Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

Abstract Information is a source of power in the planning process. This article begins by assessing five perspectives of the planner's use of information: those of the technician, the incremental pragmatist, the liberal advocate, the structuralist, and the “progressive.” Then several types of misinformation (inevitable or unnecessary, ad hoc or systematic) are distinguished in a reformulation of bounded rationality in planning, and practical responses by planning staff are identified. The role and ethics of planners acting as sources of misinformation are considered. In practice planners work in the face of power manifest as the social and political (mis)-man-agement of citizens' knowledge, consent, trust, and attention. Seeking to enable planners to anticipate and counteract sources of misinformation threatening public serving, democratic planning processes, the article clarifies a practical and politically sensitive form of “progressive” planning practice.

Planning in the Face of Power.

Preface Introduction: The Role of the Reader I. Open 1. The Poetics of the Open Work 2. The Semantics of Metaphor 3. On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language II. Closed 4. The Myth of Superman 5. Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris 6. Narrative Structures in Fleming III. Open/Closed 7. Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness: Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs 8. Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Bibliography

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

In the 1990s a strategic approach to the organization of space at different levels of scale became more prevalent. Increasingly, it is being assumed that the solutions to complex problems depend on the ability to combine the creation of strategic visions with short-term actions. The creation of strategic visions implies the design of shared futures, and the development and promotion of common assets. Moreover, all of this requires accountability within a time and budgetary framework and the creation of awareness for the systems of power. Delivering on these new demands implies the development of an adapted strategic planning capacity and a shift in planning style in which the stakeholders are becoming more actively involved in the planning process on the basis of a joint definition of the action situation and of the sharing of interests, aims, and relevant knowledge. In this paper I aim to provide building blocks for such an ‘alternative’ strategic (spatial) planning approach. It is based on two different...

Strategic (Spatial) Planning Reexamined

This paper adds to the literature on the ‘performance’ rather than the ‘conformance’ of plans, relating the arguments to an issue that is under‐researched: the evaluation of communicative planning. With the ‘IOR‐School’, it argues that the purpose of planning is to improve the quality of decisions. To establish how plans can do that, the paper looks at the interaction between the maker of a plan and those responsible for subsequent decisions as a process of communication. Drawing inspiration from literature according an inalienable role to the reader of a text in interpreting it, the paper proposes a modified design for performance research.

Evaluating communicative planning: A revised design for performance research

There are a number of different criteria for measuring the success of plans in planning. In the planning literature there is a debate about the criterion of conformance (that is, whether spatial development is according to plan) as opposed to performance (that is, whether the plan has shown the way to better decisionmaking), which is, in fact, different from performance measurement. In this paper both criteria are applied to measure the success of Dutch national concentration policies in the “Fourth Memorandum on Spatial Planning—Plus”. The author shows that the urban containment policies conform well to the plan but perform badly in terms of improving current decisionmaking on the stagnation of housing production in the Netherlands. Moreover, the present stagnation of housing production is planned stagnation. With this result, the author shows that conformance and performance are independent criteria for measuring planning success, and that plans (as set out in the “Fourth Memorandum on Spatial Planning—...

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Stagnation in housing production: another success in the Dutch `planner's paradise'?

In The Netherlands, national urban regeneration policies are undergoing a radical process of decentralisation. Many major national funds are concentrated in an Investment Budget for Urban Regeneration (IUR) and are decentralised to 30 major cities and the 12 provinces for the smaller municipalities. Establishing the IUR is seen as an important precondition for regeneration policies in the Dutch context. The paper discusses the capacity of local government to be the central government agent for the urban regeneration policies being promoted by the IUR. Decentralising urban regeneration policies involves more than decentralising the budget. The domain of local government must have sufficient capacity to engage in the policies decentralised by national government.

Local Government and the Decentralisation of Urban Regeneration Policies in The Netherlands

According to a 1994 law, 'urbanising agents', which can be either public land-development agencies or private companies selected by public procurement, are responsible for infrastructure provision in the region of Valencia. Landowners are obligated to collaborate with the urbanising agent, pay the costs of the infrastructure and cede land for public infrastructure and facilities. In return, they may build on the serviced plots. The law has increased building activities and the model has diffused to most other Spanish regions. This case shows that reducing the transaction costs of assembling land and divesting landowners of the option of waiting can breach stagnation in the production of serviced plots without compromising on financial issues.

Lessons from Valencia: Separating Infrastructure Provision from Land Ownership

It is important to find a tool to be found that is capable of fulfilling specific functions (such as land assembly, self-finance, the protection of social capital, with results obtainable within a certain time) in approaches related to the renewal of urban built-up areas. This paper discusses whether land readjustment (LR) can be such a tool by analyzing whether it performs better than traditional urban renewal processes in Turkey, and whether LR may be an instrument in different contexts of renewal. This paper focuses on three built-up housing areas with different characteristics, and is based on the results of two different questionnaire surveys. The first survey was conducted in municipalities in both metropolitan areas and large cities in Turkey and covered specific urban renewal projects. The second survey was distributed to residents from some renewal project areas including three built-up housing areas with different characteristics in Istanbul. All discussions contribute to an improved understanding of the potential of the LR method as a tool for urban renewal projects.

Willem K. Korthals Altes

Papers

Evaluating communicative planning: A revised design for performance research

Stagnation in housing production: another success in the Dutch `planner's paradise'?

Local Government and the Decentralisation of Urban Regeneration Policies in The Netherlands

Lessons from Valencia: Separating Infrastructure Provision from Land Ownership

Potential Application of Land Readjustment Method in Urban Renewal: Analysis for Turkey