the last century by Keynes are
again being widely advocated and adopted in cur-
rent times of economic uncertainty and are increas-
ingly re-­emerging as the most satisfactory way to
combine economic efficiency with social justice.
However, even within such balanced regimes,
sectionalism, fragmentation and populism have
disrupted the established mid-­twentieth-­century
order of a fraternal Left in constructive dialogue
and debate with a freedom-­ seeking Right. The
cause of representative democracy itself has
ebbed and flowed, advancing in Europe and Latin
America, scarcely holding its own in the face of
the repeated challenges of populism in much of
North America and throughout Asia, and collaps-
ing in many parts of Africa. Meanwhile, in the
rapidly growing number of new ‘millionaire’ cit-
ies (with populations of more than one million)
that now accommodate a third of the world’s
population (United Nations Department of Eco-
nomic and Social Affairs 2018), local and regional
systems of governance have struggled to meet
the demands and manage the impacts of rapid
urbanisation or to produce effective systems of
urban management. They have been constantly
haunted by the spectre of militant and self-­entitled
populism that poses threats of degeneration into
autocracy, whether in Brazil, Hungary, Russia, the
­Philippines, or the USA.
impacts of destabilised international relations
International relations have also exerted powerful
impacts on the lives of local communities. The col-
lapse of the Soviet Union and allied regimes ended
the cold war’s icy deadlock between communism
and capitalism, which had dominated international
relations for much of the twentieth century. How-
ever, a brief ‘new world order’ of economic and mili-
tary dominance by the USA was scarcely proclaimed
before it was violently challenged by a potent combi-
nation of international terrorism, resurgent Russian
nationalism and Chinese global ambitions. In Africa,
the tragic conflicts of the early 1990s between Hutus
and Tutsis in Ruanda and Burundi unleashed waves
of ethnic violence that continued more than two dec-
ades later to challenge community life across central
Africa, extending into the Congo Basin. Meanwhile,
in Europe, the EU has worked hard to minimise
or contain long-­standing inter-­communal hostilities
in the Balkans and build new continental solidarity
but is now having to face serious challenges from
resurgent Russian militarism.
Outbreaks of bitter inter-­communal violence have
occurred in all parts of the world – among Serbs
and Bosnians in Europe; Russians and Chechn-
yans in the Caucasus region; Han Chinese and the
local Uiger and Tibetan peoples in Xian Jiang and
Tibet; left-­and right-­wing groups in Latin Amer-
ica; militarists, democrats and ethnic minorities in
Myanmar; Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, the
Caucuses, Sulawesi and Timor Loro Sae; and most
recently between Russia and its western neighbours
in the Ukraine. Meanwhile, in this fracturing and

conflict-­ridden situation of an unstable and multipo-
lar world, the United Nations has found itself chal-
lenged to maintain its global roles of reconciliation,
negotiation and leadership. The inescapable bonds
between global and local communities, daily dem-
onstrated by the mounting instability that results
from political and military repression and the effects
of climate change, are beyond the current capaci-
ties of any single national government to control
or resolve. As a result, waves of refugees are being
driven across borders, continents and oceans, to
compound the challenges facing community plan-
ning in neighbouring and host regions throughout
the world (Dantas et al. 2021). The evidence that, for
good or ill, we are all, individually and communally
‘members one of another’, presents the most vivid
challenges and opportunities for community plan-
ning at all scales. Local and regional communities
have essential and creative roles to play in plan-
ning and shaping solutions.
changing mindsets
The scope and effectiveness of our actions are
much influenced by the mindsets and philosophical
assumptions of our times. For three millennia, in the
western world, there have been well-­differentiated
philosophical arguments among the great tradi-
tions of idealism, rationalism and empiricism.
Meanwhile, in the East, Buddhist and Daoist con-
templation have provided alternatives to Confucian
pragmatism. Both sets of ideas have recently been
radically challenged by a welter of assertive new
ideas of the late twentieth century, conveniently
labelled ‘Post Structuralism’. ‘Deconstruction’ has
become a favourite debating technique and ‘Meta
narratives’ a potent challenge.iv
Nevertheless, as the air clears, it becomes appar-
ent that the long-­standing Western traditions of
empiricism (of knowledge through experience),
idealism (the power of original thought and com-
munication), and rationalism (the checking out of
ideas against observations) are all alive and vigor-
ous. They are of great, often decisive, importance
for the way that societies choose to shape the lives
and forms of their communities.
Empiricism thrives in the arguments of the
American Pragmatists who continue to assert the
experience that ‘handsome is as handsome does’
and that ‘mental knives are what won’t cut real
bread’ (James, in Passmore 1980). In development
planning, this often results in policies that focus
on immediate, tangible and available rewards and
outcomes rather than pursuing underlying values
or considering long term consequences. Immediate
Promises and Problems of Community Life 5
material solutions like urban freeways and airport
shopping complexes are often favoured, not delv-
ing deeper to weigh the underlying values or inter-
ests that are being served.
Elsewhere, the contrasting contributions of val-
ues and ideas have been maintained in the neo-­
idealism of European thinkers like Jacques Derrida
and Michel Foucault who employ paradox and
contradiction to question conventional empiri­
cal interpretations and power relations (Foucault
1963, 1972, 1980, 1981) and ‘deconstruct’ received
truths (Derrida 1976, 1993, 1995) in order to pur-
sue such values as social justice, equity and diver-
sity. In this, they find common ground with critical
rationalist theorists like Karl Popper (1972) in justi-
fying values-­based problem-­solving and question-
ing approaches to activities such as community
planning, though their style is often very differ-
ent, relying on paradox rather than deductive
logic. Socially engaged Critical Rationalists span
contrasting streams of the logics of scientific dis-
covery and social progress. They provide a pow-
erful and persuasive explanation of both scientific
method and social engineering to justify the tech-
nological optimism of the mid-­twentieth century,
postulating an upward spiral of individual prob-
lem recognition, conjecture, refutation and re-­
hypothesising, that is very relevant to community
planning – see ­Chapter 5, Ways and Means (Pop-
per 1972; Magee 1973).
On the other hand, the more idealist Frankfurt
School of Critical Method emphasises the impor-
tance, not only of individual values, interests and
hypotheses but also of interaction amongst indi-
viduals to create communicative action (Haber-
mas 1987) also involving recognition of the rights
of others (Honneth 2022). As a result, they advo-
cate the crucial roles of discussion, recognition
and exchange among equally privileged partici-
pants around a notional ‘policy table’, whereby
both knowledge and proposals for action can be
resolved in open exchange among interested par-
ties. They term this process Communicative Action
(Habermas 1971, 1987, Habermas et al. 1996). This
leads them to advocate both general and specific
approaches to community planning, which range
from participatory processes involving recurrent
discussions around actual tables to the conser-
vation and creation of new physical public open
spaces to promote opportunities for continuing
community debate to enable the reality of com-
munity participation. Together, these two wings of
Critical Rationalism – the individual and the com-
municative – provide an effective basis for problem-­
solving and inclusive community planning.
6 Planning for Community
These ideas can be related to concepts, pro-
grammes and choices of action in everyday life.
American Pragmatism (Passmore 1980) emerges as
the champion of material mastery and physical
evidence, advancing and celebrating both mass
production and individual consumption. One
variant of this view has served to generate such
widespread material and individualist outcomes
as high-­capacity freeway systems, low-­ density
suburbs, walled estates and patrolled shopping
centres, favoured and justified on the basis that
they promote material progress and serve individ-
ual preferences. There are other, more theoretical
contributions that Pragmatism has to offer:
• recognising the importance of improving mate-
rial living conditions;
• developing and justifying evidence-­ based
policy; and
• respect for the evidence of people’s recorded
choices and commitment to confirming popu-
lar support for programmes and proposals in
regular democratic elections.
Critical Rationalism, associated with Karl Popper
(1947, 1972, 1989), places such ideas within a social
context and emphasises progressive problem-­
solving to keep pace with the inevitable effects of
social and physical changes and challenges. Poten-
tial contributions to community planning include:
• practical and purposeful approaches to
social change;
• encouraging people to question existing situa-
tions, voice individual opinions and test ideas
in open challenge;
• encouragement of all members of pluralist soci-
eties to be part of continuing social debates.
This approach, discussed further in Chapter 5,
Ways and Means, generates inclusive, cyclical and
open-­ended methods that allow communities to
contribute to planning to meet the continually
emerging new challenges of current times.
Communicative Action places methods of indi-
vidual problem-­solving within their social context.
A number of distinctive characteristics of life in
the twenty-­first century favour this ‘communi-
cative turn in planning theory’ (Healey 2007).
These include:
• the global reach of universal and instantaneous
communications;
• the worldwide spread of education and
know­ledge; and
• the insistent demands of previously excluded
groups to have their interests taken into account
in allocating opportunities and resources.
Communicative Action is therefore particularly
relevant to contemporary community planning
and has a number of important contributions to
make, including:
• a coherent and convincing rationale for com-
munity engagement;
• a powerful and fertile source of objectives –
through participation and discussion – to guide
the process;
• inclusion of community members in informa-
tion collection and review;
• insights into key aspects – such as the impor-
tance and role of specific public spaces and
structures;
• diminishing mounting dangers of excluded
dissidents and unrecognised groups develop-
ing resentments against those seen as parts of
an oppressive establishment or a ‘deep state’.
Contemporary philosophical thought, encom-
passing contending views of meaning, method
and purpose can be harnessed to make valid con-
tributions to the similarly wide field of commu-
nity planning. Insights can be obtained into the
wide range of values and beliefs prevalent in our
diverse communities. Unexpected situations can
be matched and understood by recognising their
underlying values and concepts to help shape
acceptable and appropriate solutions. Innovative
problem-­ solving, employing the active involve-
ment of energetic individuals, can be encouraged
and integrated. People’s innate capacities for com-
munication can be harnessed in festivals, discus-
sion groups, speakers’ corners and the potentially
democratic and inclusive conversations of the
internet. Rather than a confusing babble of personal
insights, contemporary philosophy can be inter-
preted as an enriching symphonic performance,
combining many different themes and instru-
ments, each with its own distinctive contribution.
Part Two, Community Life
and Change
administrative reorganisation
Community administration, too, has experienced
great changes. While new technologies of transport
and production have been increasing the scale of
business, tax revolts and commercially dominated
mass media have been advocating the advantages
of smaller government (Osborne and Gaebler 1992).
The appropriate balance between public interest
and market-­driven development is increasingly con-
tested, and community governance is experiencing

great pressures and undergoing significant chal-
lenges (Pinketty 2013). These uncertainties are
now being compounded by the mounting impacts
of climate change and the needs for government
and voluntary sector leadership in managing the
spreading difficulties posed by recurrent mutations
of ­Covid-­19. Fresh attention is being focussed on
planned and decentralised forms of settlement and
governance.
A parallel revival of interest in the distributive
capacities of regional planning and support for
the growth of secondary centres has resulted from
the difficulties of congestion and liveability asso-
ciated with the growing scale of urban settlement
in recent times (Roberts 2014). In the European
Community, this has taken the form of support
for decentralisation, infusing new life into exist-
ing communities by injecting funds from above
(Balchin et al. 1999). Even the awkward departure
of Britain from the European Community can
be seen as a much-­ improved alternative to the
resort to violence and war formerly practiced by
­European powers for over a millennium whenever
they have failed to resolve such misunderstand-
ings and differences peacefully. Elsewhere, in the
USA’s Oregon and Canada’s British Columbia,
top-­down principles have been combined with
bottom-­up participation to create regional govern-
ments with strong planning and implementation
powers (Heywood 1997).
The many challenges and collapses faced by
the ‘economy of risk’ of recent decades may well
prompt more collaborative attitudes of the pri-
vate sector towards public participation in eco-
nomic management, resulting in resumed and
reinforced roles for governments and commu-
nities in public administration. Such alliances
between communities and government, as those
being promoted by the UK’s Homes and Com-
munities Agency, for instance, could become far
more significant in the next few years. One exam-
ple is Manchester Place, a partnership between
Manchester City Council and the government’s
Homes and Communities Agency that aims to
speed up the supply of new homes across the city,
by combining Manchester City Corporation’s
planning programme with national government
support and commercial investment and devel-
opment (Place North West 2015). More recently,
in Australia, City Deals are a partnership between
the three levels of national, state and local gov-
ernment and communities to work towards
shared visions for productive and liveable cit-
ies. The aim is to align planning, investment and
governance to accelerate growth and job creation,
stimulate urban renewal and promote economic
Promises and Problems of Community Life 7
reform. The 2021 City Deal for Brisbane, for
instance, included a sum of $A3 million for a
new indigenous art centre (Australian Govern-
ment, Department of Infrastructure and Regional
Development 2022). In housing, too, the private
sector is generally demonstrating active interest
in providing affordable housing across Australia
in return for Commonwealth government sup-
port (AHURI 2022).
Contemporary challenges
to community life
Communities consist of groups of people who
experience and acknowledge significant links,
expec­ tations and responsibilities towards each
other. They do not need to be neighbours, but they
do need to share neighbourly feelings that may
be based on shared spaces, interests or realms of
interaction. Nevertheless, ‘community’ may mean
different things at different scales and to differ-
ent people. ‘Friendly association’ is the most all-­
embracing of its many meanings, encompassing
such alternatives as ‘all the people in a particular
district’, ‘a group of people living together as a
smaller social unit within a larger one’ and ‘owner-
ship and participation in common’. Friendly asso-
ciation both promotes and is in turn promoted
by community life. Through the self-­ expression
that links people and groups, personal energies
can be combined to create communities and cit-
ies and maintain their infrastructure of roads,
aqueducts and ultimately global communications
systems. Through collaboration in production, art,
science and technology, settlements that benefit
from friendly association and shared values can
gain the strength and capacity to transform their
environments into places of lasting achievement
and beauty. Though there are different views as to
whether cities originated through enforced asso-
ciation within containing walls or through coop-
eration based on mutual aid (Kropotkin 1939),
it is clear that at different times, both may have
been involved and that their recent rapid growth
to accommodate more than half of all humanity
(United Nations Department of Economic and
Social Affairs 2018) has depended in part on net-
works of association, exchange and collaboration.
These are most sustainable where they are vol-
untary, mutually advantageous and pleasurable.
Depictions by their artists of the life of very early
cities of more than 3000 years ago, like Heraklion
and Akhetaton, are full of scenes of people singing
and dancing together (Desroche-­Noblecourt 1976),
just as paintings of medieval cities like Lorenzetti’s
8 Planning for Community
Figure 1.1 Lorinzetti’s allegory of good government. Source: Ambrogio Lorenzetti / Wikimedia Commons /
Public domain.
‘Vision of Good Government’ and ‘Vision of Bad
Government’ in the thirteenth-­century Siena show
repeated acts of quiet neighbourliness and mutual
appreciation (see Figure 1.1).
Nevertheless, even the most successful cities
and communities inevitably bring people into
enforced and sometimes unwanted contact with
others who do not share their original culture,
interests, religion or even language. City life also
creates situations where fear, hostility or exploi-
tation can create conflict or the subjugation of
whole groups as servants, serfs or slaves. Com-
munities where friendly association has been lost
may become dangerous places where vulnerable
individuals and groups suffer random assault or
systematic exploitation. As a result, the fostering
of community life to support and sustain healthy
societies requires careful planning and manage-
ment that will involve choices and decisions about
which values and interests will be pursued. These
may vary from decisions, for instance, to adopt
the elaborate caste systems of traditional Hindu
society (Naipaul 1979) or to develop more volun-
tary networks like those advocated by Mahatma
Gandhi and practiced by the craftsmen and arti-
sans of medieval and Renaissance Tuscany (Hey-
wood 1904; Putnam 1993; Hibbert 1979).
The early decades of the current millennium pre-
sent particularly acute challenges to the invaluable
role of communities as places where change can be
assimilated and the shock of the new absorbed into
a continually re-­adjusted balance. Challenging con-
flicts of communal beliefs and interests have been
fostered by the increased individual mobility and
personal power of the modern era. These influences
have, in turn, been amplified by the global reach
of mass media, publicising the attractions of the
world’s prosperous regions to the most remote cor-
ners of all continents. Flights from war, persecution,
famine and the increasing likelihood of enforced
mass migrations resulting from sea level rises
caused by global warming may involve many hun-
dreds of thousands – and even millions – of people
worldwide, presenting both challenges and oppor-
tunities for the creation of vibrant and inclusive new
communities (Dantas et al. 2021). We are thus facing
a future where the capacity of communities to inte-
grate newcomers will become even more essential.
current trends
Tools and capacities to build such inclusive new
communities have been much assisted by develop-
ments of mass education and technological reach
throughout the twentieth century, climaxing, as
we have seen, in the digital revolution of the cell
phone with its instantaneous access to the global
internet. Most societies now aim to provide some
sort of formal primary education for their children.
The universal reach of global communications has
brought informal education to every village, how-
ever poor or remote. Individuals in all parts of the
world now have the confidence and the capacity
to communicate their ideas, needs and aims with
each other and with power holders. As a result,
we are experiencing the potential for education to
become a major focus and growth point for com-
munity life at all scales. An encouraging special
case of this is the re-­shaping of the two-­millennia-­
old role of public libraries to become welcoming
hubs for community inclusion in local and global
information systems, dedicated to providing access
for otherwise isolated individuals to a universe of
information and knowledge.

failing and thriving communities
By contrast, vivid failures to manage or accept
cultural diversity peacefully and positively are
all too common. Cases like the Los Angeles’ 1992
riots, Serbian extermination camps during the
Bosnian War of 1992–1995, Ruandan massacres of
1994–1996, those in Mumbai in 1993 and 2008, Rus-
sia’s First and Second Chechen Wars of 1994–1996
and 2004–2006 and the Sydney anti-­migrant riots
in 2007 have become recurrent themes of contem-
porary life (Robertson 1999; Wikipedia 2014). More
recently, police shootings and deaths in custody
of African Americans in the USA, black citizens
in England and indigenous people in Australia,
contributing to the world-­wide Black Lives Matter
movement, are a daily reminder of the need for
more inclusive community planning (Black Lives
Matter 2021). The plight of the Myanmar Rohingya,
Karen and other ethnic communities in that country
is a further daily reminder of the toxic and often
fatal consequences of situations where community
understanding and tolerance have been allowed to
break down or be overthrown by military regimes.
Thousands of individuals and families suffer, and
no one benefits (Concern Worldwide US 2021). In
such situations, the global stakes for community
building are very high.
Less dramatic but more widespread achieve-
ments of cooperation and mutual aid help to
balance such failures of community life. Exam-
ples such as the Mondragon Workers Coopera-
tives, Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank (see Boxes 1.2
and 1.3) and the international community develop-
ment schemes of organisations like Oxfam, World
Vision and World Bicycle Relief have brought
increased personal autonomy and essential physi-
cal and social resources such as clean water, edu-
cation and personal mobility to countless small
communities throughout Africa, Asia and Latin
America. Because human societies depend upon
harnessing skill, ingenuity and creative talent in
networks of exchange and development, the long-­
term imperatives of cooperation and voluntary
collaboration have always reasserted themselves,
overcoming and outlasting explosions of violence
and conflict. Individual prosperity and fulfilment
ultimately rely on these networks of trust, which
in their turn rest upon the friendly associations of
community life.
These collaborative realities have great sig-
nificance for community planning. Interpersonal
and ‘bottom-­up’ methods of developing policies
and plans are equally effective and more durable
and resilient than ‘top-­down’ and imposed ones.
Promises and Problems of Community Life 9
Model societies in the spirit of such social ‘Guard-
ians’ as Plato (1980), More (1516/1965), Marx and
Engels (1846, 1990), and Skinner (1974) have all
failed or never even achieved introduction. In
his seminal book The Open Society and its Enemies
(1947, 1998), Karl Popper has related the repressive
failings of closed communities to their unwilling-
ness to acknowledge and integrate the knowledge
and experience of their members into discussions
of consensual future directions. They thus become
caught in a vicious cycle of repression, resentment,
resistance and rejection. If, on the other hand, peo-
ple are motivated and enabled to negotiate with
each other, policies will become more widely and
securely based and better informed.
These psychological bases of community life
have been explored by the celebrated twentieth-­
century planning theorist, Jane Jacobs (1961, 1969,
1985, 1992, 2004), in a series of books spanning five
decades from the 1960s to the 1990s of the new cen-
tury. In her 1992 book Systems of Survival, she argues
that humans have evolved as ‘dealers’ far more apt
to develop robust systems of mutual advantage
than are the ‘guardians’ who see it as their preroga-
tive to lay down rules to regulate the behaviour of
their fellow citizens.
Jacobs’ ideas powerfully support the methods
of ‘Collaborative Planning’ (Healey 2006) that are
currently emerging to replace the now superseded
‘Systems Thinking’ of the mid-­twentieth century
(Chadwick 1969; McLoughlin 1971). Such systems
planners often created descriptive models of great
scope and explanatory power, but then slid over
into the error of assuming that ‘is’ implies ‘ought’.
As a result, they saw themselves as appointed
experts with responsibilities to project current
trends into the future. This frequently led them to
advocate such consequential and often devastat-
ing innovations as land-­use transportation systems
designed around massive urban freeways capable
of accommodating the traffic flows indicated by
their surveys and projections, relying on current
private car use for journeys to and from work.
Such Trend Planning took no note of community
interests and concerns about housing demoli-
tion, environmental pollution, economic distribu-
tional effects or alternative more responsive ways
of managing projected journeys to work flows
(Heywood 1974).
contributions of collaborative planning
By contrast, there are many positive examples of the
contributions that collaborative community plan-
ning can make to promote the life of flourishing
10 Planning for Community

cities and regions. These include, for example,
schemes of local community development, micro-
credit to assist economic development in previously
struggling communities; and worker participation
in management. One deceptively modest example
of local community development can be found in
the City Farm and Community Gardens movement
by which environmental activists in cities across
the world are reintroducing the restorative effects
of contact with nature to often underprivileged
inner-­city communities ranging from metropolitan
London to the suburbs of Dili in Timor Loro S’ae.
Box 1.1 presents one such example in the heart of
London, one of the world’s most intensively devel-
oped cities. Box 1.2 illustrates how community
energy and mutual trust can offer the social collat-
eral to provide microcredit to relieve the isolation of
the ‘poorest of the poor’ originating in Bangladesh,
one of the world’s most impoverished countries.
Box 1.3 describes how the collaborative manage-
ment of the Mondragon Workers Cooperative has
assisted a previously marginalised minority com-
munity to achieve prosperity since its establish-
ment in 1956, continuing to the present day.

Box 1.1 Surrey Docks City Farm

The aim of city farms like Surrey Docks, in the heart of inner London, is to involve local people
and environmental activists in land care, food production and animal husbandry. City farms are
areas of repose, centres for conservation of natural life and places for reconnecting with nature
to balance the intensity of modern city life. They depend upon support from their local commu-
nities, often providing out-­of-­curriculum activities for local schools and youth clubs and, in turn,
relying upon the services of local volunteers. In 2008, there were no fewer than 15 of them in
London, all members of the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, a national scale
network (Mayor of London 2008).
Surrey Docks City Farm is one of the smallest and most central, occupying two acres of an
old docks site at the northern tip of the Rotherhithe peninsula, immediately across the Thames
from the towering bulk of the 75-­storey Canary Wharf and the spreading mass of London’s new
international office precinct of Docklands. The farm was originally founded in 1975 by Hilary
Peters, who recalls that
The dreadful alienation of people in the abandoned docks wasn’t just the result of unem-
ployment. They were alienated from themselves, each other and their surroundings. When I
started to dig the silt and graze my goats and poultry in Surrey Docks, I was surprised by the
urgency with which everyone wanted to join in . . . People who had never related to anyone
or anything started to relate to animals. The farm grew due to people who recognized that
it met some buried need in them
(McConnachie/Peters 2009)
Now the farm is run by Surrey Docks Farm Provident Association, involving schools, businesses,
youth organisations and volunteers of all ages including a blacksmith/artist, who work on site
every day, providing farm equipment, art objects and continuing interest. It is a focus for local
community life, the site of recurrent fairs and festivals, and its café is a regular stopping-­off
point for walkers and cyclists travelling along the Thameside Path. The small site is densely used
and includes in the words of Hilary Peters: ‘fields for grazing, a vegetable patch along the river,
a herb garden, a compost area, a duck pond, a wild life patch, at least one yurt, a willow walk
housing the bee hives, . . . an orchard full of geese and sculpture. The blacksmith does extremely
inventive work with local children collecting the grot off the river beach and making recycled
portraits of the farm’s animals’ (McConnachie/Peters 2009).
Although frequently small and very local in their organisation and links, these city farms
contribute significantly to making inner cities physically attractive, interesting, socially inclusive
and open hearted. Many readers will immediately associate this story with similar community
organisations and spaces in their own or nearby cities. Such places and groups express well how
community life and organisations can help people take possession of their own living areas and
lives in ways that welcome all others who also want, in whatever ways, to contribute.
 Promises and Problems of Community Life 11

Box 1.2 Microcredit from Bangladesh to the world

At the end of its bloody war of independence in 1972, when Bangladesh emerged as independ-
ent but one of the world’s poorest nations, Mohamed Yunus returned from the USA, where he
had been teaching as a professor of economics. Depressed by the inability of academic theories
to explain or redress the cycle of poverty in which chronic debt trapped most of the country’s
population of more than 100 million people, he experimented, by making 42 small loans totalling
US$ 27 in a nearby village (Bornstein 1997). Based on the success of this initiative in enabling the
recipients to work and trade their way out of debt and poverty, he developed a general approach
to micro-­credit, in which the traditional financial collateral demanded by banks, which the poor
do not have, was replaced by social collateral, which their daily lives and mutual knowledge pro-
vide in abundance (Yunus 1998). Over a period of four years, he and his colleagues organised the
Grameen or ‘Seed’ Bank of small local groups linked to form centres of about 30 members, in turn
joined district branches each serving 60 centres (Fuglesang and Chandler 1993). The bank’s success
depends upon hard work, small sums of money, accountability and respect for human dignity.
Because it lends to ‘the poorest of the poor’ who are used to tight budgeting and relies on
weekly meetings to decide on loans and collect repayments, the bank has always enjoyed an
excellent repayment rate, which is currently running at 98%. Its workers must spend two-­thirds
of their time travelling to villages and participating in weekly branch meetings of local members.
Its lending has grown in 50 years to over US$ 7.59 billion to over 7 million members (over 97%
of them formerly impoverished women) organised in 1.2 million groups (Grameen Bank 2022).
By the end of the century, the movement had spread to include partner organisations in 20
different countries on all six continents and is still growing with recent branches being opened
in S­ henzhen, China (Grameen Trust 2022). The achievements of the Grameen Bank are widely
celebrated. Mahomed Yunus has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Bank has gained
an international architecture award for its contribution to improved rural housing, and the
construction of over six hundred thousand homes has also been financed. Grameen Phone, Gra-
meen Knitwear (a weaver’s cooperative) and Grameen Health Care Services have been formed
to use the excess funds contributed by members after they have finished repaying their loans.
­Grameen Phone has transformed the former rural isolation of the country by having one or more
‘telephone ladies’ with a mobile phone, able to reach any resident in any of the 83,000 villages
where there are groups (Grameen Communications 2022).
By the turn of the century, the Grameen Bank started to look worldwide, aiming to reach a
hundred million of the world’s poorest families, especially women, by providing credit for self-­
employment and other financial and business services, in pursuit of the basic aims of:
• reaching the poorest;
• reaching women;
• building financially self-­sufficient institutions;
• ensuring impact on the lives of clients and their families.
The bank continues to expand in many directions: upwards to influence the policies of the
World Bank to support Micro-­ credit; downwards to make its members more self-­ sufficient,
in enterprises like Grameen Knitwear and Healthcare Service; and sideways to establish over
2600 branches with nine million borrowers throughout Bangladesh, and with no fewer than
150 national branches spreading throughout all six continents (Grameen Bank 2022).
12 Planning for Community

Box 1.3 Worker and community self-­management in Spain

The Mondragon Workers Cooperative (now the Mondragon Corporation) is a notable example
of the power of creative ideas and cooperation to transform unsatisfactory and unjust economic
and physical conditions. In the early 1940s, Father Jose Arizmendi, emerging from one of Franco’s
prisons, founded a democratically managed polytechnic school and began to explore cooperative
ideas as an alternative to avoid each of the repressive excesses of the dictatorship then ruling
Spain, the rigid and unproductive standardisation of Stalin’s Soviet Russia and the social inequi-
ties of contemporary capitalism, which had produced the mass unemployment of the 1930s. In
1956, five unemployed graduates of the Polytechnic pooled their savings and joined with him
to establish the basis for a workers cooperative. ULGOR became the first in the network of
cooperatives, producing white goods and domestic appliances, which happened to be the items
with which they had industrial experience (Whyte and Whyte 1988).
ULGOR was an immediate success and by the early 1960s had grown into a network of enter-
prises comprising over 3000 worker partners. All members have a financial stake in their work
places, which is bought out if they leave, so that only the workers can own the enterprises.
Control of the factories and appointments of senior management are made by means of works
councils with all workers as voting members, appointing and sharing power with plant manag-
ers. By 2022, the original network had grown to include 95 enterprises with over 80,000 member
owners and become Spain’s largest producer of white goods, with the highest worker productiv-
ity of any Spanish enterprise (Mondragon Corporation 2022).
The Contract of Association stipulates that not less than 10% of the profits must go to com-
munity and social services of schools, colleges, health insurance, clinics and research institutes.
These ‘second degree’ co-­operatives are governed by representatives of the factory co-­ops. Wage
differentials, originally fixed at a ratio 1 : 3, have since been expanded to 1 : 6 – a small frac-
tion of that obtaining in most market economies – in order to ensure that the co-­op network
retains its pool of highly talented and energetic young managers and technical experts, to keep
it competitive in times of very rapid technological and economic change, as Spain successfully
adjusts to membership of the mainstream European Community.
Because membership confers the automatic right to a job, the global re-­structuring of employ-
ment due to the automation of the 1980s and 1990s posed particularly sharp challenges to
the co-­ops. Employment growth slowed, and remuneration fell for the first time to about the
average elsewhere in Spanish industry. Employment levels, however, remained at 100%. This
achievement of consensual decision-­taking in the Workers Councils, involved creative innovation
by management and rational choices by members to accept reduced wages to stay competitive.
The Co-­op starts new enterprises with groups of people who are friends, and sees the natural
bonds of friendship as a building block for successful ventures, echoing the definition of commu-
nity as ‘friendly association’ with which we started this section. Its successful application of radical
social and economic ideas is assisting traditional communities to thrive in their home settings
and to maintain deeply valued heritages of language, culture and economic autonomy, which
elsewhere in the Basque region have been expressed in acts of sometimes violent social dissent.

Part Three, Competing
Interpretations of Community
Structure and Change
In both developed and developing countries, cur-
rent challenges of rapid change and conflict are
testing to breaking point long-­established assump-
tions about the purposes and processes of commu-
nity life (Diamond 2005; Ridley 1997; Pilger 1992).
Increasingly bitter inter-­communal and inter-­caste
clashes over conflicting religious beliefs and eco-
nomic interests raise insistent questions about the
effectiveness and directions of prevailing social
policy. More inclusive, better-­informed and more
responsive community planning can provide valid
solutions. Such practical applications require a
sound and widely accepted theoretical basis to
help understand and interpret the character,
development and working methods of commu-
nity organisation. To what extent, then, should the
primary aims of such communities be establishing

and maintaining order; promoting productivity;
ensuring class control; or establishing a framework
for communication and mutual learning? This sec-
tion briefly explores these four competing accounts
of the nature of community life, based on contrast-
ing and competing major aims:
• Order: genetically derived dominance.
• Productivity and exchange: prosperity through
market competition.
• Control through conflict: equality imposed
through struggle.
• Collaboration: through negotiation, adjustment
and mutual aid.
order: genetically derived dominance
In exploring the purposes and organisation of
human communities, one prime consideration
may be the essential nature of their members. No
ideas have influenced thinking on these matters
more than the evolutionary ones of Charles Darwin
and Thomas Huxley (Desmond and Moore 1991;
Darwin 2008) who argued that evolution and
­ economic investment and technological change,
indeed all life was regulated by a natural order
imposed by the survival of the fittest, as driven by
randomly produced new mutations.v This theory
was rapidly applied by the influential school of
‘Social Darwinists’ to champion the promotion of
unregulated competition in the political and eco-
nomic lives of communities, suggesting that com-
munities would advance best by promoting ‘the
survival of the fittest’ (Ridley 1997; Constitutional
Rights Foundation 2021). Darwin’s friend Thomas
Carlyle, for instance propounded a ‘Great Man’
view in which history was shaped by dominant
leaders. He condemned the democratic Chartist
movement of the 1840s as ‘this bitter discontent
grown fierce and mad’ and argued instead for
Machiavellian motivation of natural leaders to max-
imise the worth of their territories and therefore the
wellbeing of the communities which constituted
them (Desmond and Moore 1991). These ideas were
further advanced by later doctrines of ‘Man and
Superman’ proclaimed by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Twentieth-­ century experience has cast dark
shadows across the capacity of such unconstrained
dominance to achieve lasting social progress. The
German cultural tradition stalled under Hitler;
Spain and Portugal suffered socially and stagnated
economically under Franco and Salazar; and Mus-
solini’s regime proved disastrous for Italy, climax-
ing in his corpse being torn limb from limb by a
vengeful crowd in Milan in 1944. Currently, the
military regime in Myanmar has perpetrated social
Promises and Problems of Community Life 13
injustice, political autocracy, economic penury and
multiple ethnic conflicts. As a result of these many
excesses and failures, Social Darwinism has lost
appeal as a basis for community life in free soci-
eties (Ridley 1997). Sociologists and ethnologists
have tended to turn more to the mutual aid theo-
ries of thinkers like Kropotkin (1939, p. 60), who
argued that admitting that swiftness, strength, cun-
ning and endurance to hunger and cold, which are men-
tioned by Darwin and Wallace, making the individual
or the species, the fittest under certain conditions, we
maintain that under any . . . circumstances, sociability
is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life.
Nevertheless, lasting subconscious effects of Social
Darwinism have influenced many of the explana-
tory ideas of twentieth-­century urban sociology and
economics. In the first three decades of the twentieth
century, for instance, Park et al. (1925) and their col-
leagues in the Chicago School of Urban Sociology
developed ideas of urban processes resulting from
endless struggles for space and resources. The new
urban communities were seen as being continu-
ally reshaped by the dynamic of externally driven
giving rise to waves of renewal rippling outwards
through concentric zones of uniform development.
As the city grew, the high-­ intensity commercial
core expanded to redevelop the surrounding envi-
ronmentally blighted ‘zone in transition’, sending
further ripples of redevelopment through the suc-
cessive rings of inner-­ residential suburbs, zones
of working men’s housing and outer fringes of
low-­cost accommodation. The language adopted
to describe this process, ‘invasion and succession’,
reflected ­Darwinian ideas of competitive evolution:
one group was invading the territory of another
and succeeding to its ownership. Later, Martin
Anderson (1964) and Jane Jacobs (1961) described
how these forces were able to annex the powers of
city and federal governments, using instruments of
‘eminent domain’ to acquire land compulsorily and
speed the process of economic appropriation. The
dominant elites of the ‘property machine’ (Ambrose
and Colenutt 1975) and the ‘growth machine’
(Logan and Molotch 1987) claimed to be acting in
the best interests of the whole urban community. It
is not surprising that opposing schools of Marxist
urbanists discussed later, developed the counter-­
interpretation of class conflict.
Twentieth-­ century developments in genet-
ics both reinforced and modified these ideas of
the sociobiology of communities (Wilson 1992).
Richard Dawkins argued that human evolution
­
was driven by the struggle of the ‘selfish gene’ to
dominate over the competing genes of others of its
14 Planning for Community
own species (Dawkins 1976, 1988, 2009). Although
he discounted the ability of human beings to
rationally control these drives in the interests of
cooperative success and survival, he argued that
in the drive to promote our own genes we will
support siblings and others within our own com-
munities having some common genetic material.
These interpretations may seem to explain some of
the collapses of community life and ‘ethnic cleans-
ing’ of the end of the twentieth century, where
groups of individuals of shared ancestry seemed
to have combined to attack and exterminate neigh-
bours alongside whom they had been living more
or less peacefully for decades in Bosnia, Rwanda
and northern Nigeria. However, closer examina-
tion often identifies other economic and environ-
mental factors, which more satisfactorily explain
the patterns of violence and social disintegration.
Diamond (2005) argues that the economic scarcity
had stretched these communities’ capacities for
cooperation to breaking point so that in Rwanda,
a survivor explained, ‘the people whose children
had to walk barefoot to school killed the people
who could buy shoes for theirs’ irrespective of
whether they were Hutu or Tutsi (Diamond 2005).
However, it is not only in such marginalised
and stressed communities that evolutionary biol-
ogy has offered explanations or influenced social
organisation. The cult of the outstanding business
leader and the unique gladiatorial sportsperson
(both rewarded with annual salaries of many tens
of millions of dollars a year) has reached new
heights in the current century with figures such as
Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg exploring path-
ways to unconstrained global dominance. At the
national political scale, it may take the form of
the personalised cult of the initially charismatic
or populist political figure, such as Bolsonaro in
Brazil, Trump in the United States, the Duterte
family in the Philippines and Putin in Russia. Dire
consequences always result for countless local and
regional communities and individuals. It is a model
not to be welcomed at any scale of community.
impacts on community planning and management
Community planning doctrines of urban order
through the imposition of such dominant power
relations have influenced development throughout
many metropolitan communities, often making
use of physical planning controls that introduce
segregated and walled residential estates and tour-
ist facilities, recreational and shopping centres and
theme parks, frequently patrolled by private secu-
rity staff and closed to local access or use. In the
twentieth century, in Los Angeles County and else-
where in the USA ‘cities by contract’ were incor-
porated as local governments where the wealthy
gathered to isolate themselves, making no contri-
bution to the upkeep of the social needs of the
wider metropolis (Miller 1981), were incorporated
as local governments where the wealthy gath-
ered to isolate themselves, making no contribu-
tion to the upkeep of the social needs of the wider
metropolis. Such communities suffered from being
both provocative and vulnerable to attacks from
the excluded workers on whom they depended,
and Miller accurately forecast Los Angeles’ 1992
urban riots a decade before they occurred. In the
twenty-­first century, the United States continues to
be ravaged by such conflicts, which have occurred
in many cities in recent years, including Washing-
ton, Portland and Minneapolis. In 2021, violent
support for the superficially anti-­ establishment
rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump, by a group
of armed militants believing themselves to be dis-
advantaged, took the USA to the brink of an armed
coup. Community Planning adopts the altogether
different position that people’s views of what is
right and ought to be done can and should shape
what will become the future reality of their lives in
communities created by intention and maintained
by participation.
Nevertheless, there are some positive and impor-
tant contributions that the scientific core of genetic
science can make to community planning. By
establishing the role of the deeply inscribed struc-
tures of genomes and individual DNA in deciding
individuals’ innate characteristics and compe-
tences, genetic science reinforces the arguments
of thinkers as diverse as Karl Popper and Noam
Chomsky that human beings are not infinitely mal-
leable and therefore able to adapt to any condi-
tions which planners or the market might think
fit to provide (Popper 1972; Chomsky 1972, 1992;
Lyons 1970, 1991). Their deep-­seated competences
and values should be respected as valid guides to
objectives in planning for communities and settle-
ments, rather than being subjected to attempts at
moulding by behavioural conditioning. It is not the
science, but the selective interpretation of genetic
theory that makes its determinism so faulty.
productivity and exchange: neoliberal freedom and
minimally constrained competition
A different model of individualism more appropri-
ate to a productive society than the social domi-
nance of a caste ‘born to rule’ emerged from the
combination of the humanism of the Enlightenment

and the physical transformations of the Industrial
Revolution. More open meritocracies replaced
closed aristocracies. Thinkers as different as John
Locke, Adam Smith Jeremy Bentham and Ralph
Emerson sought to expand the scope of individual
freedom, and the rapidly growing manufacturing
communities proved a fertile soil for these ideas,
where people of talent could work and trade
their way into success or even pre-­eminence, and
therefore, it was argued, confer advantages on the
whole community. Competition was seen as the
road to progress and choice.
However, in many pioneer industrial nations,
this domination by market economics and the
unprecedented social and physical mobility of
the twentieth century combined to create rapidly
assembled communities afflicted by alienation,
insecurity and great disparities of wealth and liv-
ing conditions (Williams 1973). There were few
controls over technological innovations, which
often introduced potent new developments
appropriated by affluent investors but exerting
powerful, unhealthy and destructive environ-
mental impacts of disruption and pollution on
vulnerable workers and their families. By the mid-­
twentieth century, urban motorways, a potent
symbol of a society always on the move, rapidly
replaced long-­established systems of public trans-
port of trams and trains. Well-­established existing
inner-­city communities were often obliterated by
broad swathes of such new roads and associated
cloverleaf connectors. Mass-­ produced high-­ rise
public housing, sometimes fuelled by corrupt
contracts, ignored people’s needs for human con-
tact, convenience and family life (Jephcott 1971;
­Heywood 1974; Booker 1980). In the United States,
the ‘Federal Bulldozer’ flattened inner city ghettos
without opening up the new suburbs to Blacks or
Latinos (Davidoff and Gold 1970). The assumption
that, given choice, people would create the com-
munities that they wanted through market prefer-
ence foundered on grossly unequal incomes and
the reality of self-­maintaining class systems and
institutionalised racism.
By the second half of the twentieth century, the
cumulative and often unregulated impacts of neo-
liberal permissive planning were afflicting commu-
nity life in cities throughout the Western world,
generating massive pollution, destroying settled
neighbourhoods and their green spaces and often
failing to achieve well-­distributed social benefits
from new-­found material affluence. Then, in the
opening years of the new millennium, environmen-
tal, economic and political effects began to create
internal contradictions and encounter global limits
Promises and Problems of Community Life 15
in the form of the triple disasters of climate change,
financial collapse and mounting urban terrorism.
Another of the potent impacts of neoliberal
doctrines on community planning has been the
extrapolation of its inherent materialism to justify
the belief that human behaviour is largely shaped
by material conditions and that values can very
rapidly be moulded by physical stimuli.vi This
view has major community planning implications,
including providing the rationale for standard-
ised and mechanistic living environments, shop-
ping centres arranged to suspend people’s critical
faculties and manipulative abuses of public con-
sultation. In their pursuit of perfect competition,
productivity-­ driven policies have often created
places for consumption without community and
residential communities afflicted by almost intoler-
able sameness. It is a strange paradox that a view
of society originally grounded in the desire to max-
imise personal choice should reach a stage where
its proponents are using mass-­conditioning tech-
niques to replace genuine human choosing.
Another result has been pervasive privatisation.
The view of Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of
the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1991, that ‘There
is no such thing as society; there are only individu-
als and their families’ briefly became a self-­fulfilling
prophecy (Works and Days 2021). The results in
Britain were a retreat from community planning
and the acceptance of polarisation between pros-
perous but repetitious, badly serviced and poorly
coordinated suburbs in southern growth areas and
devastated and alienated ones of contraction in
declining parts of the north of the country, includ-
ing South Lancashire, West Yorkshire, Clydeside
and Durham. The individualist competition of
neoliberalism did nothing to provide the inclusion,
direction and lively social dialogue that are needed
to create healthy community life.
progress through conflict
Given the failings of the imposed order and
productivity-­driven views of community life, it is
not surprising that an opposing school of Marxist
urban theorists developed the alternative interpre-
tation of class conflict, leading on to the imposi-
tion of a more just order. In this view, community
life becomes the battleground in which Carlyle’s
‘great leaders’ and the system planners of the mid-­
twentieth century are alike reduced to mere pup-
pets of underlying class struggles for control of the
land, capital and labour that will actually decide
who commands the means of production, who will
pay and who will benefit.
16 Planning for Community
Community problems and controversies are
likewise seen as local expressions of national and
international scale contradictions resulting from
the exploitation of labour by capital, through the
instruments of rentier landlords. Continuing into
the mid-­1990s, the Marxist geographer and for-
mer Professor of Geography at Oxford University,
David Harvey (1996) was arguing that resorting
to the idea of community was a veil to disguise
the potent and naked economic exploitation of
labour by capital, and that ‘urban-­regional plan-
ners’ were the bailiffs and apologists of this process
of adaptation and co-­option. Harvey illustrates his
interpretation with an example of a notional situa-
tion where housing stress in an impoverished com-
munity is being tackled by advocates challenging
planning designations and regulations.
We can see this sort of coalition in action when
large corporate interests in suburban locations
join with civil rights groups in trying to break
suburban zoning restrictions that exclude low
wage populations from the suburbs
(Harvey 1996, p. 181)
Harvey’s Marxian interpretation leads him to re-­
interpret a victory for decent housing opportunities
and social justice as part of a ‘coalition’ between civil
rights groups and corporate interests that neither
would recognise. It is highly possible that Harvey is
making a direct reference (the circumstances are cer-
tainly very similar) to the celebrated and influential
community action work of Paul and Linda Davidoff
and their associate Newton Gold in the previous
decades in establishing Suburban Action Inc in 1969
to fight, often successfully, against discrimination in
housing throughout the more desirable outer sub-
urbs of the USA. As both lawyers and planners,
they arraigned zoning restrictions which effectively
kept Blacks and Latinos out of these jurisdictions at
the edges of the spreading new metropolitan areas,
enjoying good job prospects and community facili-
ties, as breaches of the second amendment to the
USA’s Constitution, which guaranteed equality of
opportunity (Davidoff and Gold 1970).
While the Davidoffs’ struggles in the commu-
nities and courts and Harvey’s in the fields of
theory-­building are equally valid, the evidence
is that activist commitment to pluralist evolution
has proved more effective and relevant in bringing
about beneficial social change. American society has
integrated quite substantially in the last 40 years,
and neighbourhoods are continuing to desegregate
their housing; dozens of cities have Black and Latino
mayors and senior officers, and in 2008 and 2012,
the country elected an African American President,
who had come into politics by way of community
development work in Chicago, one of the USA’s
most stressed cities (Obama 2004, 2008, 2020). Mean-
while, in Russia and a number of East ­European
countries, overtly Marxist–Leninist regimes that
discounted community organisation and life in
favour of wider class conflict and solidarity have
been overthrown by their own people, to wide-
spread relief (Bater 1984; Ascherson 1996).vii
Of course, deeply humanitarian theorists like
David Harvey would be the first to criticise and
oppose such cruel and repressive regimes, but
they could not point to other examples where
dialectical materialism or conflict models of social
development have produced better results. If we
follow Popper’s argument (1989), that every theory
deserves credence until it is falsified in practice,
when it should be abandoned or modified, there
is a clear conclusion. The criticism that community
planning is, in reality, a veil worn by social apolo-
gists for continuing class exploitation is based on
inadequate evidence and over-­ generalised inter-
pretation which makes them, in Popper’s terms,
‘non-­ sense’ neither certainly true nor certainly
false, but merely personal speculations, and these
seem to be falsified by the accumulating evidence
becoming available.
One distinguished example of this revaluation is
the early work of Manuel Castells (1977, 1983) and
Gemma Vila (2014). Examining the actual evolu-
tion of urban and community life in Madrid in the
closing years of Franco’s Fascist regime in Spain
up to 1975, Castells observed the important role
of community groups in shaping regime change
from below (rather than by seizing the central
organs of power from above as had been advo-
cated by Lenin). Castells was himself involved
in the Madrid Citizen’s Movement and it is this
direct experience which allowed him to transform
the abstract Marxist model into a practical under-
standing of how different groups negotiate with
each other and evolve to match external changes
and improve living conditions. What emerges is
not so much a class conflict model of commu-
nity life and social change as a group interaction
version. It is significant that reviewing the situ-
ation 30 years later with the benefit of hindsight,
Gemma Vila, Professor of Sociology at the Univer-
sity of Barcelona, reaches a similar conclusion that
in regional centres such as Barcelona, as well as
Madrid, it was grassroots community movements
which provided the impetus to install the current

democratic regime to replace the crumbling dicta-
torship bequeathed by Franco (Vila 2014).
By denying the cooperative capacities of commu-
nity life, the conflict theorists have justified regimes
based on the crudest use of naked coercion and
justified this by selective historical analysis. Dia-
lectical materialists have found themselves caught
in an iron cage of regressive causality of action and
reaction of their own making, from which most
of them cannot escape. If, for Margaret Thatcher,
‘There is no such thing as society, only individuals
and their families’ (Works and Days 2021), for the
conflict theorists, there is no such thing as com-
munity: only classes fighting to control the State.
Well-­argued alternatives are available in the form
of the roles played within the lives of communities
by cooperation (Kropotkin 1939, 1974); by insight-
ful deal-­doing (Jacobs 1985, 1992); and by celebra-
tion, play and trust (Putnam 1993; Landry 2000).
In a similar way, the Australian State Govern-
ments’ Covid legislation of 2020 assisted people
experiencing housing stress by protecting tenants
from being evicted for rental arrears and mak-
ing emergency housing available in newly empty
motels and hotels in ways that had not been
adopted before. As an example, the Western Aus-
tralian Government rapidly adopted a Hotels with
Heart pilot in which about 20 people sleeping rough
were moved into Perth's Pan Pacific hotel to reduce
the health risks for people experiencing home-
lessness. This was quickly expanded and widely
emulated in other states and resulted in actually
improving security of shelter for vulnerable people
at a time that could have seen massive problems
of increased homelessness and resultant increased
possibilities of conditions favouring spread of the
pandemic (Centre for Social Impact 2020). Progres-
sive problem-­solving rather than top-­down struc-
tural change was bringing improvement.
Pandemics afford good examples of the princi-
ple that in many situations, ‘No one is safe till eve-
ryone is safe’. Mixed economies are better placed
to combine the dynamism of individual enterprise
with the responsiveness of local empowerment
than are centrally managed command economies.
In summary, consigning responsibility for bene-
ficial and effective community planning to national
concentrations of power and control by central-
ised planning authorities is destined to produce
solutions which are demonstrably worse than the
local problems they were originally intended to
resolve. Whether one looks to the well-­documented
accounts of the terrible outcomes of this approach
in Soviet era Russia (Solzhenitsyn 1968, 1971, 2022)
Promises and Problems of Community Life 17
or the contemporary abuse of minority groups in
Communist China (Leung 2010), Marxist centrali-
sation and class domination emerge as a failed
option for shaping humane, just and responsive
community planning.
In comparing conflict and collaborative models
we should therefore look to their practical appli-
cations. Conflict models have proved far from
libertarian; many have resulted in authoritarian,
top-­down and generally repressive urban and
community regulation, failing to acknowledge the
human determinants of community life. Under the
general justification that it is ‘necessary to break
many eggs to make a good omelette’, the pursuit
of order and uniformity has often devastated the
natural creativity of community life. In Stalin’s
Russia, for instance, acquisition of the basic neces-
sities of life became a daily challenge, and com-
munity life was driven underground and into the
deprived outposts of the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ of
prison camps (Solzhenitsyn 1968, 1974) before the
centralised authoritarian system was overthrown
by internal rejection. Chairman Mao’s Cultural
Revolution is now widely excoriated. The devastat-
ing effects of the imposed emptying of Cambodia’s
towns into the ‘killing fields’ of the Khmer Rouge
have caused lasting social damage (Bater 1984;
­Ridley 1997; Solzhenitsyn 1974; Pilger 1992). Cur-
rently, Muslim Uiger communities in Xian Jiang
are being forcibly herded into retraining centres
bearing unhappy resemblances to concentration
camps to undergo re-­ education ordained by the
dominantly Han Chinese Communist Government.
Socially such communities create deprivation and
alienation and physically the resulting places are
regimented and marked by the standardised rep-
etition of concentration camps (Guardian 2021b).
Well-­developed alternatives to such totalistic
‘solutions’ are available in the form of cooperative
arrangements and roles within the lives of com-
munities. These may take the form of collaborative
activities (Kropotkin 1939, 1974); insightful deal-­
doing (Jacobs 1985, 1992); or celebration, play and
trust (Putnam 1993; Landry 2000), all of which are
discussed in the following section on Collaboration:
through negotiation, adjustment and mutual aid.
The roles of communication
and collaboration
Recent developments in alternative dispute resolu-
tion aim to combine communication with collabo-
ration. Once people find themselves talking with
18 Planning for Community
someone, there is always the tendency for them
to be drawn into a dialogue that may modify and
diminish the sharp edges of pure conflict. New
creative solutions may emerge. These strong links
between communication and collaboration are
explored by Margerum (1999, 2002): mutual under-
standing provides both the motive and the capacity
for people to work together. Conflict protagonists
tend to dismiss communicative approaches as
social therapy or diversionary tactics, while com-
municative activists tend to point to the wasteful
character of social conflicts and the tendency for
them to polarise complex situations into hostile
camps that accentuate the worst characteristics of
both sides.
Communication involves not only expressive
speakers but also active listeners and mutual
recognition (Honneth 2022). Most communica-
tion contains an element of intended persuasion,
where development and discussion can pave the
way towards collaboration. Reciprocally, collabo-
ration demands prior or simultaneous communi-
cation: people cannot work well together until they
have discussed and agreed on purposes, activities,
roles and rewards. However, it is clear that the
two approaches are not identical: communication
is about meaning and collaboration about action.
It is worthwhile examining the role of each before
combining them to consider collaborative plan-
ning as an integrated process.
communication and community
The recent communicative turn in planning
theory (Healey 1996, 2006) was anticipated by
such earlier collaborations as those involved
in actual and ideal communities ranging from
Plato’s Academy, and Anglo-­Saxon Folk Moots to
More’s Utopia (Mumford 1961; More 1516/1965).
The major twentieth-­ century theorist of Com-
municative Action, Jurgen Habermas, points out
(1990) that discussion plays an essential role in
reaching valid interpretations and good policies,
which emerge not so much from isolated indi-
vidual thinkers but from the vigorous debate and
winnowing of arguments that occur in free and
critical discussion in open societies, preferably
face to face. This basic role of communication in
the evolution of settled societies is also supported
by findings from archaeology, biology, linguistics
and ethnology. The archaeologist and ethologist
Richard Leakey argues that hunting and food
gathering necessitated the use of vocal language,
as did social organisation and the economy of
food sharing. His conclusion is significant for
community organisation and planning:
In a small hunter gatherer community, social
rules, elaborated through language, produce a
cohesion that would be impossible to produce
in any other way
(Leakey 1981)
In making the link between communication,
collaboration and social organisation so explicit,
Leakey is leading us very far from abstract conflict
and selfish gene theories. It appears that commu-
nication creates the conditions for the collaborative
success of communities which may subsequently
be modified by competition.
Developing communication was thus basic to the
evolution of the first human communities around
half a million years ago. The earliest yet found, at
Terra Amata on the slopes of Mount Boron over-
looking the Mediterranean above Nice, and the
Choukoutien caves, an hour’s drive south-­ west
of Beijing, both offer evidence of highly organ-
ised community life, which must have depended
on the transmission of experience and skills and
their application in cooperative social activities
(Leakey 1981). On the Terra Amata site, footings
have been unearthed of a series of 11 large wicker
work huts, each 12 by 6 m, constructed in succes-
sive years. Inside, there are the remains of domestic
fires, animal prey and pigments for body painting.
Excavations of the large cave site in Choukoutien
have likewise unearthed many years of ceremo-
nial burials, signifying highly organised and stable
societies. Both these societies must have possessed
communication skills to support patterned and
productive community life. Fossil remains of skulls
from these sites support this conclusion, contain-
ing much-­enlarged brain spaces for Broca’s area,
which controls and coordinates the muscles of the
tongue, mouth and lips and Wernicke’s area, which
is responsible for the structure and sense of lan-
guage, than those of earlier sites (Leakey 1981). This
correlation suggests an upward spiral of improved
language skills helping the development of elabo-
rated social organisation. Leakey comments:
Communicating with others, not just about
practical affairs, but about feelings and
fears . . . and the elaboration of a shared
mythology produces a shared consciousness
on the scale of the community. Language is
without doubt an enormously powerful force
holding together the intense social network
that characterizes human existence
(Leakey 1981)
An equally significant role of communica-
tion is to alert society to impending threats. This

provides the theme of Jared Diamond’s closely
argued book Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail
or Survive (Diamond 2005). Diamond reviews a
wide range of failed and successful societies in
all six contents, spanning a time range reaching
from several thousand years ago to the present.
Many of his societies, like those of Easter Island
and Norse Greenland, collapsed because they
could not modify destructive practices or adapt to
threatening environmental conditions. They were
unscientific and conservative and generally exces-
sively pious or narrow-­ minded. They were not
thinking enough about their changing situations,
and if they were, they were not discussing their
ideas enough. Others, like Tokugawa Japan of the
seventeenth century, though socially conservative,
were energetically reviewing their situations and
promoting policies to correct threatening problems
like deforestation and overpopulation.
Diamond specifically asks what lessons his
many case studies have for modern societies. His
conclusions focus around three principles:
• Investigate conditions and face the facts.
• Recognise and review unintended consequences
of current actions.
• Collaborate in social problem-­solving.
Insofar as Diamond discusses competition, he
regrets the role it played in amplifying unwise
behaviour, like the erection of ever-­larger statues
on Easter Island, the aim to rear more cattle in the
declining climatic conditions of thirteenth-­century
Greenland and the killing frenzies of Rwanda.
His conclusions are that awareness, investigation
and open communication are the keys to survival
in times of external or internal threats or rapid
change. These views on avoiding disasters are par-
alleled by those of Richard Florida on achieving
economic success, when he argues (2005) that the
‘Creative Class’, on whose inventions and skills
modern society increasingly depends, can only
develop and thrive in mixed, diverse and experi-
mental communities like those of inner-­city San
Francisco, Greenwich Village in New York, inner
Austin, central Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Mel-
bourne. These models, where communicative
action supports collaboration, have great signifi-
cance for community planning.
community planning and communicative action
Progress towards valid social policy, according
to Habermas (1990), should emerge from open
and purposeful discussion, among people speak-
ing from the knowledge and experience of their
daily lives. These discussions can work across a
Promises and Problems of Community Life 19
wide variety of scales and types of community. He
favours such face-­to-­face debates and criticises the
distanced and abstracted virtual discourses of the
‘system world’ of centralised administration and
supply-­side economics. He argues that everyone,
not only policy-­ makers but also local residents,
have equal rights to be heard at the policy table,
thus justifying public participation in commu-
nity planning. He deprecates the traditional self-­
allocated role of the philosopher as commentator,
as simultaneously servile and arrogant, preferring
the more explicit and open advocacy of one’s own
convictions. Though he accepts that action is the
most important basis for knowledge, he relates this
to the importance of ‘speech acts’, which are nec-
essary to shape and coordinate much subsequent
physical action. This argument both supports citi-
zen participation and suggests how it might be
implemented. These views have led Habermas to
conduct repeated campaigns for abundant, lively
and accessible public open spaces to promote the
easy contact between people on which good social
communication depends.
Applications of communication
in community planning
There are a number of more specific planning
expressions and outcomes of this commitment to
communication for community planning:
• Community festivals, art and cultural events
in public spaces to initiate, promote and com-
municate different community values, needs
and strengths – helping communities to share
and shape ideas and aims in events such as
community forums, peer group discussions
and workshops, public art, TV, radio and online
discussion groups and talk-­back opportunities
(Heywood 2018).
• Neighbourhood Committees and Councils that
take responsibility for neighbourhood communi-
cation, comment on development proposals and
undertake specified communal functions, such
as public parks, street closure, neighbourhood
watch, and young people’s vacation activities
(Ward 1973; Heywood 1989, 1997, 2018; Local
Government New Zealand 2021; City of Port-
land, Office of Civic and Community Life 2021).
• Focus and mixed interest groups – groups of
volunteers and invitees with particular inter-
est in specific topics who work together to
produce aims, problems and solutions, in spe-
cific topics or for a particular planning area
(Heywood 2018).
20 Planning for Community
• Advisory and reference groups, selected, elec­
ted or self-­ nominated to provide ongoing
advice on matters referred to them, which may
be based either on specific topics such as the
needs of young people or historic buildings
or on physical areas; these bodies can become
‘learning groups’, provided with resources to
gain further information on the topics of con-
cern to them, so that good policy can emerge
from a combination of values and facts (see
Norman Creek Case Study in Brisbane in Chap-
ter 3, Communities of Interest).
• Consultation kits: summaries of accessible and
interestingly presented information, which can
be provided to a large number of local organisa-
tions to promote discussions and responses that
can make useful contributions to policy devel-
opment (Queensland Human Rights Commis-
sion 2021).
• Community Visioning, to promote reflection
and speculation among a group about values,
goals, fears and hopes to drive future strategic
plans (Granicus 2021).
• Design workshops and charettes: occasions at
which local residents and other participants
work together with planners, designers and
others to produce draft schemes to fulfil their
shared or negotiated aims (Heywood 2018).
• Public meetings: publicised occasions open to
all attendants but featuring specified speakers
addressing identified topics, with opportunities
provided for open questioning
• Attitude Surveys, Community Preference Lists,
Focus Groups and semi-­structured interviews –
statistically valid sample surveys to identify
attitudes to specific issues to provide reliable
guides to people’s felt problems and prefer-
ences (Mackay 2018; Voxco 2021).
• Collaborative planning, involving local peo-
ple and stakeholders with councils and other
implementation agents (responsible, for exam-
ple, for land use, social, transport and economic
planning) in cycles of proposal, review and
negotiation to produce schemes that command
the required mixed ingredients (Forester 1999;
Healey 2006).
Another interesting aspect of the communicative
turn in planning is the shift in consultation tech-
niques from exclusive reliance on problem-­solving
towards more positive approaches that involve
individuals and groups thinking about past suc-
cessful experiences and their intended visions
for the future. Whereas problem-­solving Critical
Rationalists tend to rely on extracting objectives
from people’s frustrated wants, the emphasis of
Appreciative Inquiry is on searching for recogni-
tion of good experiences and positive values in
people’s previous experiences (Hammond and
Royal 1998). Not only does this enhance recog-
nition and help to build participants’ self-­esteem
and enlist their energies in the process of shap-
ing beneficial change; it also identifies successful
models and mechanisms that can be developed to
help implement plans. Good cases can be made for
both approaches. While problem-­solving is more
radical and potentially comprehensive, bringing to
light frustrated wants, appreciative inquiry can be
more engaging, less threatening and is well suited
to form part of ongoing community development
and capacity building.
Part Four, The Roles
of Collaboration
The history of human collaboration is closely linked
to the evolution of communication discussed in the
earlier section on Communication and Community.
Each has assisted the other. At the dawn of the
species, more than three million years ago, one of
the earliest archaeological findings shows the steps
of a young hominim child preserved in the vol-
canic ash at Laetoli, south of the Olduvai Gorge, in
what is now Tanzania, skipping her way around
the heavier and more purposive paths of her par-
ents, implying both cooperative family life and
some level of communication to establish guidance
and confidence (Leakey 1981, p. 57). Much later,
when the first cities were being established around
4000 years ago, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Tab-
lets of Hammurabi both depict worlds where the
strands of communication, cooperation and order
were closely woven together to create societies
capable of sustaining themselves across many cen-
turies (Sandars 2006; Helle 2022). The Epic of Gil-
gamesh, in particular, affords a fascinating insight
into the roles of collaboration between urban dwell-
ers and mountain nomads and pastoralists in the
building of the first Mesopotamian empires.
lessons from the mediterranean
Peter Kropotkin extends his belief in the basic role
of cooperation throughout all evolution to apply
specifically to human societies. Greatest progress,
he argues, is made in phases when cooperation
predominates, as in the development of the self-­
governing communes of the Central Italian city

states, which by 1300 ce had grown to number
more than 80 (Toynbee, quoted in Mumford 1938,
p. 69). Kropotkin’s view that the collaborative guild
and civic arrangements of twelfth-­ century Italy
promoted the later evolution of modern city life
provides powerful support for Robert Putnam’s
influential book Making Democracy Work (1993), on
the roles of social capital in contemporary society.
Putnam shows how the thriving continuation of
these traditions of medieval and renaissance col-
laboration drew their strength from such celebra-
tions and festivities as the Palio of Siena and the
Ponte of Pisa, which continue to the present day.
He argues that these, in turn, created the bases for
the associational economies of the Central Italian
towns and cities of Tuscany and Emilio Romagna
with their networks and clusters of small, mutually
supportive enterprises.
These successful economies of the ‘Third Italy’
as well as the Mondragon Workers’ Management
network of the Basque Region of Northern Spain
provide significant examples of community coop-
eration (Cooke and Morgan 1998; Center for Popu-
lar Economics 2021). Through all of the vicissitudes
of Italian and Spanish politics of the last century,
their associational and collaborative economies
have continued to foster significant innovation and
productivity to achieve remarkably durable eco-
nomic resilience and to sustain community life that
is among the most celebrated models of contempo-
rary social organisation (Cooke and Morgan 1998).
These examples of the resilience of communities
leveraging social cooperation to create widespread
personal prosperity are particularly significant for
ideas of collaborative planning (Healey 2006). Such
associational economies have proven the Central
Italian towns and cities of Tuscany and Emilio
Romagna robust enough to survive in recurring
periods of fractured control, spasmodic contrac-
tions and prevailing threats of foreign domination
through such threats as the direct foreign invest-
ment (DFI) of the postmodern world.
The paradox of splintering centres and coherent
localities poses questions about why such regional
economies succeeded within national regimes
afflicted by ineffective and rigid central adminis-
trations. What are the social forces (the ‘social capi-
tal’) that hold such regional communities together?
Robert Putnam (1993) argues that the social and
economic successes of Tuscany, Umbria and Emilia
Romagna are due to their capacity to cooperate,
fostered by the singing, dancing and civic perfor-
mances that characterise their many festivals and
social activities, which in turn build more social
capital. This collaboration draws its energy from
Promises and Problems of Community Life 21
mutual understanding, reliance and exchange,
which is expressed in art play and performance.
It is then reinforced in the resulting cooperative
production and employment.viii
Later, in his 1997 book Bowling Alone Putnam
goes on to lament the loss of these socially bonding
activities in the USA of that decade. The problem
has only grown more acute in the last 25 years,
resulting in mass alienation and damaging inter-
group hostilities. Clearly, community collabora-
tion is itself a social product that in turn shapes
economic and physical environments. This kind
of guild and civic life also developed in northern
Europe, particularly in the Baltic, Germany, Brit-
ain and the low countries, playing a significant
role in the development of the ‘polder model’ of
sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Holland. Com-
munal work established and maintained the canals
and dykes and established the basis of trust that
supported the development of the highly dynamic
form of capitalism that continues to make Amster-
dam and Rotterdam major centres of today’s
global economy.
In England, collaborative management of village
commons and of the three-­field fallowing system
that persisted until the Enclosure Acts of the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries helped build the
democratic awareness that re-­emerged in a number
of trailblazing British political reform movements
in the course of the nineteenth century. Chartism,
demanding annual parliaments and universal
suffrage, was a major political issue from 1837 to
1848. The Cooperative Movement continued to
grow in membership and scope from its founda-
tion in 1844 until the present. Universal suffrage
was achieved by stages with landmark legislation in
1867, 1918 and 1928 (Hamilton 1946; Hammond and
­Hammond 1978; Thompson 1980). Elsewhere, in the
monsoon lands of southeast Asia, communal water
and land management in Bali and New Guinea
built strong cooperative institutions that have sur-
vived to the present (Ridley 1997; Suarja and Thys-
sen 2003; Diamond 2005). Many collaborative ideas
underlying similar worker, housing and urban farm
cooperatives can be traced back to roots in medieval
and pre-­colonial notions of mutual aid.ix
Collaboration in practice
In order to explore whether collaboration can still
achieve practical outcomes in contemporary times,
this section examines cases drawn from shelter,
natural environment, place, access and production.
22 Planning for Community
shelter
Housing, which is one of the most basic pre-­
requisites of life in settled communities, combines
the three critical elements of:
• grounding in the basic values of shelter, nur-
ture, procreation, play and learning;
• strong connections to many other social
activities;
• expense and complexity often beyond the scope
of the unaided average individual.
As both an individual human need and a col-
lective product, shelter is a promising candidate
for collaborative planning and provision. There is
anecdotal evidence that a number of early agri-
cultural societies did indeed practice cooperative
house building and planning with sites being
approved by village elders for young newlyweds,
and construction being assisted by working parties
of friends and relations, rewarded by the staging
of a subsequent feast.x Although the industriali-
sation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
replaced this by a dominant market in cheap
mass housing, cooperative responses rapidly re-­
emerged. In the 1770s, in Britain’s industrialising
West Midlands and West Yorkshire regions, groups
of working men collaborated to form Terminating
Building Societies whereby each agreed to con-
tribute a fixed sum every month so that houses
could be built, one by one, until every member
had been accommodated in a home of their own
(Garrett Holden 1970). When all land and houses
had been paid for, the society terminated, but out
of this successful social invention grew the ‘Perma-
nent Building Society’ which has done so much to
extend the ‘trust’ principle to bring home owner-
ship within the reach of large proportions of the
total population of many such advanced nations
as the USA, Britain, Australia and Canada, who
either own or are buying their own homes. This
process has done much to transform classical capi-
talism into the ‘Welfare Capitalism’ that has man-
aged to evolve and survive for over two centuries.
A particular interest of this example is the illus-
tration it provides of the ways in which coopera-
tion in planning and roducing desired goods can
coexist with market mechanisms in deciding their
allocation and consumption. However, during
the financial crash of 2007–2008, the cooperative
machinery linking genuine borrowers to will-
ing lenders temporarily broke down due to the
competitive excesses of hedge funds and remote
subprime portfolio operators. This resulted in ill-­
judged and unreflective lending policies leading to
a downward spiral of repayment failure, foreclo-
sure, dispossession and competitive divestment.
Much that could have been learnt from the ‘social
collateral’ model of the microcredit movement had
been ignored. Many leading commercial bankers
had refused to support and even mocked micro-
credit when it was proposed to them as a means
of providing grassroots security to the commercial
banking system (Yunus 1998). By contrast, a num-
ber of highly successful and collaborative housing
supply systems, discussed in Chapter 7, Homes and
Communities, have been steadily developing and
expanding for over a century in different coun-
tries throughout the world, including Community,
Social, Public and Emergency Housing and Co-­
housing and Housing Cooperatives.
natural environment
Nowhere is the injunction to ‘Think Global, Act
Local!’ more imperative than in the sphere of the
natural environment. There is a widespread recog-
nition that the excesses of both competitive capital-
ism and command economy communism produce
unsustainable degradation of the natural environ-
ment, which can best be redressed by programmes
of action combining the principles of symbiosis
and mutual aid with community organisation,
cooperation and academic research (Suzuki and
McConnell 2008; Kropotkin 1939). Collaborative
interest groups have become very important envi-
ronmental actors. In Britain, Foresters and Com-
moners Associations have historically enjoyed
rights to the benefits, control and upkeep of the
common land and forests that once constituted
much of the total land area. In Britain, this spirit of
local and personal stewardship has spread through
organisations like the Ramblers Association (with
over 100,000 members), the Council for the Preser-
vation of Rural England, and the Yorkshire Wild-
life Preservation Trust to influence not only ideas
and access but also land tenure and management.
Such organisations influenced the designation, as
early as 1949, of the country’s admirable system of
national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty,
public rights of way, long-­distance footpaths and
nature conservation areas, covering no less than
17% of the small and densely populated nation
(Cullingworth 1976, p. 178). In the United States,
a similar history has produced a remarkable sys-
tem of even more spectacular National and State
Parks, dating back to the trailblazing advocacy of
the Audubon Society and Theodore Roosevelt in
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and
ranging from the Shenandoah National Park in

Alleghanies through the Yellowstone in the Rock-
ies to the Yosemite and Crater Lake Parks in Cali-
fornia and Oregon.
Elsewhere, similar bodies work individually and
in cooperation to promote environmental aware-
ness and conservation, contesting habitat loss and
promoting reforestation and wetland protection, in
areas as remote as Russia’s Lake Baikal (Moscow
Times 2020). In Australia, they also include local
and regional ecological preservation societies and
National Parks Associations and Landcare, Bush-
care, Watercare, Dunecare and associated groups.
Worldwide countless environmental action groups
are involved, often combining community and
academic bases. Increasing numbers of local
associations, loosely organised into regional and
international coalitions, are also taking action on
matters such as carbon reduction to help safeguard
global environmental health (for an English exam-
ple, see, for instance, lcarb 2022). Making excel-
lent use of modern ICT, these organisations aim to
combine local action with wider-­scale advocacy to
produce consciousness change that , in turn, will
maintain the momentum of conservation.
This international scale has now been greatly
enhanced by the influential work and publications
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), which have done much to drive the cur-
rent worldwide campaigns to restrict global warm-
ing to 1.5 °C or less, by reducing carbon emissions
resulting from continued reliance on fossil fuels.
However, this target now looks less likely to be
achieved following the limited success of the Glas-
gow Cop 26 meeting of governments in December
2021 to secure general agreement from developed
nations either to restrict their own emissions by
adopting more ambitious targets; or to agree to
contribute to the costs that would be incurred
by developing nations in adopting such specific
targets by mid-­century; or to persuade very large
‘Second World’ emitters like India and China to
set themselves significant reduction targets by this
date (United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change 2021). It is clear that the momen-
tum of the global movement for environmental
sustainability will have to continue to come from
community-­ based groups at each of the local,
national and global scales. Nowhere is the pref-
erence of governments to put immediate and
short-­term economic advantages ahead of long-­
term sustainability more dramatically illustrated
than in the decade-­long refusal of the 2013–2022
Australian government to set specific 2030 carbon
emission reduction targets. The now superseded
decision that government made to postpone the
Promises and Problems of Community Life 23
target of achieving net zero carbon emissions
by three decades to 2050 gave fresh currency to
J.M. Keynes dictum that ‘In the long run, we are all
dead’. This position has now been modified by the
incoming 2022 Labor administration, which has
set a target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions
by 43% by 2030, following an election in which
the successes of Greens and community-­ based
Independent candidates (categorised as ‘Teals’
because of their combination of Green commit-
ments with traditional ‘blue’ establishment back-
grounds) resulted in a working majority for a new,
more environmentally friendly Labor government
(Rimmer 2022).
place management
Collaboration is essential to the healthy life and
effective creation and management of whole and
satisfying places. This recognition inspired Eben-
ezer Howard’s ‘invention’ of the Garden City
(Howard 1899, 1965; Moss Eckhardt 1973). Entitling
his book Tomorrow: The Peaceful Path to Real Reform,
he insisted that cooperative principles should be
infused into every aspect of life and government in
his proposed new ‘Garden Cities’. These were pro-
posed to be the largest cooperatives ever developed
up to that time, with memberships including all
32,000 people in their intended populations. Both
Letchworth and Welwyn were launched and origi-
nally run by Garden City Companies, and it was
Howard’s stated intention that all residents (who
would be automatically members of the coopera-
tive companies) would own all the land in perpetu-
ity, pay modest rents for their dwellings, and spend
the profits from the accumulating rental payments
on job creation and environmental conservation.
Peter Hall (2002, p. 95) quotes from previously
unpublished writing of Howard’s The Vanishing
Point of Landlord’s Rent, explaining that land values
would flow back to the community, in order to:
found pensions with liberty for our aged poor,
now imprisoned in work houses, to banish
despair and awaken hope in the breasts of
those that have fallen; to silence the harsh
voice of anger; and waken the soft notes of
brotherhood and goodwill
(quoted in Hall 2002, p. 95)
Later, Howard came to propose that dwellings
could be built by a variety of means, including
people constructing their own homes with funds
provided through Building, Friendly or Coopera-
tive Societies or Trade Unions. The collaborative
24 Planning for Community
Garden City idea in its various expressions of new
towns, garden suburbs, and cluster settlements
within metropolitan regions has spread through-
out the world and remains a powerful force to
help humanity manage urban change in an era of
unprecedented population growth and technologi-
cal change.
Parallel collaborative approaches to place-­
making as well as planning have followed apace.
In the United States, Kevin Lynch’s wide-­ranging
A Theory of Good City Form (1984), Christopher
Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Building (1979), the
New Urbanism of Peter Calthorpe and Associates
(1993, 2001) and Randolph Hester’s Designs for
Ecological Democracy (2010) have laid out a wealth
of paths to good place making based on com-
munity consultation and participation. In Britain,
the highly influential Responsive Environments of
Bentley (1985) based their design methods entirely
on how users of existing and future spaces might
respond to present and proposed features. Flying
in the face of recent commercial pressures for pri-
vatised and socially segregated housing layouts,
such ideas support a place-­making movement that
aims to create interacting, sociable and coopera-
tive communities. Their methods are also based
on inclusion and cooperative social inquiry, like
Enquiry by Design and Community Charettes. Later,
in Chapter 9, Places, Spaces and Community Design,
another such method is explored in which the
Australian Landscape Architect, John Mongard,
makes use of the outcomes of series of community
engagement Set up Shops to create highly success-
ful place-­making strategies for country towns in
a wide range of locations, ranging from Queens-
land’s Atherton Tableland through New South
Wales New England Plateau to coastal communi-
ties in the island state of Tasmania (John Mongard
Landscape Architects 2022).
individual and collaborative forms of movement
and transport
Freedom of movement can be seen as both a deeply
enshrined human value – going back to our origins
as hunter–gatherers in the Eocene epoch of 20,000
years ago – and a continuing guarantee of personal
liberty. Over the centuries, this has allowed serfs
and their families to walk off their feudal master’s
demesnes and seek work in the growing towns,
factory workers to move between different towns
in search of better jobs or skills and contemporary
political, economic and disaster-­driven refugees to
seek new lives in safer and more promising homes.
Such migrations extend to include internal migra-
tions in contemporary industrialised societies,
such as China and India (Hessler 2010).xi
At the regional and metropolitan scales, pub-
lic funding is required to maintain more recur-
rent forms of movement. Public transport systems
are being extended to sustain social life in cities
throughout the world, with notable examples in
Bogota, Curitiba, Kolkata, London, Portland (Ore-
gon), Toronto and Vancouver. These examples
form part of a heartening and increasingly wide-
spread pattern that may well be enhanced as the
introduction of driverless cars makes more likely
the formation of convoys of small movement cap-
sules to replace the current recurring gridlock on
dual 3 and 4-­lane motorways.
No less important are the daily movements
enlivening local communities. Small networks of
parents throughout the world combine to organise
‘walking buses’ to take children to and from school
safely, healthily and sociably. Local groups often
organise community transport and car-­ pooling
arrangements, and urban coalitions are campaign-
ing for better public transport based on collabora-
tive principles (Cervero 1998, 2009; 1000 Friends
of Oregon 2022).
collaboration in production, exchange and economy
There are contending views on the conditions nec-
essary for the creation of prosperity through sur-
plus production. Marx saw wealth production as
dependent on class control. Adam Smith discerned
and advocated the ‘hidden hand’ of the laws of
supply and demand, making possible the division
of labour and specialisation of function. Kropotkin,
Marshall, Keynes and Galbraith (1972) interpreted
economics rather differently as the study of ways
to achieve and maintain effective and rewarding
community life and communal activity. In all these
models, practical collaboration is crucial to main-
tain production and prosperity, though there is no
agreement on the best ways to achieve that coop-
eration, whether through the discipline of competi-
tion, the imperative of control or the inducements
of collaboration. Earlier in this chapter, we dis-
cussed the successful cooperative approach devel-
oped by the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation
(Mondragon Corporation 2022). It is this that most
clearly distinguishes them from the more competi-
tive, conflict and imposed order models of social
organisation underlying both neoliberal capital-
ism and command economy communism (Whyte
and Whyte 1988). While highly significant, this

model still remains a challenging exception in a
world dominated by competitive venture capital-
ism, particularly ascendent in each of the world’s
five most populous countries of China, India, the
USA, Russia and Indonesia. The intention of the
Mondragon Workers Cooperative and the ideas of
its originator, Father Arizmendi, that such work-
ers’ cooperatives should grow up inside capitalism
and supersede it, are singularly compatible with
the inclusive philosophy and upward spiralling
approaches of community planning and develop-
ment, distinguishing them from more competitive,
conflict-­based and imposed order based models
of social change of Neoliberalism and contempo-
rary Chinese capitalism (Whyte and Whyte 1988;
­Friedman 2008; Hessler 2010).
In such collaborative models, ownership, invest-
ment and credit arrangements can be introduced
through transitional arrangements. A number of
solutions are made possible by cooperative invest-
ment, incorporating the micro-­ credit principles
of social collateral and personal responsibility of
the Grameen Bank, discussed earlier. These are
well suited to stimulate grassroots development
and control. Now that many governments have
acquired an increased degree of control over banks,
following the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, moves
towards cooperative credit unions and societies
can be further assisted and become increasingly
important levers to increase the range of activities
and tools available to empower grassroots com-
munity planning and development.
These can build on existing organisations as
diverse as the cooperatives established in the USA
by the Office of Economic Opportunity within
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programme of
the 1960s; Spain’s Mondragon Corporation; Brit-
ain’s large and successful Cooperative Wholesale
Society (160 years old in 2018); the worker-­owned
British retail chain, the John Lewis Partnership;
and the rapid growth of farmers’ markets and
local bulk buying co-­ops which are springing up
in communities throughout the world. There is
every reason to promote such alliances between
government, banks and communities to achieve
productive local employment and control.
Conclusions
attributes and definitions
In these early decades of the twenty-­ first cen-
tury, both ‘community’ and ‘planning’ are words
Promises and Problems of Community Life 25
saturated with significance, controversy and con-
flicting expectations. Ideas of community have
graduated from being regarded as too nebulous
for serious use, to being recognised as a valuable
summary for many of the most important attrib-
utes of social life. Concepts of community have
been extended to include both the links that people
acknowledge with each other and the reciprocity
that sustains healthy social life. Competing ration-
ales are less convincing than ever before. Impo-
sition of Law and Order is not enough because
that can no longer be sustained without consent,
as is demonstrated by the global impacts of both
the ‘Black Lives Matter’ and the ‘Me Too!’ move-
ments for racial and gender equality and respect.
Uncontrolled market competition has been shown
to result in a race to the bottom levels of maldis-
tribution and exploitation far more often than an
ascent to new pinnacles of productivity. Unwel-
come outcomes of repeated subordination of long-­
term sustainability to short-­ term profit-­
taking
include poisoned environments and self-­ voted
bonus payments to CEOs and senior managers of
firms relying on government handouts after col-
lapses caused by rash business decisions.
The remaining major rationale for organising
social relations – imposed order – arouses often
heroic opposition from inside regimented and
often militaristic regimes and widespread condem-
nation from societies practicing free speech. They
continue to provide vivid examples of ‘how not to
do it’ in the fields of politics and administration,
none more so than in the military dictatorships of
Myanmar and North Korea (Wikipedia 2021a,b).
The collaborative basis of community life is thus
supported not only by its own arguments of shared
objectives and activities but also by the painful
failures of alternative rationales of imposed order.
‘Planning’ is also a term that is emerging from
the shadows of bureaucratic regimentation to enter
the sunnier fields of human choice and inten-
tion. Spectacular new extensions of our capaci-
ties to control and shape physical environments
and identify and develop renewable resources
have reinforced recognition of inescapable needs
to accept responsibility for the outcomes of our
own actions. Rapid increases in human impacts
on climate, water circulation, species habitats and
fossil fuel extraction and use have further focussed
attention on our growing abilities to anticipate
and manage changing situations and the associ-
ated need to ‘think globally and act locally’ while
weighing unintended consequences.
26 Planning for Community
For all these reasons, planning is becoming a more
widely accepted and welcomed means to involve
whole communities in thinking about their futures
and developing and adjusting feasible means to
achieve desirable ends. Planning Charettes have
evolved into Community Forums and Enquiries by
Design. Planning courses in universities are now
oversubscribed with talented young people seek-
ing the tools to shape future societies to reflect their
own worthwhile values and those of their fellow
community members. Government departments
compete to recruit planners to help develop purpo-
sive policies, implement community consultation
and collaborate with others in community build-
ing and governance. The voluntary sector is also
increasingly able and willing to play leading roles
in developing collaborative community plans for
whole sectors and communities. Most important of
all, community groups and activists insist on mak-
ing their voices heard, both to oppose schemes that
threaten their values and interests and also to pro-
pose often comprehensive alternative approaches
for their communities. In societies’ social dramas,
planning has emerged from backstage roles of the
prompter and makeup artist to a place on cen-
tre stage where events are enacted among players
who must listen to each other and collaborate or
face altogether losing control of roles and events.
cascades of change and choice
These capacities to undertake effective shared action
are essential if we are to successfully navigate the
tides of environmental, economic and social change
that are flowing increasingly strongly through our
daily lives in this period of rapid change. To avoid
self-­
destructive conflicts, it is clear that we must
make choices about intended futures, which will
be most secure if they take careful account of each
other’s needs and hopes. Illustrations of the disas-
trous effects of perceived exclusion range from voter
abstention and refusals to support funding for medi-
cal reforms that would involve people contributing
to the health maintenance of others to bomb attacks
by politically motivated terrorists and attempts in
the USA to storm Congress. By contrast, collabo-
rative planning is well suited to promote effective
management of change within and among such
essential activities as housing, work, play, move-
ment, communication, culture and governance, in
ways that engage individuals and sustain and enrich
both their lives and those of their communities.
At the same time, inclusive planning can also
help communities meet the necessary but often
unfamiliar challenges of integrating new members
and adapting to changed external conditions. In
doing so, the activities of communication, con-
sultation, participation and negotiation can play
invaluable roles in identifying and achieving bene-
ficial and sustainable outcomes. Humanity’s needs
for contact and communication have been vividly
demonstrated amidst the Covid-­ 19 global pan-
demic, both by the rapid adoption and develop-
ment of distance-­conquering innovations like Zoom
and Teams conferences and discussions and also by
people’s very evident yearning to resume more
direct face-­to-­face connections for work and play,
with families, friends and colleagues. Contrasting
the imaginative outcomes that can be achieved
from inclusive methods of community planning
with those that emerge from more conformist and
exclusionary ones clearly indicates the advantages
of collaborative planning. Because human beings
are both independently motivated and sociable,
good communication is needed to enhance agree-
ment on values, activities and priorities that can
then underpin the creation and renewal of healthy,
vibrant and resilient communities. Such methods,
developed and explained in Chapter 5, Ways and
Means, offer clear pathways to more harmonious
and resilient futures.
Endnotes
i Examples of this are such familiar cases as a new
sewage outlet being located upstream of an impor-
tant marine habitat or a neighbourhood engage-
ment programme requiring its participants to sign
an undertaking of confidentiality.
ii Although these changes may be the most acute
experienced by humanity since the ending of the
ice ages of about 10,000 years ago, they are by no
means unprecedented in the longer geological
history. Geologists have long recognised that their
record of the rocks points not to steady deposition of
sediments in generally constant or slowly evolving
conditions but to the separation of a series of rela-
tively stable epochs by horizons of very rapid and
sometimes cataclysmic change. These may result
from a number of external causes, including vol-
canic activity, meteor impacts, changes in the Earth’s
axis and orbit and solar activity (Gould 1988). Gould
speculates that this ‘punctuated equilibrium’ may
also explain the successive epochs of human history
better than the prevalent assumption of steady evo-
lution to increased knowledge, wisdom and power,
which still retains a strong hold as the conventional
wisdom of contemporary intellectual life. Such an
interpretation invites the speculation that human
society may have passed through a number of similar
transformations. These may have been triggered by
external events, such as the ice ages (which may

have stimulated the growth of agriculture by con-
centrating population in the relatively limited areas
of well-­ watered valleys). Alternatively, they may
have resulted from social and technological revolu-
tions such as the positive inventions of writing and
the wheel or the negative ones of organised warfare
and slavery.
iii In the early years of this century, the World Trade
Organization produced proposals for a Multilateral
Agreement on Investment (MAI), which would
have made legislation by national governments to
protect local land ownership illegal (Monbiot 2004).
This proposal, which would have opened the way
to dispossession of the only economic resource of
billions of rural dwellers in economically disadvan-
taged nations, had to be abandoned owing to the
campaigning and lobbying of coalitions making use
of global information networks.
iv I am indebted to my daughter, Lucy Heywood, for
pointing out that the logical next step – that the
Deconstructionists seldom take – is re-­construction,
which would involve embracing Karl Popper’s
logic (1972) of an upward spiral of problem-­solving.
This is an important point for community planning
because it provides a pathway to channel initially
negative community contributions into positive dia-
logue. Lucy goes on to suggest that this could also
make positive community development contribu-
tions of ‘me-­construction’ for all participants.
v Darwin never precisely defined the mechanisms of
natural selection, though the full title of the first
edition of the former is instructive: On the Origin
of Species by Natural Selection or the Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (Desmond and
Moore, 1991). His colleague and disciple, Thomas
Huxley, equated this struggle as being like ‘nothing
as much as a giant gladiatorial contest’ and spoke
of ‘Nature red in tooth and claw’ (Kropotkin 1939).
A parallel powerful school of ‘Social Darwinists’
including theorists like Darwin’s friend Thomas
Carlyle (satirised by Charles Dickens in the character
of ‘Gradgrind’ in Hard Times [1861]) developed these
views to depict human communities as depending
on dominant leaders such as Julius Caesar, Genghis
Khan and the new Captains of Industry. This inter-
pretation has them emerging by force of character
and determination and creating, out of spasms of
conflict, the stable conditions in which great civili-
sations could flourish and local communities could
shelter under their paternal mantles.
vi The American behavioural psychologist B.F. Skinner
accurately conveys the intentions of behaviourism
in the title of his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity
(1974), in which he advocates a totally conditioned
community life, rather like that uneasily anticipated
by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1955).
vii Forty years earlier, Karl Popper had vigorously
demonstrated how these absolutist theories were
directly linked to the terrible results of intergroup
conflict and extermination in the mid-­ twentieth
century in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. In his
Promises and Problems of Community Life 27
Open Society and its Enemies (1998), he laid the basis
for the pluralism which justified the community
activism of Paul and Linda Davidoff, who argued
that every interest should have its own watchdog
(Davidoff 1965). This gave a community application
to the upward spiral of social problem-­solving that
Popper (1972) termed ‘social engineering’ and saw
as a more continuous, connected and less destruc-
tive path to social evolution than either the dialec-
tical materialism of Marx and the Neo-­Marxists or
the rigid social order of Plato’s Republic (1980) or
Machiavelli’s princely dictatorship (1961).
viii The successful artistic, scientific, social and economic
history of Tuscany, Umbria and Emilia Romagna
has been shaped to a quite remarkable extent over
the past eight centuries by the accumulated social
capital of these city communities. Since the late
twelfth century, when St Francis first sent his mes-
sages of universal cooperation throughout Western
Europe from the small Umbrian hilltop town of
Assisi, this spirit of mutual aid has contrasted with
and overcome the bleak warring political and mili-
tary history of these city regions (Heywood 1904).
ix The fourteenth-­and fifteenth-­ century British
Lollards and Bohemian Hussites, for instance,
advocated replacing lordly and priestly control
by independent and self-­ regulating congregations
(Cole and Postgate 1976). Later, Thomas Paine and
William Godwin advocated a society built on this
cooperative basis, as did Fourier with his propos-
als for phalansteries, or cooperative workshops, in
nineteenth-­ century France. Robert Owen, though
ambiguous about adopting cooperative principles
in his own New Lanark model industrial settle-
ment (1800–1821), did provide a clear and effective
explanation of them in his ‘Report to the County of
Lanark’ of 1817 (Hamilton 1946; Mumford 1961).
x This was the pattern which still applied in Igbo land
in Nigeria in the early 1960s and was still recalled
by old-­timers in the Forest of Dean in 1980, when
I conducted a community preference survey there
with students of the Gloucestershire College of Art
and Design.
xi However, at the global scale, the rights of interna-
tional refugees to seek new lives for themselves
and their families in safer or more promising
places is often physically denied by governments
of such prosperous nations as Australia, Italy and
the United Kingdom, and from time to time, the
USA. Governments of these countries have routinely
refused to accept international refugees while ener-
getically promoting immigration by more affluent
individuals, amounting – as in Australia – to many
hundreds of thousands of relatively prosperous
migrants every year. Protection of the personal rights
to freedom of movement of refugees and asylum
seekers in today’s global community can only
rely – somewhat insecurely – on supportive arrange-
ments and provisions at wider international and
global scales (United Nations High Commissioner
for Refugees 2021; Dantas et al. 2021).
28 Planning for Community
References
1000 Friends of Oregon (2022). Transportation. https://
friends.org/transportation (accessed 1 January 2023).
AHURI (Australian Housing and Urban Research
Institute) (2022). Private sector involvement in afford-
able housing supply. https://www.ahuri.edu.au/
research-­i n-­p rogress/Private-­s ector-­i nvolvement
-­in-­social-­and-­affordable-­housing-­supply (accessed 10
October 2022).
Alexander, C. (1979). A Timeless Way of Building.
New York: OUP.
Ambrose, P. and Colenutt, J. (1975). The Property Machine.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Anderson, M. (1964). The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical
Review of Urban Renewal 1949–1963. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Ascherson, N. (1996). Black Sea. London: Vintage.
Australian Government Department of Energy, Sci­
ence, Industry and Resources (2021). Renewables.
https://www.energy.gov.au/data/renewables
(accessed 5 December 2021).
Australian Government Department of Infrastructure,
Transport, Regional Development, Communication
and the Arts (2022). https://www.infrastructure
.gov.au/territories-­regions-­cities/cities (accessed
1 January 2023).
Balchin, P., Sykora, L., and Bull, G. (1999). Regional Policy
and Planning in Europe. London: Routledge.
Bater, J. (1984). The Soviet City: Ideal and Reality.
London: Arnold.
Bentley, I. (1985). Responsive Environments: A Manual for
Designers. London: Architectural Press.
Black Lives Matter (2021). Imagining abolition resour­
ces. https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/ (accessed
18 December 2021).
Booker, C. (1980). The Seventies: Portrait of a Decade.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bornstein, D. (1997). The Price of a Dream, The Story of the
Grameen Bank. Dhaka: Grameen Press.
Calthorpe, P. (1993). The Next American Metropolis:
Ecology, Community, and the American Dream. New York:
Princeton Architectural Press.
Calthorpe, P. and Fulton, W. (2001). The Regional City:
Planning for the End of Sprawl. Washington: Island Press.
Castells, M. (1977). The Urban Question. London:
Edward Arnold.
Castells, M. (1983). The City and the Grassroots. London:
Edward Arnold.
CBN News (2019). Surveillance with shocking rewards
and punishments: could China’s big brother system
come to USA? https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/
world/2019/may/24-­7-­surveillance-­with-­shocking-­
rewards-­and-­punishments-­could-­chinas-­big-­brother-­
system-­come-­to-­usa (accessed 9 May 2022).
Center for Popular Economics (2021). Steel Workers
and Mondragon Collaborate. https://www.popu
lareconomics.org/econ-­u topia-­s teelworkers-­a nd-­
mondragon-­collaborate/ (accessed 7 December 2021).
Centre for Social Impact (2020). COVID-­ 19 factsheet
homelessness statement 2. https://www.csi.edu.au/
media/uploads/csi-­covid_factsheet_homelessness_
statement2.pdf (accessed 28 December 2021).
Cervero, R. (1998). The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry.
Washington, DC: Island Press.
Cervero, R. (2009). “TOD & Car Sharing: A Natural
Marriage” Access. Transport Research at the University
of California, No 35, Fall 2009.
Chadwick, G. (1969). A Systems View of Planning.
Oxford: Pergamon.
Chomsky, N. (1972). Language and Mind Enlarged Edition.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Chomsky, N. (1992). Deterring Democracy. London: Vintage.
City of Portland, Office of Civic and Community Life
(2021). About Neighbourhood Associations. https://
w w w. p o r t l a n d . g o v / c i v i c / m y n e i g h b o rh o o d /
about-­neighborhood-­system%20accessed (accessed 29
November 2021).
Cole, G. and Postgate, R. (1976). The Common People
1746–1946. London: Methuen.
Concern Worldwide US (2021). Rohingya crisis explained.
https://www.concernusa.org/story/rohingya-­crisis-­
explained/ (accessed 2 January 2023).
Constitutional Rights Foundation (2021). Social
Darwinism and American Laissez Faire. https://www
.crf-­usa.org/bill-­of-­rights-­in-­action/bria-­19-­2-­b-­social-­
darwinism-­a nd-­a merican-­l aissez-­f aire-­c apitalism
(accessed 17 December 2021).
Cooke, P. and Morgan, K. (1998). The Associational
Economy, Firms, Regions and Innovation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Cullingworth, J. (1976). Town & Country Planning in Britain
(Revised Sixth edition). London: Allen & Unwin.
Dantas, A., Heywood, P., Banh, D., and Amado, M. (2021).
Decoding Emergency Settlement through Quantitative
Analysis, Sustainability. MDPI. https://pdfs.seman
ticscholar.org/79f9/db553ec5eb6d80ac420197a587d
71ceb4086.pdf.
Darwin, C. (2004). Descent of Man. Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Darwin, C. (2008). On the Origin of Species. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Davidoff, P. (ed.) (1965). Advocacy and pluralism in
planning. Journal of the American Institute of Planners
31 (4): 331–338.
Davidoff, L. and Gold, N.N. (1970). Suburban action:
advocate planning for an open society. Journal of the
American Institute of Planners 36 (1): 12–21.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: OUP.
Dawkins, R. (1988). The Blind Watchmaker. London: Penguin.
Dawkins, R. (2009). The Greatest Show on Earth: The
Evidence for Evolution. London: Bantam.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatalolgy Translated with an
Introduction by Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore, MD: John
Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, J. (1993). Circumfession (published jointly
with Geoffrey Bennington’s Derridabase as Jacques
Derrida). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, J. (1995). On the Name. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1991). Darwin. London:
Penguin.

Desroche-­ Noblecourt, C. (1976). Tutankhamen. Boston,
MA: New York Graphic Society.
Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose Fail or
Succeed. New York: Viking.
Dickens, C. (2010). Hard Times. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Environmental Change Institute (2022). Environmental
Change Institute, climate, ecosystems, energy, food and
water. https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/about/ (accessed
2 January 2023).
Flannery, T. (2020). The Climate Cure, Solving th Climate
Emergency in the Era of COVID-­ 19. Melbourne: Text
Publishing.
Florida, R. (2005). Cities and the Creative Class. New York:
Routledge.
Forester, J. (1999). The Deliberative Practitioner, Encouraging
Participatory Planning Processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Foucault, M. (1963). The Birth of the Clinic (published in
English 1975). New York: Vintage.
Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge and the
Discourse on Language. New York: Harper and Row.
Foucault, M. (1980). Power /Knowledge. New York: Pantheon.
Foucault, M. (1981). Discipline and Punish. Harmonds­
worth: Penguin.
Friedman, M. (1968). The role of monetary policy.
American Economic Review 58 (1): 1–17.
Friedman, M. (2008). Monetary History of the United States,
1867–1960. New York: Princeton University Press.
Fuglesang, A. and Chandler, D. (1993). Participation as
Process – Process as Growth. Dhaka: Grameen Trust.
Galbraith, J. (1972). The New Industrial State. Harmonds­
worth: Penguin.
Ghosh, A. (2004). The Hungry Tide. London: Harper Collins.
Gould, S. (1988). Time’s Cycle, Time’s Arrow, Myth &
Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. London:
Penguin.
Grameen Bank (2022). History. https://www.grameen-­
info.org/history/ (accessed 1 January 2023).
Grameen Communications (2022). Grameen Enterprise.
https://www.grameen.technology/post/39/grameen-­
enterprise (accessed 1 January 2023).
Grameen Trust (2022). Grameen Dialog, News https://
grameentrust.org/programs/grameen-­d ialogue/
(accessed 1 January 2023).
Granicus (2021). Community Visioning: how to capture
community aspirations. https://www.bangthetable
.com/blog/online-­community-­visioning/ (accessed
1 January 2023).
Grinnell College (2022). ALT Right Movement. https://
haenfler.sites.grinnell.edu/subcultural-­t heory-­a nd-­
theorists/right-­wing-­subcultures/ (accessed 6 May
2022).
Guardian (2021a). What did the world leaders agree
at the summit in Rome? https://www.theguardian
.com/world/2021/nov/01/g20-­w hat-­d id-­w orld-­
leaders-­agree-­at-­the-­summit-­in-­rome (accessed 5
December 2021).
Guardian (2021b). China has built 380 internment camps
in Xinjiang study finds. https://www.theguard
ian.com/world/2020/sep/24/china-­h as-­b uilt-­3 80-­
internment-­camps-­in-­xinjiang-­study-­finds (accessed
18 December 2021).
Promises and Problems of Community Life 29
Habermas, J. (1971). Knowledge and Human Interests.
New York: Beacon Press.
Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Habermas, J. (1990). Moral Consciousness and Communicative
Action. London: Heinemann.
Habermas, J., Rorty, R., and Kolakowski, L. (1996).
Debating the State of Philosophy. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Haldane, E. (2021). Trumpism, Inequality and Europe.
https://www.thenewfederalist.eu/trumpism-­
inequality-­and-­europe?lang=fr (accessed 26 February
2022).
Hall, P. (2002). Cities of Tomorrow, 3e. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hamilton, H. (1946). History of the Homeland. London:
Allen and Unwin.
Hammond, J.L. and Hammond, B. (1978). The Town
Labourer. London: Longman.
Hammond, S. and Royal, C. (1998). Lessons From the Field:
Applying Appreciative Inquiry. Plano, TX: Thin Book
Publishing Co.
Harvey, D. (1996). On Planning the Ideology of Planning
(ed. S. Campbell and S. Fainstein) The Urbanization of
Capital. Baltimore, John Hopkins university Press.
Healey, P. (1996). Planning through Debate: The Com­
municative Turn in Planning Theory (ed. S. Campbell
and S. Fainstein). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Healey, P. (2006). Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in
Fragmented Societies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Healey, P. (2007). Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies:
Towards a Relational Planning for Our Times. London:
RTPI/Routledge.
Helle, S. (2022). Gilgamesh, A New Translation of the Ancient
Epic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hessler, P. (2010). Country Driving, Three Journeys Across a
Changing China. Melbourne: Text Publishing.
Heywood, W. (1904). Palio and Ponte, An Account of the
Sports of Central Italy from the Age of Dante to the XXth
Century. London: Methuen.
Heywood, P. (1974). Planning and Human Need. Newton
Abbott: David & Charles.
Heywood, P. (1989). A framework for community consul-
tation in Brisbane City. Queensland Planner.
Heywood, P. (1997). The emerging social metropolis.
In: Progress in Planning. Oxford: Pergamon/Elsevier
Heywood P.
Heywood, P. (2018). Growth plans and growing pains in
Brisbane’s sunbelt metropolis. In: Urban Regeneration
in Australia (ed. K. Ruming), 19. New York: Routledge.
Hibbert, C. (1979). The Rise and Fall of the House o9f the
Medicis. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Holden, G. (1970). Building Society. London: Chamber’s
Encyclopaedia, International Learning Systems.
Honneth, A. (2022). Recognition, A Chapter in the History of
European Ideas (translated from the German by Joseph
Ganahi). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Howard, E. (1899). Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real
Reform. London: (More recently published in 1965 as
Garden Cities of Tomorrow, London, Faber).
Howard, E. (1965). Garden Cities of Tomorrow. London:
Faber & Faber.
30 Planning for Community
Human Rights Watch (2022). Mass surveillance in China.
https://www.hrw.org/tag/mass-­surveillance-­china
(accessed 7 May 2022).
Huntington, S. (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon
& Schuster.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
(2014). Global Change of 1.5 Degrees. https://www
.ipcc.ch/sr15/ (accessed 10 December 2021).
Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death & Life of Great American Cities.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Jacobs, J. (1969). The Economy of Cities. Harmonds­
worth: Penguin.
Jacobs, J. (1985). Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Harmonds­
worth, UK: Viking.
Jacobs, J. (1992). Systems of Survival. London: Hodder and
Stoughton.
Jacobs, J. (2004). Dark Age Ahead. New York: Random House.
Jephcott, P. (1971). Homes in High Flats. Edinburgh:
Oliver and Boyd.
John Mongard Landscape Architects (JMLA) (2022).
Community design and placemaking. https://
mongard.com.au/project-­theme/community-­design-­
and-­placemaking/ (accessed 3 January 2023).
Kasarda, J. (2009). Aerotropolis, the way we’ll live next.
http://aerotropolisbusinessconcepts.aero/aerotropolis-­
the-­way-­well-­live-­next/ (accessed 2 January 2023).
Kropotkin, P. (1939). Mutual Aid. London: Penguin.
Kropotkin, P. (1974). Fields, Farms & Workshops of
Tomorrow. London: Allen & Unwin (first published
1899, Boston, MA).
Landry, C. (2000). The Creative City: a Toolkit for Urban
Innovators. London: Earthscan.
LCARB (2022). Low carbon Wolvercote. https://icarb
.org/2011/02/12/low-­carbon-­wolvercote/ (accessed
1 January 2023).
Leakey, R. (1981). The Making of Mankind. London: Abacus.
Leeds University School of Sociology and Social
Policy (2019). Northern Exposure: Race, Nation and
Disaffection in Ordinary Towns and Cities after Brexit.
https://essl.leeds.ac.uk/sociology-­research-­expertise/
dir-­record/research-­projects/1057/northern-­exposure-­
race-­nation-­and-­disaffection-­in-­ordinary-­towns-­and-­
cities-­after-­brexit (accessed 26 February 2022).
Leung, J. (2010). The Chinese Communist Party’s Treatment
of Ethnic Minorities. E-­International Relations. https://
www.e-­ir.info/2010/01/10/the-­chinese-­communist-­
partys-­treatment-­of-­ethnic-­minorities/.
Local Government New Zealand (2021). Community
boards. www.lgnz.co.nz/local-­government-­in-­nz/
community-­boards/ (accessed 29 November 2021).
Logan, J. and Molotch, H. (1987). Urban Fortunes: The
Political Economy of Place. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Lynch, K. (1984). Good City Form. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Lyons, J. (ed.) (1970). New Horizons in Linguistics.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lyons, J. (1991). Chomsky. London: Fontana.
Machiavelli, N. (1961). The Prince (translated with an intro-
duction by George Bull). Harmondsworth, England:
Penguin.
Mackay, H. (2018). Australia Reimagined: Towards a More
Compassionate, Less Anxious Society. Australia: Pan
Macmillan.
Magee, B. (1973). Popper. Glasgow: Fontana.
Margerum, R. (1999). Getting past yes: from capital
creation to action. Journal of the American Planning
Association 65 (2): 181–192.
Margerum, R. (2002). Evaluating collaborative plan-
ning. Journal of the American Planning Association
68 (2): 171–192.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1846 and 1996). With An
Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm. The Communist Manifesto,
A Modern Edition. London Verso.
Mayor of London (2008). Federation of City Farms and
Community Gardens, A National Scale Network. London:
Author.
McConnachie/Peters (2009). Surrey Docks Farm, Agri-­
culture in the City. http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/
features/footnmouth/cfarm.html (accessed 1 January
2023).
McLoughlin, J. (1971). Urban & Regional Planning,
A System’s Approach. London: Faber.
Miller, G. (1981). Cities by Contract. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Monbiot, G. (2004). The Age of Consent, A Manifesto for a
New World Order. London: Flamingo.
Mondragon Corporation (2022). Mondragon Corporation,
A Different Experience. https://www.mondragon-­
corporation.com/urtekotxostena/mondragon-­l a-­
experiencia.php?l=en (accessed 1 January 2023).
More, T.T. (1516/1965). Utopia. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Moscow Times (2020). With Lake Baikal’s key
protections set to expire, Russia’s eco-­ advocates
sound the alarm. https://www.themoscowtimes
.com/2020/12/21/with-­lake-­baikals-­key-­protections-­
set-­t o-­e xpire-­r ussian-­e co-­a ctivists-­s ound-­t he-­
alarm-­a72305 (accessed 9 January 2023).
Moss Eckhardt, J. (1973). Ebenezer Howard,1850–1928.
Aylesbury: Herts, Shire Publications.
Mumford, L. (1938). The Culture of Cities. London: Secker
and Warburg.
Mumford, L. (1961). The City in History. New York:
Harcourt, World, Brace.
Naipaul, V. (1979). India: A Wounded Civilization.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
National Aero Space Administration (NASA) (2021). Sea
level rises. https://www.nasa.gov/specials/sea-­level-­
rise-­2020/ (accessed 10 December 2021).
Obama, B. (2004). Dreams from My Father, 2e. Melbourne:
Text Publishing.
Obama, B. (2008). The Audacity of Hope, Thoughts on
Reclaiming the American Dream. Melbourne: Text
Publishing.

Obama, B. (2020). A Promised Land, Presidential Memoirs,
vol. 1. Penguin, Random House.
Osborne, D. and Gaebler, T. (1992). Reinventing Government.
New York: Penguin.
Park, R., Burgess, E., and McKenzie, R. (1925). The City.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Passmore, J. (1980). A Hundred Years of Philosophy.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Pilger, J. (1992). Distant Voices. London: Vintage.
Pinketty, T. (2013). Capital in the Twenty-­ First Century.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pinketty, T. (2019). Capital and Ideology. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Place North West (2015). Manchester and Cheshire
Construction forms Chinese alliance. https://
www.placenorthwest.co.uk/news/manchester-­
cheshire-­c onstruction-­f orms-­c hinese-­a lliance/
(accessed 5 December 2021).
Plato (1980). The Republic (translated with an introduction
by H. Lee). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Popper, K. (1947). The Open Society and its Enemies
(reprinted 1998), vol. 2. London: Marx and Hegel,
Routledge, Kegan, Paul.
Popper, K. (1972). Conjectures and Refutations. Oxford: OUP.
Popper, K. (1989). Objective Knowledge, An Evolutionary
Approach, Revised edition, 5th printing. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Putnam, R. (1993). Making Democracy Work, Civic Traditions
in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Queensland Human Rights Commission (2021). Law
reform: vilification and hate crimes consultation kit.
https://www.qhrc.qld.gov.au/about-­us/law-­reform
(accessed 1 January 2023).
Ridley, M. (1997). The Origins of Virtue. London: Penguin.
Rimmer, S.H. (2022). Is this the end of the two party
system in Australia? Sydney Morning Herald, The
Conversation May 22, 2022. https://au.news.yahoo
.com/end-­two-­party-­system-­australia-­140108737.html
(accessed 4 June 2022).
Roberts, B, 2014. Managing Systems of Secondary Cities:
Policy Responses in International Development, Cities
Alliance, https://www.academia.edu/16904361/
Managing_Systems_of_Secondary_Cities_Policy_
Responses_in_International_Development accessed
11 November 2021.
Robertson, G. (1999). Crimes Against Humanity. London:
Penguin.
Sandars, N. (2006). The Epic of Gilgamesh (translated by
N.K. Sandars). London: Penguin.
Skinner, B. (1974). Beyond Freedom and Dignity. London:
Penguin.
Solzhenitsyn, A. (1968). Cancer Ward (translated by
Nicholas Bethell & David Burg). London: Bodley Head.
Solzhenitsyn, A. (1971). The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956:
an experiment in literary investigation, I & II Translated
from the Russian by Thomas P. Whitney. New York:
Harper & Row.
Promises and Problems of Community Life 31
Solzhenitsyn, A. (1974). The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956:
An Experiment in Literary Investigation: I–II, (trans. T. P.
Whitney). New York: Harper & Row.
Solzhenitsyn, A. (2022). Between Two Millstones, Book
2, Exile in America, 1978–1994 (translated by Claire
Kitson). Chicago: University of Notre Dame Press.
Suarja, I. and Thyssen R. (2003). Traditional water man-
agement in Bali. Liesa Magazine.
Suzuki, D. and McConnell, A. (2008). The Sacred Balance:
Rediscovering our Place in Nature, 2e. St. Leonards, NS:
Allen & Unwin.
Thompson, E. (1980). The Making of the English Working
Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Transition Towns (2022). Transition network. https://
transitionnetwork.org/ (accessed 10 October 2022).
United Nations Department of Economic and Social
Affairs (2018). World Urbanization Prospects, the 2018
revision. https://www.un.org/development/desa/
publications/2018-­revision-­o f-­w orld-­u rbanization-­
prospects.html (accessed 2 January 2023).
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC) (2021). Decision CP 26 Glasgow
Climate Pact. https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/
resource/cop26_auv_2f_cover_decision.pdf (accessed
18 December 2021).
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) (2021). Protecting Refugees, Questions
and Answers. https://www.unhcr.org/publications/
brochures/3b779dfe2/protecting-­refugees-­questions-­
answers.html (accessed 3 January 2022).
Vila, G. (2014). From residents to citizens: the emer-
gence of neighbourhood movements in Spain. In:
Community Action and Planning: Contexts, Drivers and
Outcomes (ed. N. Gallent and D. Ciaffi), 59–78. Bristol
University Press.
Voxco (2021). Focus groups and public opinion. https://
www.voxco.com/blog/focus-­g roups-­a nd-­p ublic-­
opinion (accessed 7 December 2021).
Ward, C. (1973). Anarchy in Action. London: Freedom
Press.
Whyte, W. and Whyte, K. (1988). Making Mondragon: The
Growth & Dynamics of a Workers Co-­operative Complex.
Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.
Wikipedia (2014). Cronulla riots. https://en.wikipedia
.org/wiki/2005_Cronulla_riots (accessed 2 January
2023).
Wikipedia (2021a). Military rule in Myanmar. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_rule_in_Myanmar
#:~:text=Military%20rule%20in%20Myanmar%20%28
formerly%20named%20Burma (accessed 10 December
2021).
Wikipedia (2021b). Novye Aldi massacre. https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novye_Aldi_massacre
(accessed 16 December 2021).
Wikipedia (2022). Russian interference in the 2016 United
States elections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_
elections#References (accessed 7 May 2022).
32 Planning for Community
Williams, R. (1973). The Country and the City. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Wilson, E.O. (1992, 1992). The Diversity of Life. Cambridge,
MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Works and Days (2021). Margaret Thatcher, There’s no
such thing as Society. https://newlearningonline
.com/new-­learning/chapter-­4/neoliberalism-­more-­
recent-­times/margaret-­thatcher-­theres-­no-­such-­thing-­
as-­society (accessed 1 January 2023).
World Health Organisation (2022). Total death toll from
COVID-­ 19 nearly 15 million. https://www.yahoo
.com/lifestyle/total-­d eath-­t oll-­covid-­1 9-­1 30519035.
html (accessed 7 May 2022).
Yunus, M. (1998). Socially Conscious Capitalism: Towards a
Poverty Free World, Public Lecture Transcript. Brisbane:
Queensland University of Technology.
2 The Lives of Local Communities
Scope and scales of community
Communities consist of groups of people who
experience and acknowledge significant links,
expectations and responsibilities towards each
other. They do not need to be neighbours, but they
do need to share neighbourly feelings that may be
based on shared spaces, realms of interaction or
fields of interest. Local communities are those that
are defined by the physical possibilities of regular
and direct personal contact. Their success depends
largely upon how far this coexistence develops
into sustainable community life and organisation.
This chapter considers how different measures
can help achieve this and suggests principles for
effective integrated local community planning. It
is organised into the following sections:
• Social, economic and organisational character-
istics of local communities
• The physical forms of communities
• Spatial justice
• Planning places
• Community governance and participation
• Conclusion: the durability of local communities
of place and contact
lowers recognised thousands of years of village
cooperation as the constructive core of Hindu
­culture and proposed its revitalisation in a con-
Social, economic and organisational
characteristics of local communities
contact and cooperation
The opportunities for contact and cooperation
offered by local communities of place have never
lost their attraction and are now rapidly regain-
ing their roles and importance. Current trends are
redressing the balance between city centres and
local neighbourhoods, triggered by a wide range
of decentralising pressures. As well as positive
ones offered by new communication technologies,
Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood.
© 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John
Wiley & Sons, Inc.
negative ones of mounting problems of access to
large centres are being posed by problems of con-
gestion and pollution, and both are being com-
pounded by the impacts of mutating pandemics
increasing people’s experience of the benefits of
working from home. Existing concentration of
jobs, services and high-­density accommodation in
and around central areas was already being chal-
lenged by the worldwide growth of importance of
secondary centres, raising the prospect of a more
even balance between city centres and local neigh-
bourhoods (Roberts 2014). Roberts provides exam-
ples drawn from all five continents of the ways
that these re-­asserted attractions of neighbourli-
ness and local collaboration are influencing the
shape and organisation of both long-­established
and newly developing urban communities.
The survival value of such capacities for local,
face-­to-­face cooperation has roots extending over
10,000 years to early Neolithic farming villages
(Mumford 1961; Childe 1976). Its later continu-
ation in the collaborative life of medieval mar-
ket towns, out of which the modern European city
evolved, has been well explored by Peter Kropotkin
(1939).i In India too, Mahatma Gandhi and his fol-
temporary model of inclusive village democracy
or satyagraha, under the leadership of village
councils or Panchayats.ii
Recent developments in economic theory reflect
this recognition of the significance of the spirit of
local cooperation for successful modern life. Associ-
ational Economics, developed by Cooke and M ­ organ
(1998) and discussed in Chapter 1, draws on the
example of the successful network economies of
Emilia Romagna and Tuscany in northern Italy,
Baden-­Württemberg in Western Germany and the
Basque region of northern Spain to show how
shared community support for numerous small
enterprises can support local funding and train-
ing facilities. By fostering flexibility, this produc-
tive dynamism promoted survival and prosperity
in times when a volatile global market threatened
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Erklärung der Abbildungen
auf
Tafel X und XI

Tafel X

Die Figuren 13, 27, 28 und 29 sind direct nach den Präparaten, die
übrigen nach Microphotogrammen von dem Museumszeichner Hrn.
Geisler auf den Stein gravirt. Die einzelnen Haare sind so geordnet, dass
ähnliche Formen möglichst zusammenstehen, ohne Rücksicht auf die
systematische Verwandtschaft der Arten, denen sie entnommen sind.

1–6 Seitenansichten.

N . l i1m b a t u s (Ptrs.). Langes Spatelhaar mit Anhang an der

Endplatte, aus der Region median oberhalb der Nase. 46mal
vergrössert. Seite 38.
N2,. 2pau m i l u s (Crtschm.). 2 a sehr kurzes Spatelhaar mit
Anhang an der Endplatte, vom seitlichen Theile der Oberlippe.
46mal vergrössert. 2 Endplatte nebst Anhang von demselben
Haar. 190mal vergrössert. Seite 38.
N . 3,s 4a r a s i n o r u m A. B. M. Seite 37. 3 langes, wenig
typisches Spatelhaar von der Gegend seitlich oberhalb der
Nase. 4 typisches Haar von dem Felde zwischen Nase und
Mundrand 1. Vergrösserung von 3 und 4 je 46mal.
N . p5l i c a t u s (Buch. Ham.). Typisches Spatelhaar von den
Wülsten der Oberlippe 1. 46mal vergrössert. Seite 37, 38.
C h e i6r o m e l e s t o r q u a t u s Horsf. Langes, ziemlich
typisches Spatelhaar von der grossen Zehe. 46mal
vergrössert. Seite 39.

7–11 Flächenansichten.
 N . b i v i t t a t u s Hgl. Typisches Haar von dem Feld an der
7Schnauzenspitze. Die Endplatte ist in der Gravur viel zu
dunkel ausgefallen. 46mal vergrössert. Seite 37, 38.
N . l i8m b a t u s (Ptrs.). Ziemlich typisches Haar von den
Wülsten der Oberlippe. Bezüglich der Endplatte gilt das
Gleiche wie für Fig. 7. 46mal vergrössert. Seite 37, 38.
N 9–11
. p l i c a t u s (Buch. Ham.). Haare von den seitlichen
Theilen der Oberlippe. Mit Ausnahme von 9 a sämmtlich 46mal
vergrössert. 9 Haar von mittlerer Ausbildung 1, 9 a die Endplatte
desselben (190mal vergrössert). Seite 38. 10, 11 wenig
ausgeprägte Formen. Seite 37, 38.
12,
N .12bai v i t t a t u s Hgl. Borste oberhalb der Nase, zu den
modificirten Haaren der „ersten Gruppe“ gehörig, mit Anhang
an der Spitze. 12 ganzes Haar, 46mal vergrössert, 12 a oberes
Ende desselben, 100mal vergrössert. Seite 36, 38.
N. b 13r a c h y p t e r u s (Ptrs.). Endplatte eines mittleren
Spatelhaars von der Region oberhalb seitwärts der Nase, mit
Anhang, dessen Endglied abgerissen ist. Flächenansicht.
190mal vergrössert. Seite 38.
N14,
. b15i v i t t a t u s Hgl. Lange, wenig typische Spatelhaare der
Region median oberhalb der Nase. 14 von der Fläche, 15 von
der Seite. In letzterer Figur ist die Zackung der Oberfläche
versehentlich zu stark wiedergegeben. 46mal vergrössert.
Seite 37. [54]
N16,
. p17l i c a t u s (Buch. Ham.). Spatelhaare von den seitlichen
Theilen der Oberlippe, von der Seite gesehen. 46mal
vergrössert. 16 Haar mittlerer Form, etwa entsprechend Fig.
9 2. Seite 37. 17 sehr wenig ausgeprägtes Haar, etwa wie das
der Fig. 11. Seite 37, 38.
N. b 18i v i t t a t u s Hgl. Borste vom Gesichte, zur „ersten
Gruppe“ gehörig. 46mal vergrössert. Seite 36.
N. a 19s t r o l a b i e n s i s A. B. M. Borste von der Oberlippe, zur
„ersten Gruppe“ gehörig. 46mal vergrössert. Seite 36.
C20–25
h e i r o m e l e s t o r q u a t u s Horsf.
 Borste20 vom Gesichte, zur „ersten Gruppe“ gehörig.
46mal vergrössert. Seite 48.
Körperhaare von der Brust. Seite 35. a–d längere und
21 a–ekürzere ganze Haare, 46mal vergrössert; e
ein Stück aus der Mitte von a, 120mal vergrössert.
modificirte
22, 23 Spatelhaare des Feldes vorn an der
Schnauze, Flächenansicht. 46mal vergrössert.
Seite 39.
24, 25 von den seitlichen Theilen des Gesichts 2,
Borsten
in die „zweite Gruppe“ gehörig. 46mal vergrössert.
Seite 39.
N
26,
. b27r a s i l i e n s i s Is. Geoffr. Borsten der „zweiten Gruppe“.
46mal vergrössert. Seite 39. 26 von den Wülsten der
Oberlippe, 27 oberhalb der Nase.
N . s28a r a s i n o r u m A. B. M. Habitusbild der Spatelhaare des
Feldes unterhalb der Nasenlöcher. Der Pfeil am Rande deutet
die Medianebene und die Richtung nach der Nase an. Die
Endknöpfchen erscheinen in der Abbildung zu flach. Geringe
Vergrösserung (Zeiss, Binocular). Seite 36.
M o l29
o s s u s r u f u s o b s c u r u s (Geoffr.). Dasselbe wie von
vorigem. Der Pfeil am Rand hat die gleiche Bedeutung wie
dort. Vergrösserung dieselbe. Seite 36.
N y c30
t i n o m u s a s t r o l a b i e n s i s A. B. M. Eine Parthie
Körperhaar von der Brust, die verschiedenen Abschnitte
einzelner Haare zeigend. 110mal vergrössert. Seite 34.

Tafel XI

Umrisszeichnungen von Köpfen und Füssen verschiedener Molossiden,

um die Anordnung der Spatelhaare zu zeigen. In den Abbildungen der
Füsse sind die Spatelhaare und ausserdem die langen gekrümmten Haare
naturgetreu wiedergegeben; in denen der Köpfe sind nur Spatelhaare und
entsprechende Borsten und zwar schematisch durch Punkte oder durch
Striche mit verdickten Enden angedeutet.
 N1–1
y c tai n o m u s p l i c a t u s (Buch. Ham.) von Sumatra
(Dresd. Mus. 3631). 1 Kopf von vorn und unten in doppelter, 1
a rechter Fuss von rechts und etwas von unten in vierfacher
nat. Grösse. Seite 43–44.
N2–2
y c tai n o m u s s a r a s i n o r u m A. B. M. von Central
Celébes (Dresd. Mus. 3763). 2 Kopf von vorn und unten in
doppelter, 2 a rechter Fuss von rechts und etwas von unten in
vierfacher nat. Grösse. Seite 44.
N y c t3i n o m u s b i v i t t a t u s Hgl. von Keren, Bogos, NO
Afrika (Stuttg. Nat. Cabin. 981). Kopf von der Seite in doppelter
nat. Grösse. Seite 44.
N y c t4i n o m u s l i m b a t u s (Ptrs.) von Quelimane, O Afrika
(Stuttg. Nat. Cabin. 2036). Kopf von vorn und unten in
doppelter nat. Grösse. Seite 45.
N y c t5i n o m u s a n g o l e n s i s Ptrs. von Madagascar (Dresd.
Mus. 3761). Kopf von vorn und unten in doppelter nat. Grösse.
Seite 45.
N y c t6i n o m u s a s t r o l a b i e n s i s A. B. M. von Deutsch
Neu Guinea (Dresd. Mus. 3306). Kopf von vorn und unten in
doppelter nat. Grösse. Seite 46.
N y c t7i n o m u s b r a s i l i e n s i s Is. Geoffr. von Brasilien
(Dresd. Mus. 1981). Kopf von vorn und unten in doppelter nat.
Grösse. Seite 46. [55]
M o l o8s s u s r u f u s o b s c u r u s (Geoffr.) von Cuba (Dresd.
Mus. 1170). Kopf von vorn und unten in doppelter nat. Grösse.
Seite 47.
M o l o9s s u s a b r a s u s (Temm.) von Surinam (Dresd. Mus.
1148). Kopf von vorn und unten in doppelter nat. Grösse. Seite
47.
M o l10
o s s u s p e r o t i s (Wied) von Surinam (Stuttg. Nat. Cab.
293). Kopf von vorn und unten in doppelter nat. Grösse. Seite
48.
11–11
C h e idr o m e l e s t o r q u a t u s Horsf. von Java (Dresd. Mus.
3628). 11 und 11 a nat. Grösse, 11 b-d doppelte nat. Grösse.
Seite 48–49.
 Kopf11von der Seite
Kopf
11 von
a vorn und unten
rechter
11 b Fuss, Plantarseite
erste
11 cZehe des rechten Fusses von rechts
dieselbe
11 d von oben.

1 Der axiale dunkle Strang tritt im Präparate viel schärfer hervor. ↑ a b c

2 Der axiale dunkle Strang tritt im Präparate schärfer hervor. ↑ a b

[Inhalt]

Abh. Ber. K. Zool. Anthr. Ethn. Mus. Dresden 1898/9 Nr. 7

Meyer: Säugethiere Celébes II. Taf. I
 M a c a c u s m a u r u s F. Cuv.

c. ⅓ nat. Grösse

Abh. Ber. K. Zool. Anthr. Ethn. Mus. Dresden 1898/9 Nr. 7

Meyer: Säugethiere Celébes II. Taf. II
M a c a c u s m a u r u s F. Cuv.

¾ nat. Grösse
 Abh. Ber. K. Zool. Anthr. Ethn. Mus. Dresden 1898/9 Nr. 7
Meyer: Säugethiere Celébes II. Taf. III

1–2 T a r s i u s f u s c u s Fisch.-Waldh. 3 T a r s i u s s a n g i r e n s i s A. B.
Meyer

1 nat. Grösse, 2 circa ⅔, 3 circa ½ nat. Grösse

Abh. Ber. K. Zool. Anthr. Ethn. Mus. Dresden 1898/9 Nr. 7

 Meyer: Säugethiere Celébes II. Taf. IV

1 P t e r o p u s w a l l a c e i Gr. 2 V e s p e r u g o p e t e r s i n. sp. 3 V e s p e r u g o
m i n a h a s s a e n. sp. 4–6 N y c t i n o m u s s a r a s i n o r u m n. sp.

1 und 4 nat. Grösse, 2–5 doppelte, 6 vierfache nat. Grösse

Abh. Ber. K. Zool. Anthr. Ethn. Mus. Dresden 1898/9 Nr. 7

Meyer: Säugethiere Celébes II. Taf. V
 S c i u r u s s a r a s i n o r u m A. B. Meyer

nat. Grösse u. ½ nat. Grösse

Abh. Ber. K. Zool. Anthr. Ethn. Mus. Dresden 1898/9 Nr. 7

Meyer: Säugethiere Celébes II. Taf. VI
 1 Mus musschenbroeki Jent. 2–10 Mus xanthurus Gr.

1–8 nat. Grösse, 9 und 10 circa 5 fache nat. Grösse

Abh. Ber. K. Zool. Anthr. Ethn. Mus. Dresden 1898/9 Nr. 7

Meyer: Säugethiere Celébes II. Taf. VII
 1 M u s c a l l i t r i c h u s Jent. 2–10 M u s h e l l w a l d i Jent.

1–8 nat. Grösse, 9 und 10 circa 7 fache nat. Grösse

Abh. Ber. K. Zool. Anthr. Ethn. Mus. Dresden 1898/9 Nr. 7

Meyer: Säugethiere Celébes II. Taf. VIII
 L e n o m y s m e y e r i (Jent.)

nat. Grösse

Abh. Ber. K. Zool. Anthr. Ethn. Mus. Dresden 1898/9 Nr. 7

Meyer: Säugethiere Celébes II. Taf. IX
 C r a u r o t h r i x l e u c u r a (Gr.)

nat. Grösse

Abh. Ber. K. Zool. etc. Mus. Dresden 1898/9 Nr. 7

Meyer: Säugeth. Celébes II. (Anhg.: Jablonowski: Haare d. Molossi) Taf. X
 Nyctinomus plicatus (Buch. Ham.) Fig. 5, 9–11, 16, 17 N. sarasinorum
A. B. M. Fig. 3, 4, 28 N. bivittatus Hgl. Fig. 7, 12, 12a, 14, 15, 18 N.
brachypterus (Ptrs.) Fig. 13 N. pumilus (Crtschm.) Fig. 2, 2a N. limbatus
(Ptrs.) Fig. 1, 8 N. astrolabiensis A. B. M. Fig. 19, 30 N. brasiliensis Is.
Geoffr. Fig. 26, 27 Molossus rufus obscurus (Geoffr.) Fig. 29 Cheiromeles
torquatus Horsf. Fig. 6, 20–25
Abh. Ber. K. Zool. etc. Mus. Dresden 1898/9 Nr. 7
Meyer: Säugeth. Celébes II. (Anhg.: Jablonowski: Haare d. Molossi) Taf.
XI
1, 1a Nyctinomus plicatus (Buch. Ham.) 2, 2a N. sarasinorum A. B. M. 3
N. bivittatus Hgl. 4 N. limbatus (Ptrs.) 5 N. angolensis Ptrs. 6 N.
astrolabiensis A. B. M. 7 N. brasiliensis Is. Geoffr. 8 Molossus rufus
obscurus (Geoffr.) 9 M. abrasus (Temm.) 10 M. perotis (Wied) 11–11d
Cheiromeles torquatus Horsf.
 Inhaltsverzeichnis

Inhaltsverzeichniss V
Tafelerklärung VII
1. Macacus maurus F. Cuv. 1
2-3. Macacus cynomolgus L. und philippinensis Js. Geoffr. 4
4-5. Cynopithecus niger (Desm.) und nigrescens (Temm.) 5
6. Tarsius fuscus Fisch.-Waldh. 8
7. Tarsius sangirensis n. sp. 9
8. Tarsius philippensis A. B. Meyer 9
9. Tarsius spectrum (Pall.) 9
10. Paradoxurus musschenbroeki Schl. 10
11. Bubalus mindorensis Heude 12
12. Babirusa alfurus Less. 15
Vorkommen und damit in Verbindung stehende Fragen. 15
Zahnformel. 22
Bewehrung der Sau. 23
13. Sciurus tonkeanus n. sp. 25
14. Sciurus leucomus Müll. Schl. 25
15. Sciurus rosenbergi Jent. 26
16. Sciurus tingahi n. sp. 27
17. Sciurus steeri Gthr. 27
18. Sciurus mindanensis Steere 28
19. Sciurus samarensis Steere 29
20. Phlœomys cumingi Wtrh. 29
21. Crateromys schadenbergi (A. B. Meyer) 31
22. Phalanger celebensis (Gr.) 33
23. Phalanger sangirensis n. sp. 34
24. Phalanger ursinus (Temm.) 34
Index. 35
Tafeln
Inhaltsverzeichniss III
Tafelerklärung V
Alphabetischer Index VII
Addenda VIII
Einleitung 1
Primates Cercopithecidae 2
1. Macacus maurus F. Cuv. 2
Macacus tonkeanus n. sp. 3
2. Cynopithecus niger (Desm.) 4
3. Cynopithecus niger nigrescens (Temm.) 4
Tarsiidae 4
4. Tarsius fuscus Fisch.-Waldh. 4
Chiroptera Megachiroptera Pteropidae 5
5. Pteropus wallacei Gr. 5
6. Pteropus alecto Temm. 5
7. Pteropus hypomelanus Temm. 6
8. Pteropus mackloti Temm. (Pteropus celebensis Schl.) 6
9. Xantharpyia minor (Dobs.) 6
10. Cynopterus latidens Dobs. 7
Anmerkung 7
11. Uronycteris cephalotes (Pall.) 8
12. Cephalotes peroni Geoffr. 9
13. Carponycteris australis (Ptrs.) 10
Microchiroptera Rhinolophidae 11
14. Rhinolophus minor Horsf. 11
15. Hipposiderus diadema (Geoffr.) 11
Nycteridae 12
16. Megaderma spasma (L.) 12
Vespertilionidae 12
17. Vesperus pachypus (Temm.) 12
18. Vesperugo petersi n. sp. 13
Anmerkung 14
Vesperugo papuanus orientalis. 14
19. Vesperugo minahassae n. sp. 14
20. Vespertilio muricola Hdgs. 16
Emballonuridae Molossi 16
21. Nyctinomus sarasinorum n. sp. 16
Anmerkung 19
Nyctinomus astrolabiensis n. sp. 19
Insectivora Soricidae 20
22. Crocidura fuliginosa (Blyth) 20
Carnivora Viverridae 20
23. Viverra tangalunga Gray 20
24. Paradoxurus hermaphroditus (Schreb.) 20
25. Paradoxurus musschenbroeki Schl. 20
Rodentia Sciuridae 21
26. Sciurus leucomus Müll. Schl. 21
27. Sciurus leucomus occidentalis A. B. M. 21
28. Sciurus sarasinorum A. B. M. 21
29. Sciurus murinus Müll. Schl. 21
30. Sciurus rubriventer Müll. Schl. 22
Muridae 22
31. Mus rattus L. 22
32. Mus neglectus Jent. (?) 22
33. Mus ephippium Jent. 23
34. Mus musschenbroeki Jent. 23
35. Mus callitrichus Jent. 24