Abstract
This article argues that a more critical approach to innovation policy within planning is needed and offers recommendations for achieving this. These recommendations entail rethinking the values, focus, speed, and legitimacy of innovations. It takes a critical perspective on how contemporary societies treat rapid innovation as having necessarily positive results in the achievement of objectives such as sustainability and justice. This critical perspective is needed because innovation can both contribute to and drive a form of maladaptive planning: a collective approach to reality that imposes constant and rapid changes to societal configurations due to an obsession with the new and with too little rapport with the problems in place or that it creates. A maladaptive direction for transport planning is used as a sectorial illustration of the broader conceptual ideas presented: for both sustainability and social justice reasons, it would be desirable to see peak car occurring. However, the car industry is presenting driving automation as an innovation with the potential to restore the vitality of the private vehicles market while creating effective means to dismiss alternatives to car dominance.
Highlights
This article aims to challenge the dominant innovation logic applied today in planning generally and in transport planning
Consider the case of climate change driven by the transport sector: The use of the automobile is an evolution supported by many societies. This evolution is problematic for the natural environment and can eventually lead to a situation in which humans cannot survive in it. This means that what can be perceived as an adaptation in a given evolutionary milieu is a maladaptation in another evolutionary milieu that includes the previous one
The emphasis on automated vehicles (AVs) we see today is problematic because it threatens the viability of the first evolutionary principle: While it is promoting variety of alternatives within the narrow area of transport automation—and is ignoring important criticisms made on the excessive reliance on technology to solve societal problems [8,9]—it is becoming a threat for variety outside it
Summary
This article aims to challenge the dominant innovation logic applied today in planning generally and in transport planning . As innovations have different scales of magnitude, Freeman and Perez [43] proposed the classic taxonomy for innovations: incremental (likely to continuously occur within a given organization or sector); radical (typically resulting from carefully crafted collaborations between governments, research institutions, and the private sector); changes of the technological system (with the potential to lead to consequences in several activity sectors); and changes of the techno-economic paradigm (which represent mutations at a societal level) This taxonomy suggests that important synergies between innovation studies and evolutionary theory could be identified. This article is based on a systematic review conducted by the authors of the literature concerned with innovation, sustainable mobility and transport automation, and evolutionary theory applied to urban and transport planning This led to a collective debate and reflection that has culminated in the production of the present article. We conclude the article with some policy implications and summarizing thoughts
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