Responsibility, polity, value: The (un)changing norms of planning practices

Abstract

To address the social, spatial and environmental problems of cities, planners often promote and engage with spatial practices that are intended to be experimental, innovative or transformative of existent processes. Yet, the actual nature of the novelty of these practices is often not explicit nor problematised by their proponents. This article develops an institutionalist framework to better appreciate the variegated nature of change in planning practices. It understands planning as embedded in, and simultaneously impacting on, three types of institutionalised norms: operational norms that define and allocate responsibilities among actors, collective norms that (re)produce planning polities and constitute the spatial-temporal context of their actions and constitutional norms that substantiate the idea of value defining the eligible stakeholders of a particular process. The article mobilises this framework and argues that contemporary planning practices convey a (a) shifting of responsibility towards individuals and households, (b) disaggregation of city regions through polycentric localism and (c) the reproduction of the process of accumulative valorisation of land. The article concludes reflecting on the complexity institutional change.

Towards an urban degrowth: Habitability, finity and polycentric autonomism

“…Functional polycentrism relies on an atomist and functionalist organization of socioeconomic relations (Savini, 2019). Urban areas are subdivided into zones of production, living, and circulation.…”

Responsibility as a field: The circular economy of water, waste, and energy

“…This particular ontology of responsibility is crucial for the study of the governance of city-regional environments, utility services and ecological infrastructures. A purely subjectivist understanding of responsibility fails to explain why and how actors contest and transform (or not) existing regulatory frameworks and their underling power relations, and are not helpful in imagining alternative social norms (Moroni, 2007;Savini, 2019;van Rijswick and Salet, 2012). As Pellizzoni (2004) puts it, when faced with situations of high uncertainty, governance processes cannot foresee the consequences of particular innovations, with the result that actors simply ignore these unforeseen consequences so to exonerate themselves from their actions' potential long-term effects on the environment (558).…”

Unpacking social learning in planning: who learns what from whom?

“…In this article, the following definition of social learning is used: Social learning is a process in which individuals and groups exchange or jointly develop knowledge (including skills and experiences) through human interaction (De Jaegher, Di Paolo, and Gallagher 2010). Knowledge exchange differs from knowledge development: in the former, knowledge is new only to one or a few people involved, while knowledge development means that the emerging knowledge is new to all those involvedan important distinction for observing when social learning leads to the reproduction of existing knowledge, and when it leads to the creation of new knowledge (Bandura 1971;Hasson et al 2012;Heyes 2016;Kalkstein et al 2016; see also Savini 2018 for how this distinction can be crucial for planning). This definition relies mostly on understandings from psychology (e.g.…”