The value of planning and the values in planning

Abstract

In July 2015, I took part in a well-attended roundtable debate organised by the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) in the AESOP Annual Congress which was spearheaded by a provocative Discussion Paper by the RTPI Deputy Head of Policy and Research (Harris, 2015). This viewpoint is based on my response to two issues raised in the paper: the interface between research and practice and the value of planning. As regards the first one, the Discussion Paper criticises the planning academics' research for not focusing on 'those issues that are of direct relevance to potential research users in ways which provide practical, actionable evidence' (Harris, 2015, 1). This statement reminds me of a story, which, although has been told elsewhere (see Davoudi, 2015a), is worth retelling here. The story is about a scene in Hugh Whitemore's play, Breaking the code (1986), which should be recounted every time academics are asked to demonstrate the practical worth of their research. The scene is a job interview when a civil servant asks a young academic about his research and receives this enthusiastic, yet confused answer:'Hilbert thought there should be a single clearly defined method for deciding whether or not mathematical assertions were provable ... I wanted to show that there can be no one method that will work for all questions ... Eventually I conceived the idea of a machine ...' (Whitemore, 1986, 33-34)The baffled civil servant then asks: 'You actually built a machine?' (Whitemore, 1986, 34), to which the young academic replies: 'No, no. It was a machine of the imagination' (Whitemore, 1986, 34). The civil servant's next question is emblematic of the dominant, albeit stereotypical, perception of academics as people who live in their ivory towers and use taxpayers' money to do 'blue sky' research of no use to anyone. He asks:'What is the point of devising a machine that cannot be built, in order to prove that there are certain mathematical statements that cannot be proved?' 'Is there any practical value in all this?' (Whitemore, 1986, 34)By now you have probably guessed that the play is based on a true story; that the young academic was Alan Turing, who was interviewed for the post of the leading cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park; that he went on to break the German's Enigma code which influenced the date of the Normandy landings, shortened the Second World War and saved countless lives. And, if that was not enough for the practical relevance of his research, he also built, almost by accident, the first electronic computer (Davoudi, 20:5a).The story is worth repeating because it brilliantly shows the non-linear, unpredictable and contingent nature of both the process and the outcome of research. It shows that 'researchers' flights of fancy can pay off (Reisz, 2008, 37) even if they may not have an immediate, practical utility or a quantified economic value. History is full of examples of scientific breakthroughs that have happened as a result of intellectual curiosity and speculative research. They have often come from a desire for knowledge rather than for filling a gap in the market or responding to immediate, practical questions. These examples tell us that academic research should not be judged through the limited lens of instrumentalism; that researchers should not always be expected to be 'on tap' to provide the right answer to what is often the wrong question and that there are other ways of framing the entwined relationship between research and policy (see Davoudi, 2006) or knowledge and action (see Davoudi, 2015b). For example, a conceptual model defines such a relationship as iterative and long-term whereby the findings from research creep into policy deliberations and illuminate the landscape within which decisions are made. I am not suggesting that planning academics should stop being concerned about the impact of their research and its relevance to the society. I do, however, suggest that they should resist the instrumental model of policy-research interface and its obsession with quantification; that they should resist the erosion of respect for learning. …