Frank Gaffikin

Collaborative Planning in an uncollaborative world

The purpose of this article is to expose the concept of collaborative planning to the reality of planning, thereby assessing its efficacy for informing and explaining what planners `really do and can do. In this systematic appraisal, we begin by disaggregating collaborative planning into four elements that can enlighten such conceptual frameworks: ontology, epistemology, ideology and methodology. These four lenses help delimit and clarify the object of our examination and provide transparent criteria that guide our examination of collaborative plannings strengths and weaknesses. The second part of this article comprises an empirical investigation of planning processes in Northern Ireland, ranging from region-wide to local and from statutory to visionary. Planning efforts in this province make suitable test cases because special care has been invested in participatory deliberation processes to compensate for the democratic deficits in its mainstream political system. Such efforts have sought to ensure a maximally inclusive planning process. And indeed, the consultation process leading to the Regional Development Strategy, for example, has earned plaudits from leading exponents of collaborative planning. The final analysis provides a systematic gauge of collaborative planning in light of our empirical evidence, deploying the four conceptual dimensions introduced in the first part. This exposes a range of problems not only with the concept itself but also regarding its affinity with the uncollaborative world within which it has to operate. The former shed light on those aspects where collaborative planning as a conceptual tool for practitioners needs to be renovated, while the latter highlight inconsistencies in a political framework that struggles to accommodate both global competitiveness and local democratic collaboration.

Discourses and Strategic Visions: The U.S. Research University as an Institutional Manifestation of Neoliberalism in a Global Era:

It is argued widely that the academy today is in the process of significant change—in the institutional assumptions of what constitutes the university and the construction of knowledge and in its relations with the city and the world. This article addresses the evolution of the modern university in the context of the discourses of contemporary globalizing institutions. Further, it empirically assesses the organizational priorities of U.S. research universities in light of the application of these discourses to their objectives and practices, finding that they are playing a key role in the formal representation of the institutional direction, goals, and values of American higher education.

Creating Shared Public Space in the Contested City: The Role of Urban Design

This paper examines relevant characteristics of the ‘contested city’ and the concept of ‘public space’ in that problematic context. It offers an appraisal of the historical and contemporary role of urban design in shaping social space and interrogates the feasibility of using urban design to facilitate more integrated cityscapes. It presents detailed case studies of two ‘contested cities’, Nicosia and Belfast, based on content analysis of policy and planning documents, extensive site analyses in both places, interviews and seminar discussions with policy makers, planners, community and civic leaders. The paper comprises four dimensions—conceptual, descriptive, analytical and prescriptive—and in its final section identifies core values and relevant policies for the potential achievement of shared space in contested cities.

A New Synergy for Universities: Redefining Academy as an 'engaged institution'

UK universities currently face three main challenges, related to the linked factors of development, deficit and duty. This article focuses on the final feature in the context of the former two. Specifically, it addresses the potential and problems associated with university—community partnerships, distinguishing between concepts of outreach and engagement that have dominated the US experience of such an interface. Through a case study analysis of the University of Ulsters Springvale project, it explores a model for effective partnership between the community and tertiary education sectors in contemporary society.

New Visions for Old Cities: The Role of Visioning in Planning

Many plans and strategies these days are underpinned by ‘visions’. This article examines the cultural and policy shift in planning in the UK toward more integrated and participative practice, and the potential role of visioning in this new climate. Reviewing examples of vision planning in the US, where the process has a longer lineage, it argues that these interventions suffer from a lack of evaluation of the effects of ‘visioning’. Yet this visioning approach has been adopted in certain cities and towns in Northern Ireland in recent years. This article assesses the impact of this approach in a detailed case study and finds the impact to have been modest.

Community Cohesion and Social Inclusion: Unravelling a Complex Relationship

In a global context of an emphasis on identity politics and a ‘cultural turn’ in social analysis, deep concern has been expressed about multiethnic Britain becoming a broken society with many ‘sleepwalking’ into segregation and separatism. Given the close correspondence between areas of acute ethnic segregation and those of multiple deprivation, intercommunal tensions have included disputes about the equitable allocation of scarce urban resources across ethnicity. This creates the possibility that urban programmes may inadvertently accentuate intercommunal tension and confound efforts to synchronise cohesion and inclusion agendas. Following recent debates about the implications of increased diversity, influenced by arguments that multiculturalism has encouraged ‘parallel lives’, an emergent policy framework emphasises more proactive integration to promote ‘common belonging’. Criticism of this agenda includes its confusion between community and social cohesion, and its disproportionate focus on cultural aspects such as identity formation and recognition, relative to structural issues of income and class. In exploring this contested terrain in Britain, the article suggests that the longer-term debate about segregation, deprivation and community differentials in Northern Ireland can offer useful insight for Britain’s policy discourse.

The Contemporary Urban Condition: Understanding the Globalizing City as Informal, Contested, and Anchored.

In attempting to expand the vocabulary of urban description and understanding, and to offer a new composite conceptual framework for a more integrated urban planning and policy, this essay addresses the informal, contested, and anchored dimensions of the urban in turn; second, it seeks to increasingly link the three within the new global context; and finally, it attempts to draw these strands together in a proposed reconceptualization of the contemporary city within a world where the global is urbanizing and the urban is globalizing.

Northern Ireland: Democratizing for Development

This introductory article does three things. First, it indicates the general purpose of this special edition and outlines the structure and intention of the four main articles that follow. Secondly, it elaborates the arguments and theoretical discourse underpinning the articles, and thirdly, it locates these concerns and development initiatives not only in the specific regional context of Northern Ireland, but also in the wider framework of a new global economy.

Architectural Ambivalence: the Built Environment and Cultural Identity in Belfast

The word ‘ambivalence’ has a particular appropriateness for Northern Ireland in that we consistently assume that our society, if we can refer to it collectively, can be defined in terms of two opposed and conflicting perspectives. Almost every aspect of our lives, including our politics, religious practices and culture can be read as Protestant unionist or Catholic nationalist. So when we speak of cultural identity in Northern Ireland, more often than not what we mean is ethnic identity. In Belfast, of course, we have some very obvious visible expressions of identity in the sectarian geography of working-class areas — although the terraced house architecture is almost universal, tribal markers such as flags, emblems and wall murals simultaneously celebrate and threaten.

Discourses of the contemporary urban campus in Europe: intimations of Americanisation?

This article studies major structural changes in both the urban context and the internal objectives of universities in Europe. While they enjoy expanded student demand and an elevated role in their city‐region economy as significant creators and repositories of knowledge, they simultaneously confront a funding gap in accommodating these higher student access rates, controversies in the definition and delivery of their wider urban obligation, and the task of harmonisation in tertiary provision, as outlined in the 1999 Bologna Declaration. One proposed way of addressing such major shifts in the contemporary context has been to take on the distinctive internal and externally engaged features of the American research university – employing, for example new diverse funding portfolios, new managerialist objectives of corporate efficiency and globalist competitive strategies. This article assesses the extent and implications of any shift to the US model by examining the resonance in European universities of three main discourses that have influenced US higher education in recent times: (i) multiculturalism and diversity, (ii) neo‐liberal politics and mixed economic welfare policy, and (iii) globalisation. Through semi‐structured interviews with leading personnel in thirteen universities, and related site and document analysis, we determine that substantial evidence exists to suggest that the discourses are not simply US, but rather European as well, portending an institutional shift in the structure, management and contextual levels of engagement of the modern university with its contemporary context. At the same time it would be wrong to assert that the European university has been ‘Americanised’, in that we find, even in these changing times, the critical voice of the academy remains a significant element of the overall civic compact of pluralistic deliberative democracy.