Plans, Planning and Tragic Choices

Abstract

Communicative planning theory, with its emphasis on collaborative processes and consensus-building, has become widely accepted as a new and dominant paradigm for planning practice. It appeals especially to planners concerned with the potential for creating social change through planning processes. It also attracts those trying to escape from the narrow confines of traditional rational policy analysis. It avoids the pessimism of structuralist notions of the role of planners by identifying cracks in the structure that allow agency to survive. However, there are pitfalls in the communicative emphasis on reaching consensus which need to be avoided. This is illustrated through a study of recent debates about the character of the French Quarter in New Orleans and the role of plans in sustaining this. Qualitative research, utilizing conversations with neighbors in New Orleans' French Quarter as well as documentary sources, demonstrates the limitations of consensus-building processes when conflict between visions exists. First, the antagonism between groups, some favoring preservation and others development (visions not necessarily oppositional), creates animosities that are difficult to resolve through communicative processes. These antagonisms point to the ongoing difficulty of dealing with the 'tragic' choices created where substantial differences in systems of meaning collide. Second, the role of a substantive normative vision appears unclear in communicative approaches. In New Orleans, public pressure has persuaded the city administration to elaborate a Master Plan indicating the population's need to define what is desired for the city and their neighborhood. The Plan is still held up as a way of confronting differences. At the same time, neighborhood movement organizations are important for their construction of visions of a desirable urban environment at the margin of the formal planning processes.