Why governance will make urban design and planning better

Why governance will make urban design and planning better: Dealing with the communicative turn in urban planning and design

Rocco, Roberto

Architecture and The Built Environment

Urbanism

2013-12-31

NUL - New Urban Languages Conference Proceedings: Re-imaging the City after the Knowledge Based Turn, Milan, Italy, 19-21 June 2013 - Designing and planning cities are profoundly political activities. There are no purely value-free or ‘technical’ solutions to urban problems: all decisions in urban development are political decisions insofar they must involve choice, negotiation, friction and divergence and occasionally agreement that enables action. The figure of the neutral and unbiased planner or designer who has ready-made solutions for urban problems is a fallacy. In this article, I explore the concept of governance and its implications for urban planners and designers, enabling them to connect spatial strategies and designs to an understanding of the political economy of places. This ought to enable spatial planners and designers to assign specific roles to different stakeholders involved in specific plans, projects and interventions, hence improving the suitability of their proposals, increasing support and facilitating implementation. But this is not enough: I also argue that planners and designers must reach out to different types of knowledge and get away from their own expert communities in order to gather relevant knowledge that will allow them to perform their tasks better. Including non-expert knowledge in planning and designing processes helps produce more relevant, valid knowledge and counteracts what Foucault called the exclusive discourses of the expert agents. Expert discourses are an integral part of existing structures of power (and sometimes, of oppression). They muffle non-expert voices that are outside power structures and often cannot find channels to be heard. When heard, they are often disqualified. By constructing knowledge in a networked way, including ‘nonexpert’ voices, planners and designers could escape excessively one-sided or biased positions, hence making their proposals more relevant and realistic. In order to do that, they must not only understand governance structures, but must also be able to design new structures where different actors are included in decision-making processes.

governance
knowledge
politics of the city
role of planners and designers
planning foundation

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:39095679-60d5-4460-9274-8ca43a0ae07f

Planum Association

1723-0993

Planum: the Journal of Urbanism, 2 (27), 2013

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2013 Rocco de Campos Pereira, R.C.