Appunti Planning theory

Planning theory and planning practice

25.09.2025

E. Alexander (2022) on planning, planning theories, and practices: a critical reflection

There are at least three fields.

Reflection about planning theories and practices, which type of theories are linked to them.

Planning is mainly linked to practice.

Epistemic perspective: different approaches to knowledge, the role of planners has changed during time.

Planners are doing very different things… planning as the link between knowledge and action (Friedmann)… planning as a rational choice (Davidoff)… planning as “the guidance of future action” (Forester)… planning is what planners do (Vickers).

The futility of defining planning suggests that there is no planning as a recognizable practice, but planning is a multiscalar set of diverse practices.

Is planning a practice, and if so, what kind of practice is it?

If planning is diverse practices, what does this imply? What kind of practice are these?

Three kinds of planning practices

• Generic planning: What people do when they are planning.
• (Something) planning: Knowledge-centered planning practices, for example, spatial, environmental, or transportation planning.
• Real planning: Specific planning practices in particular context.

For the academy, recognizing that concentrations are the specialized practices that are planning can help to balance between the demands and “generalist” cores.

For planning practitioners: this model’s main implications concern planners chiefly.

“Planners” can be mobilizers, mediators, or entrepreneurs, and planners’ skills in these roles may help them to succeed.

But first, planners are professionals: spatial, environmental, transportation, or community development planners contributing their knowledge and experience in the participative process of planning for collective action.

Planning is not a practice, but a set of diverse practices in a fractal multiscalar hierarchy linking different kinds of practices to different levels of planning theories.

A group’s practices as enactment of its culture (Bourdieu).

Understanding practice

One descriptive understanding of practice:

Practices as “the patterns and regularities… (that) people learn… are the best ways… toward the fulfilment of their purposes” (Turner).

A normative one:

“Actors share a practice if their actions are answerable to norms of correct or incorrect practice” (Rouse).

1 Normative = something that has to be done in a certain way, it says how things should be.

Practice means more than simple skill or routine task performance, but involves specialized knowledge and expertise (Knorr-Cetina).

An example of transformation of epistemic culture in planning happened as planners’ professional and knowledge bases changed from the “design professions” in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries to a social sciences-based rational paradigm in the mid-20^th century.

Identifying knowledge-centered planning practices

1. Tools: The (something) planner’s distinctive contribution in the co-construction of knowledge for collective decision-making and action.
2. Epistemic object (for practices in substantive fields, for example, spatial planning, environmental, transportation and community planning): The specific object of planning intervention related to the (something) planning practice.
3. Practice (for types or forms of planning, for example, advocacy planning, strategic planning, and e-planning): The distinctive elements characterizing the real-life practice or (something) planning.
4. Context: The typical arenas in which (something) planning is practiced and the institutional contexts of (something) planning, with special attention to (something) planners’ real-life workplaces. The institutionalization of (something) planning itself is sufficient (but not necessary), evidence in knowledge diffusion (e.g. journals), education (e.g. specialized programs), professionalization (e.g. professional associations), and practice (e.g. recruitment).

Planning theories

At the highest level of abstraction and generally, there is a “planning” practice that can be described and theorized.

This is planning as “the organized nexus of activity” generating actions that intervene in the world.

As planning theory is supposed to be a theory of practice, theories of “planning” practice will be at the same level of abstraction as the subject…

Several sets of planning theories, each related to a recognized knowledge-centered planning practice, theories of:

• Spatial planning.
• Social planning.
• Regional planning.
• Transportation planning.
• Community development planning.

These (something) planning theories are procedural and substantive, and, since they relate to knowledge-centered practices that are defined as normative, they include normative theories too.

Framing the field of spatial planning theories

• Knowing what: The object of spatial planning is human activities in space and their environment; for special purposes, the land-property market can serve as a surrogate.
• Knowing where: The context for spatial planning in the social-institutional environment of spatial planners’ practice.
• Knowing how: Spatial planning tools are the concepts, methods, and skills needed for effective practice.
• Knowing why: This question takes various forms.

2 - Real planning practices are the subjects of most planning research, which is the base for (something) planning theories: theories in (something) planning that relate to a substantive epistemic object.

Planning-related empirical research is drawn from a wide range of fields, from neighbourhood segregation in social geography, through housing markets in urban economics, to local government models in public administration.

Which theory for what kind of practice?

Awareness of the differences between “planning” and planning theories and practices might engender better planning theories.

Designing planning programs will be easier with a simple goal for core curricula: to give students the essential competences for “planning” practice.

Practicing planners can content themselves with challenging roles: urban, environmental, community, transportation-, or e-planners contributing their knowledge, understanding, and experience in the collective co-construction of knowledge for action that is planning.

Technocratic planning

30.1.10.2025

Part 1. First attempts at framing planning as a (theoretical and) practical discipline in the US.

Part 2. The disciplinary order of planning.

Older rules

A negative regulation is one that says what couldn’t be done (like London in Middle Ages).

Some form of urban design linked to monumental spaces (fit monumental in an urban area in terms of perspective, dimensions…).

Buildings cannot be higher than the church.

Technocratic planning: the idea of planning based on the power force of technique.

How did this form of planning start to emerge, mostly in the US?

Chicago - High density

Città d’inizio ’900: tram elettrici, carri trainati da cavalli carichi di merci, carretti e una folla enorme sui marciapiedi. Intorno palazzi alti e fili aerei dei tram, con un po’ di foschia/smog.

Street with many uses: trading, horses, transports, annoying intersection, traffic, congestion, pedestrian, maybe polluted.

Fairly dense environment with mid-use buildings.

Train station: steam coming out from trains, located in an industrial area, buildings (houses or factories) and chimneys.

Lines out to dry clothes: people use all the open space. Fairly dense situations in an urban area with many floors and many windows, and of course also many clothes.

Inside and crowded space, people were doing different things in the same moment and space (sleeping, eating, standing…).

City fire, there is a river, buildings (industrial, productive or residential) and bridges, and a lot of people escaping and bringing things with them.

How the city is changing between 19^th and 20^th centuries, because of the industrial revolution.

The industrial revolution city

The main differences between industrial revolution city and the precedent one:

• Cities were places of trade.
• They existed because of the market (goods come from the countryside).
• There was a place of self-government.
• Cities were full of functions.

Then… Technological transformations.

Social, institutional and political order transformations: industrial city needed a mass of people.

Concentrations of people in cities.

Gradual or quick growth.

Unhealthy conditions.

Dirty and dangerous.

Congestions of public spaces or houses.

A threat for all the population: epidemic.

Organized strikes.

Rhetoric: what is the city becoming?

This city could become dysfunctional also for the productive dimension.

Definition of planning

“It is simply the exercise of such foresight as well promote the orderly and sightly development of a city and its environs along rational lines, with proper regard for the health and convenience of the citizens and for the commercial and industrial advancement of the community. It does not mean what has been so often called the “city beautiful”. It does not mean or even include municipal art, nor does it, in the author’s opinion, include the architecture of public or semi-public buildings.” (N. Lewis, The Planning of the Modern City, 1916)

So, the city has to be in order and beautiful.

Sightly: increase the quality of streets, of buildings and open spaces.

Rational lines: connection between knowledge and actions (shared criteria based on scientific studies).

Order: an idea about how city and society have to be organized.

City beautiful movement: visual quality of the city, has mainly to do with the quality.

“To be more explicit, the problems of city planning divide themselves up into a number of groups, which deal with manufacturing, commerce, transportation by land and by water, traffic, transit, housing in town and in the suburbs, recreation for young and old, city administration, financing legal matters and so forth”.

Introduction of the idea of land use: intervening in city means you have to deal with urban functions, divided if there are so many things, let’s try to divide them →

“This means that the actual features dealt with factories, warehouses, stores, office buildings, ports, docks, railway dwellings, parks, playgrounds, city administration buildings, schools, libraries, museums, hospitals, jails, asylums, and lighting systems, and thousand and one decorative features of our streets and public property (Ford…)

Planning in the US

• The devotion of the gridiron plan (a way to organize settlements based on Roman’s ideal with two orthogonal axes).
• Monumental projects, many of them imposing and beautiful (American cities needed an identifying regeneration, also for political representation), and traffic improvements (traffic made cities less productive).
• Scientific provision for recreation (for the first time. At the beginning it was difficult to find recreation spaces for citizens. Recreation is not only pleasant, but it also linked to sciences, so it must be in order and linked to health and safe, so tangible benefits).

The city-planning movement may be said to date from 1893, Chicago “white city” for the international exposition (Lewis, 1916).

Cities began to be white, sunny, prospective, in order, with water, green areas and monuments.

Planning as foresight or remedy/correction of mistakes

“When conditions due to these mistakes or misfits become intolerable by reason of public inconvenience through obstruction of free movement and actual financial loss from consequent delays, and when the ugliness which is inseparable from lack of orderliness is realized, the demand for a correction of the defects in the plan are insistent, and the public is willing to pay the price, however great it may be”. (Lewis, 1916)

Cities are a remedy to some problems, inefficient like ugliness, chaos and disorder, so, they must be → corrected.

Price: limitation of private property (!!! also here planning can say what it must or mustn’t be done), raising of taxation, slowing down of productive activities, expensive costs (land expropriation).

Planning as foresight

City planning simply means getting ready for the future city growth.

It is the guidance into proper channels of a community’s impulses towards a larger and a broader life (…)

It is the firm base for the building of a healthy and happy community (McAnemy, in Lewis, 2016).

A system approach to planning: the main components

• The transportation system.
• The street system.
• Parks and recreation facilities.
• Public buildings and civic centres.
• The railroad in relation with the street system.

Open questions

Restrictions.

Introduction of functional zoning is legitimate?

Restrictions on ratios, heights etc. should be site-specific or not (old city-new city developments)?

Physical definition.

Physical setting: grid or not, the relevance of density, compact vs. “garden” city.

US/Europe.

Differences between US, UK and Continental European cities (protection of private property, role of central state vs. local authorities: in some cases, plans were approved from a national level) (Lewis, 11916).

The disciplinary order of planning: the rise of the planning mentality

“How could the rules for efficient capital expansion and circulation be internalized in the fabric and form of the city – not as exemplary architectural sitings, spectacular fairs, or unrighteous individuals but by introjecting a disciplinary order within and under the surface of urban form in the most efficient and economical manner.” (Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, 1983)

The need to plan wasn’t related to the welfare of inhabitants but to the fact that city was an obstacle for the production and to the capitalistic growth and circulation.

How is it possible to convince local communities, systems and inhabitants that this type of order is needed? The city became itself a tool for the capitalistic production.

In Italy, environmental plan and heritage protection plan (to care about something that is recognized as a 1 collective good) are made by the State.

Metaphor by Foucault

Foucaultian perspective: the city and the plague.

“A political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions: not laws transgressed, but penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary function of power… the plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had its medical and political correlative discipline” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 1977)

As the industrial city considered something as chaotic, there is a need to penetrate in everyday situations.

A new disciplinary order

“So too again the chaos of the city with its simultaneity of land uses, jumble of vehicles, multitudes of people, corrupt politicians, and labour unrest, there stood an ideal: the city as a perfectly disciplined spatial order”.

“The substitution of order in the place of chaos, the control of the urban whole required the development of a concatenated specialization: comprehensive city planning. Thus, a new set of needs came forward for which planning would be the response: to impose disciplinary order and supervision direction over the spatial order of the American city”.

Objectives

“The elements of the American city had been functionally integrated into a whole: what mattered most of all was:

• How one part related to another and.
• How they cooperated in support of the maintenance and reproduction of capital accumulation within the city.

Which governance setting?

Voluntary improvement promoted by philanthropist and state.

Intervention and public welfare provisions join forces in American cities.

• Regulatory role of the state vs laissez faire capitalism (much more legitimized from today).
• Role of the central state “closer to the knowledge of general principles, less accessible to the political demands of local protests”.

Tensions and conflicts: space and time

A Marxian critical perspective:

“While capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse (…) it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e., to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another” (Capital by its very nature drives beyond every spatial barrier).

Building and transportation

“In an era of imperialist ventures, when America was expanding its market to the whole world, every spatial barrier that threatened this development had to be overcome.

Isard called this the “transport-building cycle” (roughly 20 years).

Even with rapid economic growth, not all of the needs of production and consumption could be met by individual capitalists, yet not all of these needs were shifted off to the state”.

State rule and private property

“Toward such disciplined spatial order, the state began to plan and financially aid collective infrastructure and service needs.

One of the impediments the state faced was the private ownership of property. In order to provide collective infrastructure needs, the state required land in centralized locations at costs that did not overburden its source of revenue.

But private appropriation of these same lands could always find more profitable and therefore costly uses for the land”.

The city as a tool

“The process of planning conceives of the city as an instrument of capitalist development. Now the nature of the city is to be a functional tool, a machine useful to the process of production.

To increase the utility of each parcel of land, to fix their uses and regulate their development means to infuse the whole with a disciplinary order: constant assessment of changing land patterns, classification of these uses, and a distribution over time to obtain in the future a more rational whole”.

Which order?

Disciplinary control operates through