It is about time: dynamics failure, using plans and using coalitions

Abstract

The central contention of this viewpoint is that a narrative emphasising time rather than space, plans rather than consensus and co-evolving coalitions rather than control will suggest new ways for advancing our thinking and practices in relation to urban and environmental planning. The argument is not that currently salient narratives are wrong or useless, only that they limit the content of our conversations in important ways. Multiple understandings should co-evolve in our scholarly conversations and continually challenge the control of dominant narratives. Relying on one dominant approach not only constrains the scope of our scholarly conversations, but also constrains our ability to communicate ideas to practitioners. And what practitioners hear is not necessarily the same as what we claim to be saying.Contrasting a Time/Plans/Coalition (T/P/C) narrative to the currently salient Space/Consensus/Control (S/C/C) narratives provides a mechanism to demonstrate the usefulness of an added perspective. For present purposes, I conflate the Habermas/ Foucault nexus, facilitative leadership, consensus-building and collaboration narra- tives as Space/Consensus/Control, because the union of these competing narratives differs from a Time/Plans/Coalitions narrative in important ways. Concepts from the economics of market failure and dynamics failure, which are generalisable to systems of interacting agents over time, provide a platform from which to build these distinctions.Space/consensus/control narrativesMost of our planning narratives spring from failures to achieve desirable outcomes in systems of individual agents acting independently. In economics, these market failures are specific analytical impediments to arriving at the perfect market equilibrium in which resources are allocated most efficiently. To most planning scholars, the concepts of market failure are either well ingrained or considered irrelevant to the portion of the conversation in which they participate. These concepts are important here, however, because they set the platform on which certain scholarly questions become relevant and other questions become not relevant.For planners, the most salient failures of such interacting systems are externali- ties, collective (or public) goods and income (or wealth) distribution. Externalities are effects on agents that are not signalled by prices (or more generally by feedback) so that agents generating externalities do not account for them. Collective goods are goods or services for which consumption is not rivalled, which means more than one person can consume the same thing, and access cannot be controlled, meaning that individuals have incentives to free ride. Most instances of these market failures are 'impure' - that is, on a continuum for which these attributes are the extreme - and most instances of externalities and collective goods in urban development depend in important ways on their spatial properties or relationships.In simple terms, the response to these market failures is collective choice among the agents to regulate themselves or tax themselves to account for externalities, to provide collective goods and services or to redistribute income or wealth. In urban development, externalities such as pollution and collective goods such as transporta- tion networks have crucial spatial attributes. Consensus-building, subject to acknowl- edgement of power relations, is currently the salient narrative on how planners achieve collective choices. Collective choice can be achieved in voluntary groups or in governments. Governments are groups legitimated to use coercion in regulation and tax collection in order to provide goods and services, and such legitimate coercion - control - is useful in improving outcomes in the face of market failure. The resulting scholarly conversations about planning, therefore, consist of narratives of Space/ Consensus/Control.The Space/Consensus/Control narratives are responses to the problems of collec- tive choice. …