Abstract
Even though the turn to practice is widely accepted in the field of urban planning, the practices of planners are empirically largely unexplored. Looking at the daily routines and practices of urban planners thus allows a deeper insight into what planning is, and how planning practices are related to innovation and transformation. To do so, we start from the assumption that behaviour is a constellation of practices, including certain activities, a set of choices and actions, patterns of behaviour or forms of interaction that is organised in a certain space or context by common understandings and rules. By conducting an online survey among planners in medium-sized German cities, we first identified a wide range of planning practices and activities in general. In a second step, we conducted a statistical cluster analysis resulting in six types of planners: (1) the ‘local-specific analysts,’ (2) the ‘experienced generalists,’ (3) the ‘reactive pragmatists,’ (4) the ‘project-oriented planners,’ (5) the ‘compensatory moderators,’ and (6) the ‘innovative designers.’ Each cluster has specific practices and activities, linked to characteristic value-sets, role interpretations and self-perceptions that might help explain the differences with regard to innovation and transformation. From the identified six groups or clusters of planners, only two clusters more or less consequently aim at innovation, experimentation and new approaches. One cluster is dedicated to collaborative practices whereas traditional practices predominate in three clusters at least, mainly because of legal requirements. This is the result of an increasing ‘formalisation’ of land-use planning, making planners focus on technical and formal practices, and, at the same time, lead to the reduced ‘attention’ to and implementation of conceptual approaches or ‘necessary’ transformative practices, including proactive approaches and strategic coordination with regard to sustainable urban development, but also comprising experiments, real labs or social innovations.
Highlights
Planning is what planners do (Vickers, 1968)
Urban Planning, 2019, Volume 4, Issue 4, Pages 111–125 tices change over time? What moral and ethical values underlie the actions of planners? How do they reflect on their actions? How much autonomy and agency do urban planners have in their daily business? Against this background, it is the aim of the article to identify the different practices and attitudes of planners and to systematically reflect on the daily practices and routines of planners to draw conclusions with regard to the selfperception of urban planning
We start from the assumption that planning is a constellation of practices, including certain activities, a set of choices and actions, patterns of behaviour or forms of interaction that are organised in a certain space or context by common understandings and rules
Summary
Planning is what planners do (Vickers, 1968). the practices of planners might differ from city to city or region to region as these practices, routines or patterns of behaviour are shaped in a certain social or spatial context. One exemption is the work of Healey (1992), who took a practice perspective in her essay entitled A Planner’s Day, describing which activities and knowledge types determine the daily life of a senior planner in an English city This practice-based approach clearly indicates that it is necessary for the analysis to reintegrate what planners are doing (e.g., technical expertise), why they are performing in a particular way (e.g., moral vision) and how their practices are framed in the organisational setting (e.g., adversarial politics; see, for example, Forester, 1999, 2013; Hoch, 1994; Vigar, 2012). We can conclude that planners have to work with structural tensions between organisation and spontaneity, control and self-organisation, experiments and routines, legal validity and openness, or intervention and non-intervention (Lauria & Long, 2017; Savini et al, 2015; Vigar, 2012) This influences how planners arrange their daily practices, how they make their decisions, and which roles they use in planning processes. The last section summarises the results and discusses the roles of planning and planners with regard to planning practices, in particular in the face of transformative planning practices
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