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Robert Cowley, University of Westminster, UK
My title is, of course, a provocation. I don’t seriously advocate a wholesale return to ‘top-down’ modernist planning. But I want here to outline a series of tensions between the idea of planning and the goal of urban sustainability. I propose that, in the absence of their resolution, a less extravagant set of ambitions may enable more productive approaches to our global future, and that top-down planning may – in certain circumstances – play a useful role. The discussion considers the case of Sejong City, currently under construction in South Korea.
It would seem eccentric to refute the attractiveness of the goal of sustainability more generally, even if its concrete meaning and implications have remained elusive. While, though, sustainability explicitly asserts our responsibility towards the future, its global rise as an agenda has coincided with a loss of faith in our ability to ‘plan’ anything in a traditional sense. Planning has come to appear hubristic (Van Assche & Verschraegen, 2008); our contemporary sensibility renders the world as complex, uncertain, and non-linear (Chandler, 2014a). The ‘city’, meanwhile, has become an increasingly powerful imaginary, concentrating our hopes for the future (Caprotti, 2015), with urban sustainability initiatives being increasingly ‘mainstreamed’ globally in recent years (Joss, 2011; Joss et al., 2013). But the often eulogistic rhetoric of contemporary city-level policy may obscure the fuzziness of its imagined target. If cities are quintessentially complex entities, the real, emergent city will always exceed the horizon of the planned one; no city will ever be sustainable in the ways envisioned.
Fundamentally, urban planning continues to provide “a simple and highly structured view of the world and how to act in the face of inherent complexity” (Allmendinger, 2002:42). Especially in the developing world, traditional technocratic ‘masterplanning’ approaches prevail (Watson, 2009). And yet it has also gradually shifted over time to embrace more communicative, inclusive practices, and from technocratic positivism towards a valorisation of contextually embedded discursive truths, reflecting the broader displacement of top-down ‘government’ by multi-actor practices of ‘governance’. But if it has thereby become “underpinned by an anti-realist ontology” (Harrison, 2014:65), its “capacity to engage meaningfully with the materiality of space” (ibid) may be diminished. As a ‘wicked’ problem, climate change may invite non-linear, pragmatic modes of problem-solving; but as a very real and material one, it also demands urgent and substantial actions.
Perhaps we should reject the idea of planning altogether. The rise of ‘DIY’ urbanism (see eg: Iveson, 2013; Finn, 2014), for example, seems well aligned with the “growing shift in policy-thinking, away from finite and deterministic ‘outcomes’ and towards autonomous open-ended processes” (Chandler, 2014b). But the unguided