Morality, power and the planning subject

Abstract

Ethical issues are at the heart of planning. Thus, planning theory has long displayed an interest in debating both the ethical justification for planning and how the activity of planning can be rendered more ethically sensitive. However, comparatively little attention has been shown to how the very constitution of the planner as a 'moral subject' may be ethically problematic for planning practice. This paper addresses this lacuna through an engagement with the philosophy of Michel Foucault. In contrast to how his work is normally applied, this paper accords with Foucault's own direction that his later examination of ethics be used as a lens through which to read his earlier analysis of power and knowledge. Accordingly, the paper first outlines Foucault's innovative reinterpretation of how power and knowledge operate in society before setting this within his novel re-conception of ethics. This theoretical exposition is then employed to interpret material drawn from in-depth qualitative interviews with twenty planning officers working in a range of different contexts.The paper subsequently employs Foucault's ethically informed reading of power and knowledge to identify ethical issues arising from the approaches used by practitioners to justify their planning activities. The paper concludes by suggesting how such issues can be resolved.

Silences, categories and black-boxes: Towards an analytics of the relations of power in planning regulation

“…It may also mean tackling the normative assumption that planning as a set of practices is doing the ‘right thing’ and coming to the ‘right decision’. Yiftachel (2001) states that ‘the days in which planners and planning were widely regarded as rational and progressive agents of change are well and truly over’ (p. 254; see also Lennon and Fox-Rogers, 2017), and yet normative planning theory continues the search for a normatively better form of planning practice. Drawing inter alia on Foucauldian ideas on power, Davoudi (2015) still finds a way to argue for a planning as a practice of knowing which is essentially positive.…”

“…The decision also has weight in that regulatory decisions do not occur in isolation but tend to look back at past decisions and forward to future development applications. The institutional norms of regulatory institutions are usually that there should be a degree of consistency in such decisions over time (Lennon and Fox-Rogers, 2017: 375).…”

“…While Fraser (1992) argues that Foucault variously describes power as positive, negative and even neutral, many have found the approach particularly useful for studying inequalities. This involves drawing a link between the way that conduct is governed through relations of power and forms of rationality, on the one hand, and the privileging and/or marginalising of various actors and their ideas (Lennon and Fox-Rogers, 2017: 367), on the other. This remains essentially an empirical question.…”

“…Foucault sees the ‘will to truth’ produced within a ‘regime of truth’ comprising objects, criteria, practices, procedures, institutions, apparatuses and operations (Fraser, 1992: 220). These create the separation of ‘those concepts deemed false from those that are considered true’ (Lennon and Fox-Rogers, 2017: 367).…”

“…While not denying that this expresses many actors’ experience of the regulatory process, the argument here is that power is at work within regulation in a different way. This article, in the Foucauldian vein, seeks to unsettle the ‘taken-for-granted’, the ‘given’ (Lennon and Fox-Rogers, 2017: 366). Rather than seeing power as a resource that is controlled by actors (the first dimension of power in Lukes, 2005), power is seen as emergent, in line with the relational thinking of the Foucauldian tradition and the ontologically aligned Actor-Network Theory (ANT).…”