KIMMO LAPINTIE
yhdyskuntasuunnittelun professori
WEB-JULKAISUT
Governing Life in Space. Expertise and Power in Urban and Regional Planning. Paper delivered at the 2003 AESOP/ACSP Congress "Network Societies: A New Context for Planning” Leuven ( Belgium ) July 8th - 12th 2003
Kimmo Lapintie
Professor of Urban and Regional Planning
Department of Architecture
Helsinki University of Technology
Abstract
The role of planning expertise and the planning profession has been a subject of much debate in planning theory, in particular since the so-called communicative turn in planning. The communicative theories have been criticized for their insufficient analysis of power relations in the planning process, and an over-optimistic view of the possibilities of consensus in social life. Even those authors who have addressed this issue have often neglected the power of planning expertise itself. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this role of planning expertise from the point of view of one of its key characteristics, the generation and controlling of space. This will make it possible to address the meaning of physical or land-use planning to the contemporary citizen, whose social role is more or less determined by his/her networking possibilities. How is this related to the increasing risks in the labour market, and how should planning redirect itself in this new situation, as communities tend to include both networks loosely connected to their physical surroundings, and redefined local communities with less options to choose? The paper will discuss the contemporary role of the different planning experts and their historical roots, using as a case the Finnish situation. The difficulties found in developing new tools for communication in planning are analysed from the general perspective mentioned above, i.e. the role of planning as a way of governing life in space.
1. The role of planning expertise: from aesthetic expertise to communication
The reflective understanding of the role of the planning practitioner has been in turmoil over the last decades – an in a sense even longer. One may even say that the 20th Century discussion in planning theory, extending from physical or architectural emphasis in the early years of the century to the rational and procedural reorientation in the 1950's and 1960's, and over to the so-called communicative turn in the 1980's and 1990's, has been preoccupied with the kind of knowledge and expertise needed for planning. According to the famous classification by Nigel Taylor (1998), planning theory has gone through two major paradigm shifts during the post-WW2 period, one from physical planning to systems thinking, and the other from scientific expertise to communicative planning. This is a simplification, of course, since Taylor did not consider the local or national characteristics of planning practice, which have varied considerably even in the Western European countries, to say nothing of the differences between, for instance, the Western Europe and the former Soviet and socialist countries, the United States, and Asian countries. Globalisation has implied a growing interest in comparing the different planning systems, and thus we should avoid too hasty generalisations. In chapter 3 I will compare this general vision to the Finnish history of the planning professions to illustrate my point.
However, it is fair to say that most of the local planning cultures have met challenges related to planning expertise. Traditional aesthetic expertise has been questioned in terms of social scientific, management, or ecological expertise, depending on the problems and issues that have become urgent. There has been an ongoing professional competition around planning: Who is allowed to define the essential issues of urban and regional development, and on which terms? In this debate, even such key concepts as ‘the environment' have remained open, to be defined and redefined by the experts in position – or those reaching for a position in planning.
The communicative turn in planning has added a new dimension to this dilemma. Informed, for instance, by the constructivist and relativist tendencies in social sciences and in philosophy, the very role of social expertise has bee put into question. Is there really a possibility for any kind of expertise – be that architectural, ecological, or social scientific – to ‘represent' the interests or values of the citizens? The basic assumption of the rational planning tradition, that the political and social dimension of planning could be taken care of by the politically determined objectives of planning, is no longer an available option. We already understand that the way these objectives are followed – even the detailed features of the actual physical or spatial plan – are no less political or socially meaningful for the people who in the end physically meet the resulting built environment. Thus the planning practitioner with his or her professional educational background and experience faces each time the basic challenge of legitimation: on what grounds does he or she claim authority over the environment of other people.
The communicative turn is in a way an attempt to answer to this dilemma: instead of an expertise based on ‘objective' knowledge, the planning practice should be based on process management and communicative skills. If the different stakeholders are allowed to participate in the planning process, they will also commit themselves to the strategy and the solutions that will be followed in the plan. In order for this to happen, the experts will have to give up their professional jargon and also adopt new communicative tools in planning, thus avoiding the ‘crowding out' of alternative ways of understanding and talking about the environment. Since the citizens will hardly allow only apparent involvement, they will also have to be allowed to influence the planning solutions.
The most common reference in this context has naturally been Jürgen Habermas and his theory of communicative action. On the face of it, it really seems like Habermas could give the necessary theoretical foundation for communicative planning: Instead of the instrumental means-ends rationality of rational planning, planning should strive for communicative rationality, that is, harmonizing social action based on a common situation definition (Habermas 1984, 286). However, one will soon notice that if Habermas would really be taken seriously in planning theory, a lot of theorising would be needed to make his concepts applicable to planning. For Habermas, namely, communicative action is an option available for members of the same life-world, whereas the bureaucratic and economic systems are pervaded by success-oriented action, constantly threatening to colonize the life-world of immediate social relations.
Thus in order to apply Habermas one would first need to show that planning, which is clearly part of the system (the system of controlling land use and the real estate market), could somehow be understood also as a stage for communicative action. The communicative turn in planning would thus be a sort of mixture of the system and the life-world, where the life-world would start (at least in planning) colonizing the system. Habermas is not himself very helpful at this point: On the contrary, he maintains that the two types of action are mutually exclusive:
“In identifying strategic action and communicative action as types, I am assuming that concrete actions can be classified from these points of view. I do not want to use the terms ‘strategic' and ‘communicative' only to designate two analytic aspects under which the same action could be described – on the one hand as a reciprocal influencing on one another by opponents acting in a purposive-rational manner and, on the other hand, as a process of reaching understanding among members of a life-world. Rather, social actions can be distinguished according to whether the participants adopt either a success-oriented attitude or one oriented to reaching understanding.” (ibid. p. 286)
Since planning deals with major economic assets and is related to the governance of peoples use of land and the resulting environmental, e.g. health effects, it is evident that planning is usually characterized by “reciprocal influencing on one another by opponents acting in a purposive-rational manner.” This follows merely from the fact that many of the stakeholders in the planning process are not individuals but firms and other organisations competing with each other in the open market. Thus it is rather surprising that few planning theorists referring to Habermas have tried to solve this dilemma, by addressing the specificity of planning as a social activity with the Habermasian vocabulary. What is more often seen is an attempt to describe planning as part of the life-world, as a kind of everyday activity of the stakeholders.
For instance, as Sager (1998, p. 7) points out the importance of dialogue, he writes that “[d]ialogue, close ego-confirming relationships, and the experience of being able to make a difference when issues are discussed (democracy) are important to the development of mature personalities. Hence they have intrinsic value independent of any goal-oriented strategy” he is certainly right, but it remains unclear whether this type of human growth is relevant to planning. Participating in municipal planning is hardly an essential part of “ego-confirming” relationships for most individual people, and for those who participate in a professional manner (e.g. the developers or the leaders of NGOs) planning is perhaps closer to strategic action to defend certain interest than a way of “existing” in society (Lapintie 2002a). However, Sager is certainly right in maintaining that this basic need is essential for adult citizens, and if they cannot satisfy this need in their principal social networks, planning will certainly meet this urge to “make a difference.” I will below return to this possibility, which may be related to the changing role of non-spatial social networks in the contemporary globalized economy.
2. The rationality of power, and the power of rationality
Even if we pass the question whether the Habermasian concept of communicative action is applicable even in the immediate life-world situation, it is certainly Utopian in the context of ordinary planning. Utopian visions have not been uncommon in the history of planning theory, but they have always been problematic because of their self-confirming nature. If planning theory starts with a Utopian-normative description of what planning ideally should be like, and this is then projected to the everyday reality of planning practice, the result is often self-evident: reality does not correspond to the ideal, and the suggestion by the theorist is that it should be made more close to it. If open and inclusive communication is not carried out, for instance, then we suggest that it would be nice if it would (Rajanti 2003). This type of research will hardly help either the planning practitioner or the other stakeholders in their daily work.
One of the well-known critiques of this sort was put forward by Bent Flyvbjerg in his book “Rationality and Power” (Flyvbjerg 1998). He wanted to show, by analysing in detail the workings of the local power regime in the city of Aalborg , that the rationality represented by the planning agency could not resist the traditional power centres, such as the Chamber of Industry and Commerce and the local newspaper with their Conservative political allies. The results were hardly surprising for anybody who had actually worked in planning practice, but his slogans, such as “rationality yielded to power” and “the more power, the less rationality” succeeded in starting an ongoing debate in planning theory about the role of power in the planning process. Have we failed to address the most essential driving forces of planning with our Utopian attitude in planning theory? Why should we discuss about inclusive communication in planning, if the most important stakeholders have no interest in communicating? If a political decision is secretly made, only arguments supporting it will be accepted. Thus the situation is very seldom really open-ended, which is the basic requirement for communicative planning.
Flyvbjerg's theoretical intentions were, however, more ambitious than merely pointing out this common situation. He wanted to question the whole tradition of the Enlightenment, Habermas included, and replace it with the alternative tradition of Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Foucault. The basic motivation for this shift was the need to study planning as it is actually practiced, as real history and rationality, and not the idealized Utopias of the Enlightenment. By suggesting these authors, Flyvbjerg did indeed open a perspective for planning theory that has not been widely used in spite of the vast literature that has already been produced around these post-modernist, post-structuralist, and Nietzschean discourses. However, this new realm of thought also had implications that partly undermined his original attempt to describe a case where “rationality yielded to power.” In Foucault's vocabulary, for instance, this sort of conclusion does not make any sense, since power and rationality are indistinguishable: all forms of power have their own rationality and knowledge, and rationality cannot exist outside of the historical immanence of power:
The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn't outside power or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn't the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing in this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. (Foucault 2000, 131)
This is the very essence of the Nietzscheanism that Foucault wanted to cherish: the critique of philosophical “Egyptianism”:
“You ask me about the idiosyncrasies of philosophers?...There is their lack of historical sense, their hatred of even the idea of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are doing a thing honour when they dehistoricise it, sub specie aeterni – when they make a mummy of it. All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has escaped from their hands alive.” (Nietzsche 1978, p. 35 )
But if this perspective of power/knowledge is used, we simply have one power/knowledge yielding to another power/knowledge – not a very surprising or provocative conclusion. Not surprisingly, then, Flyvbjerg did not make far-reaching conclusions from his theoretical foundations, but he rather satisfied himself with the minutiae of his case – which is why his study has been of great value to planning researchers as an important source of empirical material. In his later book, Flyvbjerg even went so far as to deny the relevance of theory altogether in research based on case studies. The case should provide an understanding directly, without providing an answer to a theory-based research-question: “A successful narrative does not allow the question to be raised at all. The narrative has already supplied the answer before the question is asked. The narrative itself is the answer.” (Flyvbjerg 2001, p. 86)
But what if we did take seriously the perspective opened by Flyvbjerg's (and Nietzsche's and Foucault's) critique and attempt to give a theoretical description of what actually goes on in planning – not the mummy-like description of idealized and Utopian thinkers, but a historical understanding of the planning practice? This would clearly mean that we concentrate not only on the contextual power sources of this practice, but also on the social position of the planner, his historical and local existence and potency. This is the theme that Flyvbjerg systematically avoided in Rationality and Power, to the effect that he seemed to assume a kind of ‘supreme rationality' only within reach of the planner (Lapintie 2002, p. 38). In a Nietzschean perspective, this morally supreme rationality should be replaced by an immanent rationality directly bound with the social position of the planner.
3. The Power of the Professions
An individual expert would hardly be able to influence urban or regional development by virtue of his knowledge or experience alone, no matter how distinguished it would be. This influence is only actualised through his or her profession. It is thus necessary to study the role of the different professions in the national and local settings if we want to understand the way that expertise is formed and used. As Terence Johnson has remarked, the profession is not only an occupation, it is a form of professional control (Johnson 1981, 44-47). The profession has to be able to exclude other experts than its members from the relevant commissions, and this exclusion needs specific criteria (Konttinen 1991, 14). These criteria are usually related to professional education and experience, but it is not self-evident which type of knowledge will be considered relevant for a particular commission. This is very much based on the strategic success of the professional organisations: The type of expertise that the profession represents has to be legitimised as central, at the same time as other types of expertise are deemed marginal. This legitimisation is usually gained in historically important turning points in society.
I will take as an example the dominant role of the architectural profession in Finland during the 20 th Century to illustrate the specificity of professional control. In Finland , the planners don't form a unified profession, but the planning and relevant expert commissions are distributed among architects, landscape architects, surveying engineers, geographers and social scientist, as well as designers with a B.Sc degree (the so-called construction architects, rakennusarkkitehdit). This distribution is not even, however. There are no exact figures of the experts actually working in the field, but in our recent survey sent to the members of the different professional organisations (Lapintie & Puustinen, forthcoming), 59% of the respondents were architects (M.Sc), 32 % surveying engineers (M.Sc.), 6 % .construction architects (B.Sc.), and only 3 % had some other degree. As the figures indicate, the architects' profession has been able to gain and establish control over most of the commissions, but it has also been able to define the relevant types of expertise. This was possible through a series of intentional and strategic turns, which also included exclusion or marginalisation of other professions.
At the end of the 19 th Century, this was not yet the case (Salokannel 1993, 66). Although town planning was still the task of the National Superintendant Office and regional county architects in the 1850's, from the 1870's on the architects lost their interest in planning, and the commissions were made by surveying and other engineers. This coincided with the birth of the liberal-bourgeois society, which marked the beginning of modern Finland . The turning point in the architects' strategy was the planning of Töölö residential area in Helsinki, when the architects Lars Sonck and Bertel Jung, inspired by Camillo Sitte's ideas, criticized the engineer-led town planning practice and grid as the dominant urban form. The most important text was Sonck's article “Modern vandalism: the town plan of Helsinki ” in the journal Finsk Tidskrift (Sonck 1898, 262-287). The article started a heavy debate among professionals and politicians, and it resulted in the first town planning competition in Finland in 1898 (Salokannel 1981, 66-67). The resulting town plan of Töölö was to represent the Finnish application of Sitte's ideas, but it also meant that town planning was again defined as a form of art, as urban design. It is interesting to notice that, at the time, architects had no education in town planning in their curriculum, but they were still able to convince the public and decision makers that their general artistic ability (which the engineers did not have) was necessary in town planning. Only afterwards was town planning made into an independent subject in architectural education, and the first professor of town planning started his work during the second word war.
The war also marked another turning point in the architects' strategy. So far planning had been concentrated in towns and cities, where most of the construction took place. The wide countryside was left alone, and its development was basically determined according to the needs of agriculture and other primary production. The war and reconstruction period changed this: The usual commissions in building design came to a halt, but new types of commission opened. These included the organisation of the reoccupied areas (lost to the Soviet Union during the first part of the war, the so-called Winter War) and, after the war, the organisation of the settlements for veterans and refugees from the areas occupied by the Soviet Union (Nupponen 1993, 2000). This meant that the whole country became an object for planning, and it was important for the architects to demonstrate that their expertise was suitable also for this large-scale planning. Alvar Aalto, one of the key figures in this reorientation of the profession, succeeded in launching the first voluntary regional plan in Kokemäenjoki river valley in 1942-43, including eight municipalities in the region around the town of Pori . Aalto had good connections to the local industrial elite, in particular Harry Gullichsen, the president of the paper firm A.Ahlsröm Ltd operating in the region. Gullichsen represented a kind of technocratic movement in the Finnish industry, including both rationalisation of production and the community around it, e.g. worker housing.
According to Nupponen, the architects had a double strategy in this situation (Nupponen 2000, 180-184). They reinforced their relationship with the state by defining the organisation of the built environment as part of the national project that war and reconstruction represented. At the same time, they were able to convince the new industrial elite that their expertise also suited to the technocratic project of rationalising production and reproduction. This was made, for instance, through the active involvement of the Finnish Association of Architects in the development of standardised building products, as well as standardised design of housing for the veterans and refugees. In this way they could importantly extend their customer base to include, for instance, rural municipalities and individual working class households and farmers. Following Aalto's initiative, regional planning developed from a voluntary organisation of land-use into a mandatory form of comprehensive planning, first called seutukaavoitus and, from 2000, maakuntakaavoitus .
The situation in the beginning of the 21 st Century is again marked by important contextual changes that have challenged the architectural profession. The EU membership and the strengthening of local power in building and planning legislation have diminished the role of the state, the traditional ally of the architects. On the other hand, the new Land Use and Building Act has specified that a university degree is required among the qualifications of the urban and regional planner, while leaving it open which kind of degree this could be. As a reaction to this, the professional associations of architects (both M.Sc. and B.Sc. levels), land surveyors, and landscape architects launched a common register of qualified planners in order to specify these qualifications. The marginal groups of planners, such as geographers and social scientists, were thus excluded. In the private sector, the architects' strategies have been less successful: since the earlier standardised commission fees are nowadays illegal, the free market and the diminished role of the state has resulted in a partial ‘proletarisation' of the profession. This was marked specifically during and after the recession of the early 1990s.
We may thus conclude that the professional strategies of the architects included an extension of the spatial governance of the towns and the countryside, by defining these as suitable aesthetic objects. As Aalto put it, the architect's commissions extended “from the door handle to the comprehensive plan.” Since the establishment of this definition was not self-evident, the profession had to rely on the contemporary trends in society at large, such as birth of the liberal-bourgeois society (which strengthened the private sector), and the national and technocratic projects during the war and reconstruction periods. It is clear that this history could have been different, and it has been different in other countries. There is no self-evident functional role for any of the experts involved in planning.
4. The ‘modern crofters', and the network society
But how was this extension of spatial control possible at the local level? Why did people give up so easily their right to determine land-use in their environment, to the extent that the whole country is nowadays planned (at least at the regional level), and most construction and other major changes in the environment are subject to licence? How is this compatible with the original rural tradition of local power based on land-ownership and the ability to determine the use of one's own land, including construction? The traditional class society in the 19 th and early 20 th Century Finland was very much based on this power of the landowner, and the least powerful members of society were the landless rural workers.
To be frank, it has to be added that the victory of the architects' profession was not as straightforward as it might seem from the history above. There was and still is an important tension between individual rural landowners and politicians on the one hand, and the planning architects on the other. The architects have also concentrated their activities in the towns and cities, thus leaving the countryside partly to the surveying engineers. However, we may still conclude that there has been an important shift in spatial control from the individual citizen and rural dweller to the expert.
One of the basic national strategies of the independent Finland (after the 1918 internal conflict) was to enforce national integration by letting tenants and the landless to purchase small pieces of land for dwelling and farming. This happened through a series of land reforms, from the so-called ‘Crofter Liberation Act' in 1919 to Lex Kallio and Lex Pulkkinen (which included the landless rural workers) and to the housing acts of 1936, 1941 and 1945. These reforms meant that both state and privately owned land of major landowners had to be sold for housing purposes, either voluntarily or through compulsory purchase. Thus the reforms at the same time reinforced the social meaning of landownership and started the still dominant tradition of state-led housing policy in Finland . During the subsequent industrialisation and urbanisation periods (in particular in the 1960s and 1970s), the policy of creating small farms as well as the equal distribution of housing around the country proved to be an economic failure, but the basic objective of maintaining social integration apparently succeeded..
In the contemporary industrialised and urbanised society of wage earners, the centrality of individual small land-ownership has naturally diminished, but it can still be seen in, for instance, the fact that home-ownership is the dominant tenure, and perhaps even in the large number of recreational cabins (around 500 000 in a country of 5 million inhabitants). The power of the wage earner is much more based on his wealth (i.e. his power as a consumer), his employment opportunities (i.e. the market value of his workforce), his citizenry (his political rights and the social benefits of the welfare state), and his networking capabilities (friends, relatives, business associates, etc.). Correspondingly, exclusion is no longer characterized by landlessness, but rather by poverty, unemployment, lack of labour-market qualifications, and lack of access to important networks.
What is interesting in these contemporary sources of power is that they have become less and less spatially determined. The urban dweller as a consumer is able to choose his or her place of residence, and with the private car, choose it even very far from his workplace and the services. But he also has to be able to change this decision. He will not be able to make changes or determine the quality of this or that part of his environment, but he will constantly vote with his wallet: if the environment does not satisfy him, he will move elsewhere. Commodification of the environment would appear the direct result of this trend, but not necessarily. The rather homogenous style and quality of the contemporary Finnish urban housing would rather suggest the opposite: the detailed spatial control of the environment, in particular in the urban context and in the larger cities, sill remains unchallenged. Commodification can best be seen in the industrially produced single-family housing and the recreational cabin market, but even these are usually controlled by plans.
Thus modernisation has meant the birth of a ‘modern crofter', the dweller with very little direct control of his or her immediate environment, but whose power is related to his loose connectedness to place. Instead of roots, the modern nomad has aerials. But this is, again, an over-simplification. The modern community still includes very traditional elements that are importantly spatially located, such as raising children, taking care of the elderly, and cherishing the cultural heritage. Moving to another place always means loss of existing human relations, meaningful places, and familiarity of habits and local traditions. The constant readiness to do so also increases uncertainty, in particular with children and the elderly, whose spatial connectedness has always remained stronger than that of the adults.
But we should not forget the other side of the coin, namely those who have less resources and no access to the contemporary nodes of network power. As the labour market has become increasingly unstable, and social exclusion has become a constant phenomenon in the contemporary society, one may suppose that the non-spatial characteristics of dwelling will again be challenged. The modern placeless crofter will again start fighting for his liberation, and the planner will not be left alone in governing life in space.
5. ‘Phronetic Expertise' as a new challenge for communicative planning
Could we use this historical and sociological perspective to analyse the communicative turn and its critique in planning? It does open up a few interesting perspectives. The fact that open, inclusive argumentation has not formed an important, empowering practice in planning – the critique that Flyvbjerg and other have put forward – would start to seem natural. Communication that challenges the power of expertise is not in the interest of the powerful actors of the planning game. Major landowners and others with important resources to put at stake are still relying on direct lobbying and negotiations with major politicians, and open communication would hardly fit in the picture. On the other hand, as the history of the architectural profession in Finland showed, expertise can only establish it power in the planning process through strategic coalitions with these powerful actors and the major political and economic trends. Aalto and the Finnish Association of Architects, in their attempt to establish a new type of regional plan to cover the whole country, formed a coalition with the industrial elite and the state bureaucracy, not the individual dwellers or even the small rural municipalities. This does not mean that the experts would have simply sold their expertise for the highest bid. On the contrary: in order to remain as a profession, an expert group must retain its professional control over its specific area of expertise. It must have knowledge or skill that is not available for everyone, which requires personal commitment and long practice, even physical internalising of knowledge and experience. The aesthetic expertise is a good example of such personal knowledge, such connoisseurship (Polanyi 1957). We may argue whether large regions should be controlled by aesthetic expertise or rather by economic or social expertise, but this is not the point. The very argumentation in planning theory and practice is part of the ongoing debate about the relevance or irrelevance of different types of expertise. There is no ‘innocence' in expertise.
But if the spaceless residents of the contemporary globalised society start reclaiming their power to govern their own space, if they become ‘space-hungry' in the same way as the original crofters became ‘land-hungry', the situation becomes interestingly different. If this is a weak signal of a possible future, then these so-far weak players could become an important political force, in the same sense as the landless were considered as a threat to social integration in the post-civil-war Finland in 1919. But what kind of challenge will this new ‘fifth estate' form to the established planning expertise?
In his book Making Social Science Matter Bent Flyvbjerg suggested the Aristotelian concept of phronesis as the life-boat for social scientist, who in the science wars had again received a major blow from Alan Sokal (Sokal 1996). According to Flyvbjerg, the social scientist should reject the episteme or theory suitable for natural scientists and strive for the forgotten phronesis , which deals with morality and politics, or what is good for man. I will not comment on his philosophy of science in this context, but only point out an important aspect of the type of expertise implied by his ideas. Informed by the writings of Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, Flyvbjerg maintains that true expertise is not based on knowledge of facts or rules, but it is an internalised, intuitive mastery of a field. The expert differs from the competent performer in this intuitive capacity, the capacity to make an informed judgment and act accordingly. The expert chess player or driver are not able to explain how they act, and this is why no real computer-aided expert systems have succeeded to compensate the physical presence of a human expert (Dreyfus & Dreyfus & Athanasiou 1988). By being intuitive, human expertise is also unexplicit, it is based on the power of judgment.
This is especially true of the aesthetic expertise. Ever since Kant, the aesthetic judgment has considered to be non-argumentative, even non-discursive (Mattila 2003). It is often connected to individual creative skills, more often mystified than analysed by aesthetic theory. But if this is so, do we have any reasonable expectations from the communicative process that was supposed to bring a new democratic and inclusive ideal into the planning practice? According to Mattila, we should not try to confine this communication as argumentation, or else we shall lose the possibility of aesthetic expertise in planning and urban design. Planning would rather be in need of aesthetic-creative communication and the respect for the specificity of the place and the different individual judgments that people make of it:
My view is that the tacit habitual aspects of action are important in all dimensions of planning, but the design dimension of planning is still a paradigmatic example of an activity in which tacit habituality is in a central position. Furthermore, it is not only the expertise of designers that is importantly based on habitual background; so are the ways in which the users of the environment use and perceive their environment. Therefore it is worth acknowledging that the possibilities of discursive decision-making are limited within the environmental-aesthetic questions, but that mutual understanding can still be searched for in a non-discursive manner, since artistic and aesthetic activities are a form of communication themselves. (ibid.)
We could agree with this but, but there are still two important problems that remain. For one thing, planning and the way that users of the environment use and perceive it are very different social practices. These are sometimes distinguished by using the concepts of place and space: whereas for the resident the environment is the stage for ordinary and meaningful social action, i.e. his or her place (not including planning, which is a very marginal activity and usually expert-led), for the planner the environment is space divided between different experts and their jurisdictions. A restricted part of this space is given to the planner at a certain time, and after he has made his judgment and determined the way it can be developed, it is then handed over to other experts for implementation. The idea behind communicative or collaborative planning, even based on aesthetic communication, perhaps has the implicit assumption that the planner and the resident could be ‘doing the same thing' or, using the phenomenological vocabulary, live in the same life-world. Considering, for instance, the conditions of inter-subjectivity specified by Alfred Schutz, and used again by Harold Garfinkel in his ethnomethodology, one may raise doubt whether this is possible. These conditions are the inter-changeability of perspectives (you could see the situation from the other's perspective) and the homogeneity of the relevance system (the same features are relevant to what is being done). Apparently neither of these conditions is satisfied in a normal planning process, and it could only be developed towards real collaboration through a long learning process (Lapintie 2002b).
Another problem is related to the distinction between argumentation and rhetoric. The shift of emphasis from argumentative and discursive communication to the use of metaphors and artistic communication could also mean a shift from argumentation to rhetoric. This also means that the basic motivation for developing argumentation in planning is forgotten. While in rhetorical communication you don't have obligations but only skills (how could I best persuade my audience?), in argumentation you will have to commit yourself to an open-ended situation, where reasons are given for standpoints, and protagonists of standpoints (e.g. the planners) are also committed to answer to the critique expressed by antagonists (e.g. the residents). While it is true that the aesthetic dimension of the environment is not captured by this type of rational communication, certainly many other dimensions of it are.
Trying to be loyal to the immanent perspective of this paper, we also have to ask where suggestions like aesthetic collaboration would be located, in the historical sense. Since planning is not a theoretical discipline, theories will influence planning practice only indirectly, by creating connections to established or rising social forces. The position of the aesthetic expertise in the 20 th Century Finnish planning was based on a simultaneous acceptance of dominant social forces and a clear humanistic attitude towards the power of aesthetic judgment, an attitude which was in general respected by the other elites of the Finnish society. Collaborative aesthetic work with the people – in particular with the powerless ones – would represent a new kind of advocacy planning unheard-of in our society. But, as I said before, we still don't know which of the weak signals will become the major trends of the 21 st century, and even strategies like this could find support in a post-globalized world with a more intensive space-connectedness.
References
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