Beyond the limits of imperfections: Reflections on David Webb’s comments on an actor-relational-approach in planning

Abstract

On a walking hike in southern Germany you may encounter a small house with the striking inscription: ‘Gott schutze uns fur Gewitter, Ungerechtigkeit und Planer’. (God protect us from thunder, injustice, and planners). It marks – whether justifiably or not – the broad distrust in society of the noble profession of planning. In a similar event, a recent planning masterpiece of the Flemish Government – the Lange Wapper Bridge, planned to complete the ring road around Antwerp – was voted down in a referendum. In Amsterdam, however, planning disasters that have turned the city upside-down for more than 15 years are completely ignored by the residents. They no longer bother with what has been decided beyond and over their heads; they just get on with their own lives. Against this background and in these times of crisis, not only in planning, but economically and politically as well, there is every reason to critically refocus the fundamentals of planning. This is, in fact, what David Webb, in his commentary on my outside-inward deployment of an actor-relational-approach (ARA) is doing. Moreover, Webb also recognizes that ARA ‘has the potential to generate relationally embedded projects, which have a greater, or at least different, change of success to mainstream, plan-led approaches’ (Webb, 2010). Nevertheless, he rightly distrusts the general applicability of that deployment and hits the nail right on the head in his comments.