John Friedmann

THE URBAN FIELD

Abstract The inherited form of the city no longer corresponds to reality. The spatial structure of contemporary American civilization consists of metropolitan core regions and the intermetropolitan peripheries. The former have achieved very high levels of economic and cultural development at the expense of the latter, leaving the periphery in a decadent state. Current and projected trends in technology and tastes suggest that a new element of spatial order is coming into being—the urban field—which will unify both core and periphery within a single matrix. The implications of the urban field for living patterns and for planning are discussed.

Planning theory revisited

Abstract After brief personal recollections of the origins of planning theory, the author poses the question of why, after five decades of active theorizing, it is still impossible for people engaged in writing planning theory to agree on a formal definition of their subject. Four possible answers are explored: the problem of defining planning as an object to be theorized; the impossibility of talking about planning disconnected from actual institutional and political contexts; the several modes of doing planning theory and the dilemma of choosing among them; and the difficulty of incorporating power relations into planning discourse. The paper concludes with a brief comment on three themes that should be made central to theorizing; the production of the urban habitat, the rise of civil society, and the question of power.

The Good City: In Defense of Utopian Thinking

I consider social action and political projects to be essential in the betterment of a society that clearly needs change and hope. And I do hope that this book, by raising some questions and providing empirical and theoretical elements to treat them, may contribute to informed social action in the pursuit of social change. In this sense, I am not, and do not want to be, a neutral, detached observer of the human drama. However, I have seen so much misled sacrifice, so many dead ends induced by ideology, and such horrors provoked by artificial paradises of dogmatic politics that I want to convey a salutary reaction against trying to frame political practice in accordance with social theory, or, for that matter, with ideology. Theory and research, in general as well as in this book, should be considered as a means for understanding our world, and should be judged exclusively on their accuracy, rigor, and relevance. How these tools are used, and for what purpose, should be the exclusive prerogative of social actors themselves, in specific social contexts, and on behalf of their values and interests. No more meta-politics, no more ‘maitres a penser’, and no more intellectuals pretending to be so (Castells, 1998: 359).

Place and Place-Making in Cities: A Global Perspective

Since the 1990s, interest in place (as opposed to space) has surged across a spectrum of social science disciplines including planning. But the empirical focus has been chiefly on cities along the Atlantic Rim even as vast new areas in Asia, Africa, and Latin America were undergoing accelerated urbanization. This essay outlines a planning perspective to global place-making in the face of fierce inter-city competition for footloose capital. The question of how a place can be defined, and what criteria might serve to delineate a place occupies the first part of this essay. The definition proposed encompasses both a physical/built environment at the neighborhood scale and the subjective feelings its inhabitants harbor towards each other as an emplaced community. Specific criteria are discussed, with brief illustrations from Taiwan and China. But the art of place-making has not informed planners of the swaths of the urban in the newly industrializing global regions of Asia and elsewhere. Their principal preoccupation has been with the branding of cities and the advanced infrastructure required by global capital. In the process, millions of ordinary folks have been displaced and their neighborhoods erased, as speed, movement, and power have been valued more than the fragile social infrastructure of place-based communities. The essay concludes with an argument that place-making is everyones job, local residents as well as official planners, and that old places can be “taken back” neighborhood by neighborhood, through collaborative people-centered planning. Examples from Japan, China, and Canada are used to illustrate these propositions.

The Uses of Planning Theory A Bibliographic Essay

There is a widespread opinion that planning theory is of little relevance to practitioners. This article tries to refute this view by showing the impact that planning theorists have had on the profession during the past 50 years. It suggests three ways that theorizing can contribute to the field, referring here to both practice and education primarily in North America. The first is by evolving a deeply considered humanist philosophy for planning and tracing its implications for practice. The second is by adapting planning practices to their real-world constraints with regard to scale, complexity, and time. The third is by translating knowledge and ideas generated in other fields into the domain of planning. The article concludes that planning theory needs to be perceived as a transdisciplinary endeavor involving a global community of scholars and that their contributions are vital to the profession.

Strategic spatial planning and the longer range

This article is focused around a discussion of the nature of strategic spatial planning, as exemplified in the planning literature and in examples from Vancouver, Hong Kong and China more generally. The primary author, John Friedmann, argues that too much attention in planning practices has been given to the production of strategic plans and too little to locally‐based studies of the dynamics of urban socio‐spatial development. In commentaries from the perspectives of planning academics and practitioners from different parts of the world, the discussion is enlarged to link the spatial planning discussions to the management literature on strategic planning, to stress the well‐established process emphasis in much contemporary strategic spatial planning work, to raise some positive roles for formal plans in planning processes and to highlight recent European experiences in strategic spatial planning.

Notes on Societal Action

Abstract The classical decision theory model is contrasted with an action-planning model in which planning and action are conceived as a single operation. Two types of societal action—system-maintaining and system-transforming— are identified together with their corresponding forms of planning. Criteria for evaluating societal guidance system performance are suggested, and improvement of the guidance system is presented as one of the most important missions for planning today. Personal characteristics that will permit the action-planner to use his technical competence effectively are enumerated: self-knowledge, high learning capacity, skill in the use of symbolic abstractions, empathy, ability to work in tense, conflict-charged situations, knowledge of the dynamics and uses of power, and an ethics of responsibility.

Why Do Planning Theory

In a recent issue of this journal, Bish Sanyal argues that, based on a survey of planning practitioners some years back, none of them had found planning theory or, indeed, any theory, useful as they ‘grappled with conflicting interests’ (Sanyal, 2002). They learned ‘by doing’, not from theories. His comment raises the question, why, if practitioners find planning theory to be of little or indeed, of any use, we should bother with contributing to the several ongoing discourses on theory. I suspect that Professor Sanyal’s views on this matter are widely shared. Even within the academy, there is no consensus as to what constitutes ‘planning theory’. As a result, most planners go through their education without a clear understanding of planning theory in its multiple dimensions. There is not even, I would venture to guess, a clear view of ‘theory’, whether the term should be reserved for predictive theories only, or whether, as in the case of economics, a theory about what is can also be employed as a prescriptive theory, or whether it is possible for theoretical discourse to be entirely normative, with large claims but little evidence, or whether it is simply a loose term, as in thinking about planning. There is a widespread acceptance in our métier that there are significant differences between theories that are used in planning and are specific to its several specializations (land use, transport, urban design, regional development, environmental planning, etc.) (theory 1); and theories that address what is common to all of them, i.e. theories of planning tout court (theory

The Absorption of Labor in the Urban Economy: The Case of Developing Countries

Cities in the developing countries are facing a problem of threatening dimension. Despite 2 decades of accelerated industrialization, often promoted through the familiar policy of import substitution, the rapidly increasing labor force of cities is not being absorbed into full, productive employment. Available statistics are unreliable and their coverage is incomplete. Such fragments as exist, however, suggest that low-productivity employment in nonagricultural occupations has been steadily rising on top of a layer of open unemployment that varies between 5 and 15 percent of the urban labor force.1 The growing awareness of specialists that the employment situation in the developing countries was deteriorating led the International Labour Organization to initiate its World Employment Program in 1969. The aims of this program are to put an employment objective high on the agenda of national planners and to help them formulate and carry out employment-oriented development strategies.2 Two facts seem to account for the rising concern with labor absorption. The first is the continuing and even accelerating movement of people to cities. In the developing countries, urban growth rates are typically

The epistemology of social practice

Relying upon a faith that our universe is not a chaos, but an ordered cosmos, I believe that through sincere and courageous effort man can learn what is true. I believe that inherent in what is true is that which will serve creation in its highest form, which is humanity. I believe that truth shall make man free free from its ills of the flesh and the spirit. I rely upon an unfolding knowledge of the truth to provide a solution for the problems and conflicts that vex humanity. I therefore dedicate myself to the task of seeking the truth. Arthur H. Compton1