Planning and Knowledge: How New Forms of Technocracy Are Shaping Contemporary Cities 9781447345251

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Planning and Knowledge How new forms of technocracy are shaping contemporary cities Edited by

M ike R a c o F e de r ic o S a v i n i

PLANNING AND KNOWLEDGE How New Forms of Technocracy Are Shaping Contemporary Cities Edited by Mike Raco and Federico Savini

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Policy Press North America office: University of Bristol Policy Press 1-9 Old Park Hill c/o The University of Chicago Press Bristol 1427 East 60th Street BS2 8BB Chicago, IL 60637, USA UK t: +1 773 702 7700 t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 f: +1 773-702-9756 [email protected] [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk www.press.uchicago.edu © Policy Press 2019 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978-1-4473-4524-4 hardcover ISBN 978-1-4473-4527-5 ePub ISBN 978-1-4473-4528-2 Mobi ISBN 978-1-4473-4525-1 ePdf The right of Mike Raco and Federico Savini to be identified as editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editors and contributors and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Andrew Corbett Front cover image: Enrico Savini Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners

Contents List of figures List of tables Notes on contributors

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Part I: Conceptual framings of technocracy 1 The rise of a new urban technocracy Federico Savini and Mike Raco 2 Planning, knowledge and technocracy in historical perspective Michael Hebbert

1 3 19

Part II: Public planning and bureaucracies in contemporary urban development politics 3 Dealing with tensions: the expertise of boundary spanners in facilitating community initiatives Ward Rauws and Martine de Jong 4 Plurality of expert knowledge: public planners’ experience with urban contractualism in Amsterdam Tuna Taş an-​Kok and Martijn van den Hurk 5 Local government in the face of crisis: changing public management of urban projects in Amsterdam Thijs Koolmees and Stan Majoor 6 Captured by bureaucracy: street-​level professionals mediating past, present and future knowledge Nanke Verloo

31

Part III: Corporate knowledge and the land and property development sector 7 Anticipatory knowledge: how development consultants see the future Rachel Weber 8 Towards an ‘information technocracy’: discourses of London’s post-​referendum real estate markets Nicola Livingstone 9 Finance as technocratic agent in urban development Sabine Dörry 10 Planning professionalism in the face of technocracy: ethics, values and practices Susannah Gunn

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Part IV: Private consultants and the delivery of public policy 11 Professional lobbying in urban planning: depoliticisation or REpoliticisation? Aino Hirvola and Raine Mäntysalo 12 Advocates, advisors and scrutineers: the technocracies of private sector planning in England Gavin Parker, Emma Street and Matthew Wargent 13 Localism and the reconfiguration of planning’s publics in the landscapes of technocracy Sue Brownill 14 The politics of new urban professions: the case of urban development engineers Jonathan Metzger and Sherif Zakhour

139 141

Part V: New constellations of actors and the management and governance of contemporary cities 15 Smart cities, algorithmic technocracy and new urban technocrats Rob Kitchin, Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans, Liam Heaphy and Darach Mac Donncha 16 Planning by numbers: affordable housing and viability in England Antonia Layard 17 Transnational design and local implications for planning: project flights and landings Davide Ponzini 18 Researching the best-​practice: academic knowledge production, planning and the post-​politicisation of environmental politics Samuel Mössner and Catarina Gomes de Matos 19 Conclusions: the technocratic logics of contemporary planning Federico Savini and Mike Raco

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References Index

269 309

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181

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List of figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 12.1 13.1 14.1 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4

Laocoön and his sons attacked by sea-​serpents ‘Technocracy’ frequency graph Concerning Irascible Strong and Trixie-​Cunning…and their descendants Arbor Scientiae Arbor Vitae Urban development projects on the banks of IJ Lake in Amsterdam Overhoeks is the area surrounding the white building in the centre of the picture One of the urban design plans of Overhoeks with apartments blocks, park areas, high rise Strip How consultants are operating in a multi-​change planning environment Neighbourhood planning stages The urban development process for projects initiated by developers on public land Localisation of completed projects by Foster+Partners Localisation of completed projects by Foster+Partners with reference to the level of freedom in each country The Central Market in Abu Dhabi The Abu Dhabi Plaza in Astana

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20 22 24 26 65 68 70 163 173 185 232 233 236 237

List of tables 3.1 4.1 5.1 8.1 10.1 12.1 15.1

Tensions boundary spanners in the Buurtmakers project faced within their organisation when facilitating CIs Categorisation of contracts for urban (re)development in the Netherlands Analytic overview of the research Numerical overview of articles consulted Examples of public–​private provision of local authority planning service from practice Typology of tasks undertaken by private planning consultants in the English planning system Smart city technologies

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44 55 62 108 129 158 200

Notes on contributors Sue Brownill is Reader in Urban Policy and Governance at the

School of the Built Environment, Oxford Brookes University. Her work focuses on the relationship between citizens and the state in urban planning and regeneration and she has been involved in, researched and written about community engagement in planning over a number of decades. Her resent research includes a co-​edited book on Neighbourhood Planning and Localism and work on planning and affordable housing, housing precarity and healthy urban mobility. Claudio Coletta is a research manager in the Urban Studies Institute

at the University of Antwerp and formerly a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, Maynooth University, working on the ERC-​funded Programmable City Project. His research focus is on urban phenomena at the intersection between technology, narratives and practices, explored through qualitative methods. His current interests address algorithms and automated urban management, temporal dimension of smart city development, experimental urbanism and procurement. Sabine Dörry is a Senior Research Fellow at the Luxembourg

Institute of Socio-​Economic Research (LISER), an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Luxembourg, and an Honorary Research Associate of the School of Geography and the Environment (Oxford). Her research interests include changing global production and trade relations, primarily in financial and other services industries, and the dynamics of urban, financial and real estate development, mainly in financial centres. Leighton Evans is a Senior Lecturer in Media Theory at Swansea

University, having previously been a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis, Maynooth University. His research focus is on phenomenology and digital media, with interests in locative media, virtual and augmented reality, the experience of labour in data intensive environments and the subjective experience of technological implementation. Catarina Gomes de Matos is post-​d octoral researcher at the

department of Human Geography at Goethe-​University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her research focuses on critical urban studies,

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social movements and citizenship. She gained a PhD in Human Geography from Albert-​Ludwig University of Freiburg in 2016. In her dissertation, she investigated social conflicts, participatory processes and social protests in the context of urban development projects in Barcelona, Spain. Her recent work also focuses on migration/​ citizenship studies. Susannah Gunn is Director of Planning and senior lecturer in

the Global Urban Research Unit (GURU) within the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape (SAPL) at Newcastle University. Her research interest is in systemic reform and its ramifications on practice and professionalism –​mainly focused on urban planning. She is currently co-​investigator on an ESRC project ‘Working for the Public Interest’ which is exploring the changing nature of planning service delivery in the UK, and its implications for planning. Liam Heaphy is a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute

for Regional and Spatial Analysis, Maynooth University, working on the ERC-​funded Programmable City Project. He has a background in social sciences, with an interest in science and technology studies, architecture and history and languages. His research is on the relationship between urban science and urban form, covering smart city technologies and climate change. Michael Hebbert is a professor emeritus of town planning at UCL and

the University of Manchester, and taught previously at the London School of Economics and Oxford Brookes University. Originally trained as an Oxford historian, he has applied methods of historical inquiry to many different aspects of planning –​places, people, policies, professionalisation, techniques, visions. Michael is currently working on Sir Christopher Wren’s plan for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666. Aino Hirvola is a doctoral candidate at Aalto University, Department

of Built Environment, Finland. Her research explores professional lobbying in urban planning and the related political decision-​making. Her research interests include different approaches to democracy in planning. She is curious about the various ways in which planning can be considered democratic and legitimate. Martine de Jong is a researcher at the Urban Futures Studio of Utrecht

University and works as a consultant for Twynstra Gudde. Her current

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research is called Dealing with in-​between dynamics. When different organisations collaborate, in-​between spaces arise. These spaces offer potential for making new and creative solutions for pressing problems, but are also seedbeds for conflict and tensions between organisations. Her research is set up to better understand in-​between dynamics and to help practitioners become more productive when working in-​between. Rob Kitchin is professor and ERC Advanced Investigator at the

National University of Ireland Maynooth. He is (co)principal investigator of the Programmable City project and the Building City Dashboards project. He has published widely across the social sciences, including 26 authored/​edited books and over 180 articles and book chapters. He is presently editor of the journal, Dialogues in Human Geography. He was the 2013 recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences. Thijs Koolmees is active at the Project Management Office of the

Municipality of Amsterdam in the planning and realisation of urban development projects. He currently works on the Overhoeks project, an industrial site regeneration in Amsterdam North. Antonia Layard is a Professor for Law at the University of Bristol.

Her research explores how law, legality and maps construct space, place and ‘the local’. She has particular interests in ‘urban law’, and the legal provisions and practices involved in largescale regeneration and infrastructure projects. Antonia is currently finishing her book for Routledge on Law, Place and Maps, which argues for legal investigations into place, as a counterpart to the dominance of property thinking. Nicola Livingstone is Lecturer in Real Estate in the Bartlett School

of Planning, University College London. Before coming to UCL she worked as a lecturer at Herriot-​Watt University, where she completed her PhD. Her background is in real estate and urban studies. Nicola has published widely on these topics and has recently been working on projects examining real estate investment trends, the evolution of the retail market, the impacts of changes to the planning system on cities and food insecurity. Darach Mac Donncha is a doctoral student at the National Institute

for Regional and Spatial Analysis, Maynooth University, working on the ERC-​funded Programmable City Project. He has a BA in Geography and Irish from National University of Ireland, Galway

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and a MA in Geopolitics and the Global Economy from University College Dublin. His research is focused on the adoption of digital technologies by city administrations and the political economy of smart cities. Stan Majoor is an urban planner and political scientist. He is currently

professor coordination of urban issues and director of the research priority area ‘Urban Management’ at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. His research interests are large-​scale integrated urban development projects, local governance innovation, Urban Living Labs and practices of urban commoning. Raine Mäntysalo is Professor of strategic urban planning at Aalto

University, Department of Built Environment, Finland. He is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Oulu, Finland, specialising in planning theory and communicative planning. He has recently published articles on strategies, trading zones, democracy and power in spatial and land use planning. He is currently leading an international research consortium developing integrative approaches to strategic spatial planning in Finnish urban regions. Jonathan Metzger is an Associate Professor in Urban and Regional

Studies at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Most of his research deals with decision-​m aking concerning complex environmental issues –​often with a focus on urban policy and politics. In his research he works towards bringing together current debates within the subject areas of Planning Studies, Human Geography, Science and Technology Studies and Organisational Studies. Samuel Mössner currently holds a professorship for urban planning and sustainability at the Institute of Geography at the University of Münster. He is the author of a book on urban social policy and governance and sustainable urbanism as well as several papers on urban sustainable development. His research has a focus on post-​politics of urban sustainability, social justice, planning and post-​growth. In addition, he is working on protest and conflict in the context of urban regeneration projects in Europe. Gavin Parker is Professor of Planning Studies at the University of

Reading and was an executive director of the Royal Town Planning Institute (2012–​14). His research has centred on planning and land-​use

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conflict in urban and rural areas and he has published extensively on participation in planning. Davide Ponzini is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Politecnico

di Milano and was Visiting Professor at TU Munich in 2017. He has also been a visiting scholar at Yale, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Sciences Po. His research focuses on planning theory, urban and cultural policy, and contemporary architecture. Among recent publications, he is co-​editor (with Harvey Molotch) of the book The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition and Distress and (with the photographer Michele Nastasi) Starchitecture:  Scenes, Actors, and Spectacles in Contemporary Cities. Mike Raco is Professor of Urban Governance and Development in

the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. He has published widely on the topics of urban governance and regeneration, urban sustainability, social diversity and the politics of urban and regional economic development. He is currently leading a team at UCL that is working on a collaborative ORA-​ESRC funded project on investment flows and residential development in London, Paris and Amsterdam named WHIG: What is Governed in Cities. Recent works include: The Future of Sustainable Cities: Critical Reflections (with John Flint, Policy Press, Bristol); State-​led Privatisation and the Demise of the Democratic State: Welfare Reform and Localism in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism (Routledge, London); and Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability and Community in a Global City (with Rob Imrie and Loretta Lees, Routledge, London. Ward Rauws is an Assistant Professor in Spatial Planning at the

University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research interests include adaptive approaches to urban and peri-​urban transformations, neighbourhood development and self-​governance, and self-​organisation and complexity science. He is the coordinator of AESOP’s thematic group Planning & Complexity and cofounder of Young Planners Society Ekistics. He also lectures in courses on neighbourhood revitalisation and planning theory, and coordinates the Master’s programme in Environmental and Infrastructure Planning. Federico Savini is Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning

at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the regulatory, financial, legal and political dynamics of urban development and planning. He has conducted internationally comparative research

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on land development in the periphery of cities. He coordinated and led the international JPI Urban Europe project on the regulations of urban development. He is coordinating the international project CODAloop on energy consumption, data and urban change, also funded by JPI Urban Europe. He published several works on multiple international journals and gives lectures around Europe to develop an institutionalist approach to planning research. Recent works include the book Planning Projects in Transition:  Interventions, Regulations and Investments (with Willem Salet). Emma Street is Associate Professor at the Department of Real Estate

and Planning, University of Reading. Emma’s research interests include urban policy, planning and urban design and architecture. She is also interested in diversity, inclusion and wellbeing issues, especially in the context of higher education. Emma has published widely on topics including the privatisation of urban planning, design for active mobility and architectural practice and regulation. Tuna Taşan-​Kok is Professor of Urban Governance and Planning

at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on themes of urban governance, property-​led urban development dynamics, and spatial organisation through social relations. She has initiated, coordinated and implemented several international research projects and published widely. Currently she is leading an international research project on Public Accountability to Residents in Contractual Urban Development. Her latest book is entitled From Student to Urban Planner: Young Practitioners’ Reflections on Contemporary Ethical Challenges (Routledge, 2017). She is also editor of the European Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Martijn van den Hurk is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department

of Human Geography, Planning and International Development at the University of Amsterdam. He is a co-​investigator on an international research project entitled ‘Public Accountability to Residents in Contractual Urban Redevelopment’ (PARCOUR), in which he analyses the role of contracts in urban regeneration. Martijn obtained his PhD degree in Political Science at the University of Antwerp (2015) with a dissertation on the governance of public–​private partnerships for the provision of public infrastructure. Nanke Verloo is Assistant Professor in Urban Planning at the

Department of Geography, Planning and International Development

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Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her work brings together her background in anthropology and political science. She specialises in the study of urban conflict, specifically the processes of in-​and exclusion, placemaking and everyday forms of citizenship that become contested through urban regeneration policies. She uses ethnography to make sense of the interaction between citizens and the state. Matthew Wargent is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University

College London, UK. His research focuses on the themes of governance, localism and democratic participation. Rachel Weber is a professor in the Urban Planning and Policy

Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she works in the fields of economic development, urban policy and public finance. Her latest book, From Boom to Bubble:  How Finance Built the New Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2015), recently won the Best Book in Urban Affairs Award from the Urban Affairs Association. She was appointed to then-​presidential candidate Barack Obama’s Urban Policy Committee in 2008 and by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to the Tax Increment Financing Reform Task Force in 2011. Sherif Zakhour is a PhD student in the Division of Urban and

Regional Studies at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. His research explores the different definitions of democracy at play in planning theory and practice.

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PART I

Conceptual framings of technocracy

1

The rise of a new urban technocracy Federico Savini and Mike Raco

The complex landscape of experts in urban development In cities and countries across the Global North territorial planning systems are coming under growing pressure and facing demands for structural reform. The financial crisis of 2008 widened and deepened existing neoliberal trends that questioned the raison d’être of state planning and its deployment as a governmental mechanism for organising and managing urban spaces and places. In an era of anaemic growth and growing welfare demands, there is a restless search among policymakers and development agencies to uncover more entrepreneurial governance models and mechanisms that will convert messy urban places into spaces for investment and accumulation (Moore et  al, 2017). Much of the focus of reform has been in looking for ways to use planning policies to promote particular forms of expertise and technocratic knowledge that will facilitate growth while minimising political ‘interference’ and disruptions (see Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017). Even within national contexts that are still characterised by highly bureaucratised forms of government intervention, there have been shifts towards more entrepreneurial action, so that the promotion of growth is having a stronger influence on the organisational, regulatory and political instruments employed in public policy (Le Galès and Vitale, 2013; Penny, 2017). It is in this wider context that this book and its collection of essays is set. Contributions drawing on a range of examples, from a number of countries, critically reflect on the degree to which we are witnessing the rise of a new technocracy in urban governance. Our objective is to enhance understandings of the relationships between public action, state restructuring and what we term emergent markets of expertise. The shift to a new technocracy, we argue, is leading to the re-​fashioning of planning’s core objectives and purpose from an earlier focus on the value of input-​centred forms of deliberation, place-​making and social justice to an enhanced concern with output-​centred agendas premised

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on expedited development and growth (compare Scharpf, 1999). The rolling out of entrepreneurial planning requires the employment of new governance technologies, such as quantitative systems of managerialism and the implementation of a multiplicity of codifications and models that are used to define urban problems and their solutions. As later chapters will show, restructuring processes have affected all aspects of planning practice and policymaking, from its underlying financial infrastructures to its symbolic and political character. The rise of a new technocracy is, we claim, also reflected and reproduced by the expansion of increasingly complex landscapes of knowledge production. Planning knowledge is becoming institutionalised into a diverse constellation of experts that deploy various approaches, goals and rationalities in different moments of the policy process. The role and profile of the expert assumes a very blurred form, distinct from the traditional roles assigned to public or private planners. As the book will show, the push for new types of delivery-​focused planning has gone hand-​in-​hand with the expansion of private sector expertise in the field of urban development and urban affairs, the globalisation of a consultancy sector with capacities of influence of city-​regional policies, and an internal reorganisation of public bureaucracies led by the goals of cost-​efficiency and public management. A new ‘market of planning’ has emerged to fill the gaps left by austerity-​driven state downsizing and decentralisation, so that in countries such as England, almost half of all practising ‘planners’ now work for private consultancies, working under contract (see Raco, 2018). There is a direct co-​evolution between reforms to make the planning system more entrepreneurial and the emergence of an increasingly powerful and influential consultancy sector. This co-​evolution, we argue, has been given additional impetus as the presence of more technocratic modes of governance carries advantages for policymakers and governments struggling to maintain their wider legitimacy in contexts of growing crisis (see also Froud et al, 2017). Technocracy comes with promises of modernisation and entrepreneurialism, while also acting as a ‘political anaesthetic’ that circumscribes the possibilities for political conflict and the generation of more radical alternative forms of intervention (Radaelli, 1999: 16). In Putnam’s (1977) terms the implementation of technocratic forms of governance explicitly rejects models of social conflict, dissensus and disagreement. Political arguments and deliberations are seen as antithetical to efficiency and delivery, with expert knowledge characterised as ‘apolitical’ and structured around agreed principles of the ‘common good’. It is a mode of thinking that is hostile to political

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parties and fields of political engagement and sees ‘social and political conflict as at best misguided, at worst, contrived’ (p 386). Programmes of governance are rolled-​out that enable claims of expertise to be constituted through specific ‘strategies, structure[s]‌, and silences’ that ‘transform the expert into a spokesperson for what appear as the forces of development, the rules of law, the progress of modernity, or the rationality of capitalism’ (Mitchell, 2002: 15). These changes in political outlook are taking place in a broader geopolitical context that contrasts the slow pace of growth in the west with top-​down models of governance in other parts of the world. For some, there is a realisation that democratic modes of governance are not a pre-​requisite to capitalist development. Indeed, it is increasingly argued that a precondition for economic success is that democratic engagement is contained and limited to specific fields of public policy, so that it does not stand in the way of growth-​led priorities and the activities of experts and actors who are best able to bring about development (see Bauman, 2017). Žižek (2011), for instance, argues that governing elites in western Europe and north America now seek to extrapolate lessons from the Chinese experience in the 1990s and 2000 and asks, ‘what if it signals that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer a condition and driver of economic development but its obstacle?’ (pp 106–​107; see also Žižek (2017). Similar parallels are made with the ‘success’ of Structural Adjustment Programmes in the Global South, with neoliberals arguing that growth only emerged in Latin American countries following ‘the appointment of economic technocrats to key state positions where…they promote and implement policies they prefer while frequently vetoing those they oppose’ (Dargent, 2014:  2). The echoes of these arguments are found in the European Union and its explicit agenda to replace politics with technical oversight in order to bring about the disciplining of laggard Eurozone economies (Galbraith, 2016; Habermas, 2015). In Skelton’s (2011) terms the post-​financial crisis EU has witnessed ‘government of the technocrats, by the technocrats, for the technocrats’ (p 1). Within this broader ideological context, however, there is still much that remains under-​researched and little-​discussed. While it is very visible that a new market for urban planning expertise has emerged both outside and within the daily tasks of public governments, we have limited understanding of the nexus of professional figures currently active in planning and how these experts mobilise their knowledge and instruments in affecting spatial development in cities and the implementation of broader planning objectives. In some instances, for example, planning bureaucracies still maintain relatively high degrees

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of power and influence and land rights differ significantly between and within different national and city environments. In other instances, public agencies themselves act as private investors, with the support of a range of third-​party advisors, and use their ‘planning gains’ to meet civic and welfare demands. Moreover, definitions of what constitutes technocratic expertise are context-​specific and subject to a range of claims, many of which, in Gray’s (2004) terms, are often couched in the language of ‘techno-​utopian fantasies’ in which it is imagined that social problems can be solved through the implementation of new technologies and in the absence of political conflict. In the remainder of this introduction we develop a framework in and through which technocratic governance and the planning of contemporary cities can be better understood. It is also important to note that the book contributors will also be drawing out some of the key continuities as well as changes in planning technocracies and their meanings. The institutionalisation and deployment of technocratic and expert knowledge have been at the heart of debates over planning throughout the modern era (Hebbert, this volume). We claim that the new technocracy is not a re-​fashioning of an old technocracy, but it instead occurs as a new ‘condition’ of planning and democracy in contemporary times. However, we do not seek to reify the new in order to assume that the trends and processes that have been discussed in this book bear little or no relation to earlier periods of planning and governance reform. Nor do we claim that the issues discussed through later chapters represent the emergence of a cohesive, internally consistent and coherent technocratic order, disconnected from the past and lacking in continuities. Instead, we make use of the instructive analytical tools provided by early critiques of technocracy in order to broaden and deepen our understandings of post-​political planning, populism, managerialism, neoliberalism and entrepreneurial governance. The various contributions provide evidence of an amplification of some of the processes and practices that shape technocratic government-​led planning in the post-​war era. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, the everyday place-​based complexities faced by planners and planning systems in undertaking the task of governing cannot be easily converted into simplified, reductionist logics, models and technological systems. Attempts to break down and compartmentalise planning knowledges treat planning and urban politics as the summation of discrete entities that can be managed, separated out and recombined by experts. As the discussion will show the rolling-​out and implementation of new forms of technocracy is a far from complete process and one that is subject to disruptions,

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limitations and incompleteness. The fallacy that experts, within the public and/​or private sectors, are able to apply abstract technologies in an uncontested and linear fashion underplays the fundamentally inter-​ subjective and context-​specific nature of knowledge production and its application. In Turner’s (2014) terms, understandings of the role of experts and expertise need to be located in a broader appreciation of the contexts within which their knowledge is forged, institutionalised and applied. Efforts to insulate private actors from political scrutiny or market fluctuations are likely to be only partially successful, whatever the technologies of governance that are put in place. Expertise is always prone to what Newman and Clarke (2018: 51) term moments of stabilisation and instability under which ‘particular formations of knowledge and power are configured’ and reconfigured as contexts change. Forging alliances and assembling and empowering particular groups of experts is a fiercely political exercise that in Froud et al’s (2017) terms creates opportunities ‘for the consolidation of elite power while also being prone to crisis’ (p 80). Moreover, the extent to which forms of technocratic planning emerge (or not) varies considerably between different contexts. While the geopolitics of austerity and privatisation is pervasive and spreading through European countries that were previously considered to be bastions of strong forms of welfare, the degree to which there has been a shift towards late entrepreneurialism depends on combinations of existing political relations, path-​dependencies and cultures of governance and regulation. A new market for urban planning has clearly emerged and private actors are becoming increasingly influential. But there remain outstanding questions over the types of expert knowledge that are being mobilised in different contexts and with what effects. In some instances, for example, planning bureaucracies still maintain relatively high degrees of power and influence. Land rights differ significantly in different national and city environments. The extent to which governance arrangements are shaped by contract technologies and knowledges are also variable, despite attempts by supra-​national bodies, such as the EU, and multi-​national consultancies to standardise ‘good governance models’ and planning templates.

The logics of technocratic planning in contemporary cities Classic definitions of technocracy draw on a fundamental dichotomy between government by experts or technocrats on the one hand and governance by people or the demos on the other (Purcell, 2013). For

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Bobbio (1976) technocracy represents ‘the government of competent people, therefore of those that know one thing but know, or at least should, know it well; democracy is the government of everybody, therefore of those that should decide, not based on competence, but based on experience’ (Bobbio, 1976: 73). Or as Centeno and Silva (1998) argue, technocratic governance represents the institutionalisation of systems in which ‘personnel who use their claim to knowledge (as opposed to representation or authoritarian control) to affirm their right to rule’ (p  2). These claims to knowledge are converted into modes of technological governance or ‘the ruling of society in terms of scientific principles, technical measures, and quantitative methods –​ and expert politics’ so that ‘scientists and other technological experts… replace politicians and be given political power to manage society’ (Liu, 2015: 77). The long-​lasting power of the term technocracy lies in its capacity to draw out key tensions in the organisation and management of contemporary democratic systems. Within a technocratic form of governance, experts are considered as more legitimate than what may be defined as lay and ordinary citizens. They are also given a degree of exclusive authority in establishing the course of possible actions. Such authority may go beyond the institutional arenas of representative democracy. In our understanding, the term technocracy problematises how knowledge is not only legitimated but also how it is used in complex and contextual practices of urban policymaking. The problem is never expertise per se, but the way in which particular forms of expertise are mobilised within power relations. A constructive critique against technocratic planning, averse to populist derivatives, needs to show how expert knowledge is used in context, in relation to other types of knowledge. As Turner (2014: 4) argues, ‘expertise itself is dependent on other people’s knowledge and on the systems that generate it’. As we will discuss, technocratic planning occurs when the employment of technical means, instruments, models, tools and frames by an elite of legitimate experts becomes the surrogate of politics, determining the actual political goals of public action rather than providing the supportive tools for it. Abstracted and codified representations of the urban reality In the 1970s, post-​structuralist critiques criticised modernist technocratic planning and pointed to the establishment of frameworks of understanding and producing space, established to artificially control the urban experience through the application of codified techniques and expertise (de Certeau,

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1984; Massey, 2005). The essence of this critique is best summarised in Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘illusion of realism’ by expert knowledge (Lefebvre and Nicholson-​Smith, 1991:  45) in which ‘the architect is no more miracle-​worker than the sociologist. Neither can create social relations… Only social life (praxis) in its global capacity possesses such powers –​or does not possess them’ (Lefebvre et al, 1996: 151). It is the abstraction of ‘lived space’ that allows technical-​scientific knowledge to ‘trap’ social relations, by making representations ‘the basis’ for the study of life itself. Contemporary planning practices are pervaded by abstractions of realities, by more or less explicit models that define reality as it is or should be. The spatial and temporal ‘disembeddedness’ of socio-​ economic relations is in fact constitutive of modernity and it is ‘deeply bound up with the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems, especially trust in expert systems’ (Giddens, 1991). Abstracted representations convey particular systems of meaning. Complex planning processes are in fact constituted by multiple cycles of abstractions and re-​abstractions of socio-​spatial dynamics. They are not value free but entail power relations. This is visible in the drawing of maps, the collection of (big) data-​sets, the making-​up of imaginaries of place and the like. Conflict itself takes place as a struggle where representations are mobilised against others (Sending, 2015) and/​or where some different instruments are set up in contrast to other (Tironi, 2015). The key question is always that of ‘who’s abstractions are taken into consideration, as legitimate mirrors of a problem in space, within a policy process. In planning theory, a range of contributions still point to the ‘abyss’ between a relational ontology of urban spaces and the abstracted regulatory techniques of planning intervention (Hillier, 2005). Nonetheless, the problematic tension between the use of abstract representations in planning processes and the social dynamics that those processes try to address is hard to deal with in practice (Davoudi and Strange, 2009). There are different ways to tackle this problem. It may be argued that any form of planning, being it public or private, always builds on a partial understanding of reality; it may be also argued that the problem is not abstraction per se, but rather how it is institutionalised in the policy process (Moroni, 2014). In sum, the tension between simplification through abstraction and contextualisation of planning is always present in the policy process. The way the policy process is designed and the manners in which different knowledges are combined are thus crucial to avoid a technocratic derivative to governance. Communicative and argumentative approaches to planning have been in part to try to break down these binaries, by imagining planning expertise as a reflective moderation of argumentative and

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deliberative processes across different, yet equally legitimate, values and understandings of cities (Forester, 1985; Healey, 1992). Our first critique of technocracy builds upon the evidence that the range of representations that are legitimately included in planning processes is more and more homogeneous, with the recursive use of instruments and models that are both exclusive and often flawed in their capacity to inform complex policies. As the chapters will show, planning processes are pervaded by quantitative and performative abstracts of urban processes, based on standard guidelines, large data sets, and assessment frameworks of output evaluation. These representations are active players in the process, shaping the way policies are formulated and set up. Moreover, we see a hyper-​ formalisation and professionalisation of these representations, where the spectrum of legitimate knowledge is often reduced to that of recognised experts, professional orders and particular disciplines such as management, law and environmental econometrics. Other examples include the extensive and growing deployment of contracts to establish relations of responsibility, special purpose agencies that organise planning processes (Savini and Aalbers, 2015), zoning maps that orient negotiations and legal frameworks that govern spatial qualities (Alexander et al, 2012). The generalist and exclusive use of specific knowledge Early critiques of technocratic planning in modern times pointed out that standardised, blueprinted and hyper-​abstracted models of social engineering were the seeds of technocratic planning. However, they also made the accusation that the institutional ‘owners’ of that expert knowledge, the ‘experts’, recursively tended to overtake their fields of action and competence, extending the socio-​political impact of their particular expertise to the most disparate realms of urban life. Scott (1998) has built his critique of technocratic state planning pointing at the way technical knowledge (techne) was pervasively applied to the urban realm, and at how it underplayed the know-​how of communities and individuals (metis). The first is a codified, professionalised, transferrable and standardised type of knowledge, the second is instead context dependent, inclusive, emergent, adaptable and specifically applicable to particular situations. More importantly, while technical knowledge is often claimed to be free of biases, and therefore always applicable to a variety of contexts, the specific character of the metis always entails understandings of society that are full of biases and values. In the practice of urban policymaking, the relation between techne

10

The rise of a new urban technocracy

and metis is a fine balance and, we contend, contemporary planning reforms are redefining this balance in problematic ways. The expert is not a technocrat by definition. Instead we can see the rise of technocracy when the technical, a-​contextual, expertise of somebody is hierarchically imposed over other types of knowledges, such as know-​how, practice based, communicative knowledge. A technocrat is an expert who applies the inferences of its understanding of urban reality to the complex whole of urban dynamics. Following Centeno (1993) ‘technocrats share the special claim to knowledge of all technical experts’, but while technicians focus on expertise that is ‘narrow but deep’, the technocrats emphasise one that is ‘broad but shallow’ (p  310). It is therefore the practice of applying expert knowledge to specific situations that allows us to understand how technocratic governance emerges. This particular characterisation of expert knowledge has allowed critics to point at the elite of ‘managers’ as the prototypical technocrats: their expertise is distinctively oriented to the general functioning of a complex organisation (or system) and as such they are given the authority to define the actual goals of the system itself (Barnard, 1938). The same critique applied to modernist planning, well epitomised by the (in)famous statement of Le Corbusier that ‘the plan is the generator’. The plan was not only one means to address the spatial distribution of urban dynamics but it represented the source of urban politics tout court. Lefebvre’s definition of technocrat points at the exclusive monopoly that some elites of experts have over social processes. Technocrats are ‘a group which monopolizes the decision-​making; a group capable, by its very decisions, of avoiding all bureaucratisation, of adapting itself, of making effective decisions beyond abstract rules. Outside this group and its powers, the whole of society is fundamentally reduced to being a mere passive performer’ (Lefebvre, 1980: 149). In the last two decades, planning scholars have become increasingly critical of the inherent limits of the generalist use of planning knowledge and attempted to position planners as only one player among a broader spectrum of legitimate actors and stakeholders, including political activists, lawyers, real-​estate economists, sociologies and many others. The pragmatist critique of modernist planning in particular aimed at valorising context-​based know-​how instead of applying abstract frameworks of process in planning (Forester, 2013; Healey, 2009). Today’s context of planning is pervaded by rhetorical ambitions of co-​production, negotiation, networking, participation and conflict resolution. Yet the profile and role of planners within participatory, inclusive and co-​produced processes needs still to be

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questioned in the analysis of these processes (Campbell and Marshall, 1998). Co-​productive processes are in fact still showing exclusionary characteristics, where certain types of professions may become hierarchically imposed over others. The following contributions showcase a range of examples of how processes of inclusive, co-​productive and interactive policymaking are governed by a peculiar set of specialists, who become ‘gatekeepers’ of decision-​making processes, wherein citizens are selectively legitimised through the deployment of particular technologies (Metzger et  al, 2017). While we report an increased multiplicity of consultancies to public policymaking, only some of these actors have the capacity to influence how decision-​making is structured, by setting a particular language, mobilising appealing models of understanding that inevitably frustrate others. These firms advise on process management, on citizen inclusion, on public consensus building and on intermediation. Legal and economic expertise in particular appears to have a dramatic impact on how planning policies are actually formulated and assessed, with the legal dictionary of contracts and the mathematical dataset becoming the vehicles of legitimate negotiations. The priority of implementation over the democratic definition of goals In theorising the inner logics of contemporary democracy, Habermas (1996) has examined the dialectics between technical and the political logics of collective institutions. He characterises contemporary democratic institutions as a mechanism for organising the tension between normative claims on the public interest (that is, what is right or wrong) and the subjective claims of goal achievement (that is, what is needed to achieve specific goals). These two components translate into different forms of power: democratic power represents the capacity to define the normative basis of the State (for example, the moral constitution of the laws); while administrative power deals with the purposive application of those normative assumptions through the organisation of resources and regulations. These powers are always co-​ productive of democratic processes, but ‘the rationality of a specialized and competent fulfilment of tasks by experts is no protection against paternalistic self-​empowerment and self-​programming on the part of administrative agencies’ (Habermas, 1996: 188). Every planning process is confronted by the dilemma between the need to adjust regulatory frameworks to achieve priorities of justice, environmental quality and accessibility, while consolidating

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The rise of a new urban technocracy

those existent rules and norms that are devised to protect the public interest (Savini et  al, 2014; Salet, 2017). However, this is a fine balance. When the first aim of goals implementation dominates the other, a planning process turns into a technical affair, a task of implementation and law management, a process of execution of a goal, a matter of organising the means to a certain priority (Friedman, 1987). Contemporary governance processes, we contend in this book, increasingly struggle to balance these two logics of democratic policymaking. Planning expertise is being mobilised in the field of politics, as a tool to provide legitimate definitions of goals, or even to bypass the political complexities of governance in favour of rapid implementation. Under conditions of austerity this process is guided by an emerging elite of planning professionals, real-​estate advisors, accountants and lawyers who are directly involved in, or lobbying for, the definition of public policies to be undertaken by governments. Powerful corporate players actively mobilise technical expertise to affect the result of public processes of decision-​making, by means of lobbying and technical arguments. Under these conditions, planning turns into a practice of validation of pre-​constituted normative claims, namely those of economic growth (Schmelzer, 2016). In this context, the technologies of experts are instrumental to de-​politicise policymaking, and are applied in a way that bypasses contentious debates over priorities, values and political demands (see Crouch, 2004). For Swyngedouw (2009) politics has entered a new era in which there is an emphasis on illusions of consensus and the rise of a win–​win technocratic politics in which it is assumed that policy interventions are focused on meeting shared and collaborative ‘agreed’ needs in the most efficient and effective ways possible. The role that experts play in the process of de-​politicising and post-​politicising urban governance is crucial to understanding the multiple forms that hegemony can take. Under technocratic forms of planning, experts become carriers, validators, justifiers and producers of the growing powers of capitalist and developmental interests to shape the politics of urban development (see Metzger et al, 2014).

Exploring the variegated forms of technocratic planning: the book The remainder of the book provides a fresh perspective on the classic meaning of the term technocracy, beyond its traditional focus on public bureaucracies and public institutions at large. To do so, it builds on three critical propositions in order to reveal the multiple expressions

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Planning and Knowledge

of the new urban technocracy under conditions of entrepreneurial governance in contemporary cities: 1. Technocratic planning occurs when abstracted representations of reality are used as the only legitimate form of knowledge to understand and govern complex urban dynamics. These include contracts, datasets or legal frameworks. 2. Technocratic planning occurs when particular types of specialist expertise monopolise governance processes, providing a general understanding of urban problems, and where other forms of knowledge are excluded from policymaking. 3. Within the frame of democratic processes, technocratic planning occurs when the instrumental rationalities of problem-​based technical thinking dominates the political field of goal-​setting. The three propositions shed light on the variety of planning practices outlined in the contributions made in this book (and beyond). The chapters are divided into five parts according specific fields of practice, in order to reveal the reach of technocratic logics of urban governance across fields and institutional boundaries. Part I establishes some of the core conceptual framings that shape contemporary and historical understandings of the problems associated with technical expertise within urban planning. It comprises this opening chapter, followed by Michael Hebbert’s contribution in Chapter  2 that examines the planning histories associated with writings on technocracies. Hebbert highlights some of the core distinctions that exist between different schools of thought over the form, character and roles of technical knowledge in the planning of cities and reflects on the extent to which we are now living in an era within which ‘new’ technocracies can be said to exist and what these might consist of. In Part II the discussion turns to the changing profile of public planners and the activities and priorities of public bureaucracies in contemporary urban development. The aim of the section is to examine the relationships between technocratic planning and projects associated with state neoliberalisation, with a particular focus on the outsourcing of public capacities and new technologies of policy delivery. In Chapter 3 Ward Rauws and Martine de Jong assess some of the core practices associated with civic engagement in contemporary Dutch cities. They show that planners are attempting to deal with contextual processes and move beyond their standard protocols, but in doing so they face tensions and dilemmas that emerge out of the rigidity of their organisation structures. Similar themes are taken up in Tuna Taşan-​Kok and Martijn

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The rise of a new urban technocracy

van den Hurk’s study of contractual technologies in Chapter 4 and their role in public policymaking and implementation. The chapter explores some of the underlying power relations of contract production in urban development and the ways in which they are becoming a core focus of negotiations between public and private actors. In Chapter 5 Thijs Koolmees and Stan Majoor examine the expertise of the public project manager in Amsterdam and show how the city’s internal bureaucratic structure has been reformed and reorganised under processes of austerity and de-​regulation to promote quick adjustments to plans and efficient delivery. They highlight how leadership and working processes are becoming increasingly focused on ‘flexible implementation’ and the production of entrepreneurial modes of governance. Finally, in Chapter 6 Nanke Verloo’s research problematises the contradictions facing planners that have traditionally acted as ‘street level bureaucrats’. She shows that even when planners attempt to rethink their roles and interact more with citizens, their practices are trapped and locked-​in by the bureaucratic structures and rules within which they operate. Part III shifts attention away from public technocrats to assess the ways in which corporate actors and institutions working in the land and property development sectors use their own technical knowledge and modalities to influence place-​making. Contributions under this theme examine how private corporations, real-​estate brokers, banks and land investors actively mobilise expert knowledge to shape urban projects and public policymaking. In Chapter 7 Rachel Weber focuses on the power of accountancy technologies and models of economic impact assessments used by development corporations and consultants in Chicago to shape urban development projects. These specialised forms of knowledge create an ‘anticipatory gaze’ under which urban development impact models simplify decision-​making and become the primary, or even exclusive, criteria for determining planning interventions. This is followed, in Chapter  8, by a study by Nicola Livingstone of the ways in which property development elites use particular techniques and technologies of representation to create development real estate markets in the UK. She compares the construction of post-​Brexit vote narratives of investment landscapes and opportunities in London and the North-​East. Sabine Dörry, in Chapter 9, also focuses on financial elites and examines how the financial profession and transnational financial networks act as key intermediaries in the contemporary development of cities and urban economies. This is followed in Susannah Gunn’s discussion in Chapter 10 of ethics and values in the planning profession and how these are changing in relation to new technologies of governance and delivery-​focused planning reforms

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Planning and Knowledge

in England. She shows how market-​driven technical knowledges are being brought into the heart of decision-​and plan-​making processes. Part IV addresses the expanding role of private consultants and experts in shaping and delivering public policy. Private actors are increasingly at the interface between public governments and development actors, which bring new forms of expertise in processes of policymaking, such as management, legal, economic and political strategists. These subjects tend to remain in the background in (public) processes of engagement and are often shielded from democratic scrutiny. In the first chapter (11) Aino Hirvola and Raine Mäntysalo problematise a rather under-​investigated niche of experts, the professional lobbyists. They take an open stance to lobbying, arguing that they work as powerful amplifiers of communication streams, yet are narrowly instrumental to the transmission of particular information between policymakers and private actors. Similar themes are examined by Gavin Parker, Emma Street and Matthew Wargent, with their study in Chapter 12 of the role of private consultants in the reformed English planning system and their impacts on the shaping of local policy priorities and practices. In Chapter  13 Sue Brownill focuses specifically on localism and neighbourhood planning to reveal the uneven access to resources in the form of skills and finance that exist between different neighbourhoods leading to socio-​spatial inequalities in mobilising citizens’ rights. Finally, Jonathan Metzger and Sherif Zakhour (Chapter 14) provide evidence of a new urban profession of development engineers within public bureaucracies whose position is increasingly detached from the sphere of public policy in which they operate. Public land development policies in Stockholm are becoming the exclusive competence of experts that follow rather linear and standardised models to estimate land values and promote growth. Finally, Part V offers a diversified view on the constellation of actors across public, private and civic spheres. These are sets of actors that have become directly and indirectly involved in the management and governance of contemporary cities. They do not have formal consultancies or advisory roles but still have a large impact on the conditions and outcomes of policymaking. In Chapter 15 Rob Kitchin, Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans, Liam Heaphy and Darach Mac Donncha show the rising of a coalition of ‘smart city’ professionals with the capacity to influence urban planning innovations in cities. They show the features of an algorithmic technocracy of experts that operate through a broad set of digital technologies and algorithms to define and address urban issues. In Chapter 16 Antonia Layard draws on the example of the English planning system to examine the role of lawyers and planning

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The rise of a new urban technocracy

law structures and judgements in shaping local decisions. She focuses, in particular, on the growing reliance on quantitative evidence in understanding urban problems, which have an impact on how cities are governed. Davide Ponzini, in Chapter 17, looks at an international elite of architects that replicate urban fabrics across the world. The technocratic nature of these firms is exemplified by their capacity to bypass any political context. These firms proliferate in contexts where money is largely available and where democracy is absent. And in the final chapter in this section Samuel Mössner and Catarina Gomes de Matos problematise the post-​political use of best practices legitimated by academic research. Drawing on the case of Freiburg they show how scientific publications often contribute to a reductive, generalist and abstract understanding of sustainable cities. They build ideas of best practices, substantiated by quick and superficial research, that are actively mobilised to justify urban planning interventions by policymakers, and that risk silencing the urgent debate on the socio-​ political implications of urban sustainability.

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2

Planning, knowledge and technocracy in historical perspective Michael Hebbert

Introduction Fifty years ago, William Armytage opened his history of the rise of technocracy with the Homeric image of Laocoön, the priest of Apollo who tried to convince his fellow-​citizens to reject the wooden horse left by the Greeks outside the walls of Troy. Just as he was making his case two serpents suddenly emerged from the sea and crushed him to death (Figure 2.1). Armytage comments: ‘similarly latent, but aggressive, social forces emerge from below the “social horizon” to confound historians’ (1965, vii). Setting aside for the moment the question whether they’re an apt metaphor for technocracy, those serpents swimming below the surface certainly do match the case of neoliberalism. Kim Phillips-​Fein (2009) has shown how neo-​conservative ideologues were secretively bankrolled for decades by American businessmen and wealthy pro-​ marketeers. Nancy Maclean (2017) has called the radical right agenda a ‘stealth plan’. The programme for dismantling the welfare state took shape below the social horizon until the 1980s, since when its offensive has been abrupt, implacable and all-​pervasive. Neo-​conservatism has shifted the fundamentals of social thought, enabling particularist knowledge to undermine the concepts of collective welfare and public interest. It has hollowed out the institutional apparatus of the nation-​ state and emptied the distinction between public and private sectors. It has caused local governments to abandon time-​honoured methods of accountability and embrace quasi-​corporate management structures and remuneration pyramids. The United Kingdom’s local government map has been repeatedly redrawn, almost always in the direction of fewer, larger units devoid of municipal identity. The extent of its success could be measured by the extensive termination of local public services in the

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Planning and Knowledge Figure 2.1: Laocoön and his sons attacked by sea-​serpents Vatican Museum, Catalogue No. 1059

Sourced by kind permission from: www.museivaticani.va/​content/​museivaticani/​en/​ collezioni/​musei/​museo-​pio-​clementino/​Cortile-​Ottagono/​laocoonte.html

aftermath of the 2008 banking crash: a process best described, as Tom Crewe notes, not in terms of ‘cuts’ or ‘austerity’ but as the deliberate destruction of an entire social infrastructure (2016: 7). The neoliberal era has brought a fresh cast of actors onto the stage with their own discourses, metrics, analytical techniques and modes of communication:  examples discussed in this book

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Planning, knowledge and technocracy in historical perspective

include signature architects (Ponzini), deal-​makers (Taşan-​Kok), development engineers (Metzger and Zakhour), housing spreadsheet consultants (Layard), fixers (Mössner and Gomes de Matos), futurists (Weber), journalists (Livingstone), lobbyists (Hirvola and Mäntysalo), participation consultants (Brownill), scrutineers (Parker and Street), smart city experts (Kitchin and colleagues). Some of their knowledges arise directly from neoliberal economic relations; others reflect wider technical shifts in ITC, the ubiquity of smartphones, the integrative  power of GIS, the locational pinpointing of GPS. Consequently, the nature of technocracy –​the legitimation of power by expertise –​has changed. Our book offers an original analysis of the new forms of technocracy and the ways in which they are reshaping contemporary cities. Who are these actors that have been empowered by neoliberalism? How do they think? What do they do? And what are the consequences for the world around us? These are the questions addressed by fellow authors. The task for the present chapter is different. To make sense of the new technocracy we must understand the old. The following pages put the present critique of expert knowledge into historical perspective, looking back to the interplay of planning and technocracy in the century of two world wars, the New Deal, the Welfare State and the Modern Project. It is for this purpose that this section will trace the roots of the technocratic critique to planning up to the mid-​ 1980s, leaving the analysis of the most recent mutations of technocratic planning to the following chapters.

The first wave Let’s begin with our keyword. The term ‘technocracy’ entered the English language a century ago and a frequency graph of its usage (Figure  2.2) displays two peaks forty years apart. Closer inspection reveals significant semantic shifts between the two. As the Ngram shows, ‘technocracy’ first appeared early in the last century and enjoyed a spurt of popularity in the mid-​1920s. The word was coined by the prolific English-​born, California-​based engineer William Henry Smyth (1855–​1940) and used in various papers he published from 1919 onwards (Akin, 1977; Fischer, 1990). Under the guise of a whacky characterisation of the Clam-​Digger descendants of Irascible Strong and his wife Trixie-​Cunning (Figure 2.3) Smyth offered a serious critique of the inappropriateness of the psychological mentality of primitive hunter-​gatherers to the problems of machine-​ age society:

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Planning and Knowledge Figure 2.2: ‘Technocracy’ frequency graph Google Ngram from the corpus of books in English, 1920–​2015, with a smoothing of 3. 0.0000400% 0.0000350% 0.0000300% 0.0000250% 0.0000200% 0.0000150% technocracy

0.0000100% 0.0000050% 0.0000000% 1920

1930

1940

1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

Source: https://​books.google.com/​ngrams

a nation (and above all an industrial democracy) should have a definite purpose. An army is officered by military specialists; a business organization is officered by business specialists; and industrial democracy  –​a democracy of technical industries  –​should be officered by technical specialists  –​should be in form and in fact a purposive Technocracy. (1926: 284) Smyth’s useful term was taken up by Howard Scott, a floor polish manufacturer, political entrepreneur and self-​styled engineer active in progressive Greenwich Village discussion circles in the 1920s. In 1929 Scott licensed the brand name –​Technocracy Inc –​for a movement that briefly captured the public mood in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash. Its platform was the application of scientific expertise to collective decision-​making, and replacement of the monetary dollar with energy certificates, linking economic value to the environmental resource base. In the technocratic utopia both ideological politics and the vagaries of the market would be replaced by the engineer’s dispassionate quest for efficiency. The word’s spurt of popularity can be seen in the Ngram and so can its precipitous decline after Scott was discredited in 1933 for lack of formal qualification. Though the organised movement continued in existence until his death in 1970 it was a mere shell without political significance. Armytage’s Laocoön metaphor points to the powerful forces that swim below the surface in the history of ideas. Howard Scott emerged from the discussion circles around Thorstein Veblen at the New School for Social Research in New  York City. His Technocracy platform

22

Planning, knowledge and technocracy in historical perspective

blended elements of the Taylorism promoted by the Taylor Institute (followers of Frederic Winslow Taylor) and the Fordism preached by followers of Henry Ford, with the hugely influential utopianism of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards. Armytage contextualises it both historically and comparatively, tracing its antecedents through nineteenth century Utilitarianism and Positivism back to the origins of modern applied science and revealing the multiple connections between American technocratic thinking and its European, Russian and Japanese counterparts. The doctrine of scientific management had few more enthusiastic promoters than the Bolshevik Gleb Maksimilianovich Krzhizhanovsky  –​ in Armytage’s words ‘the most portentous technocrat of them all’ (1965: 219) –​whom Lenin appointed to chair both the Soviet State Planning Commission GOSPLAN and the electrification programme GOELRO. Soviet five-​ year plans in their turn influenced the American New Deal initiatives, especially its most ambitious spatial experiment, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Walter Creese notes the close parallels between TVA’s gestation and the Technocracy movement, both drawing utopian inspiration from the transformative potential of electrification (2003:  70). However, the launch of TVA in 1933 coincided with the collapse of Scott’s movement, and the emergence of a different terminology –​‘planning’ rather than ‘technocracy’. In the title of Julian Huxley’s widely-​read wartime account TVA was the supreme Adventure in Planning, a practical demonstration ‘that there is no antithesis between democracy and planning, and that planning can not only be reconciled with individual freedom and opportunity, but can be used to enhance and enlarge them’ (1943: 135). As Howard Scott’s stock declined, technocracy’s credit transferred to the wider quest for planning, an active participle with humanistic resonance, as applicable to individuals and social organisations, as to business corporations and governments at every scale (Doob: 1940). In the United Kingdom Julian Huxley and his brother Aldous popularised the perception of planning as a non-​partisan Third Way out of the Depression through the medium of a think-​tank, Political & Economic Planning (PEP) launched in 1931 with Sir Basil Blackett (Bank of England), I.M. Sieff (M&S) and Lionel Elmhirst (Dartington Hall). The following year President F.D. Roosevelt launched American’s New Deal with a leading exponent of planning, Rexford Tugwell, as one of his closest advisers. When Tugwell left the Federal Administration in 1936 he became Chairman of the New York Planning Commission

23

Planning and Knowledge Figure 2.3: Concerning Irascible Strong and Trixie-​Cunning…and their descendants Smyth (1926) title-​page, from Siegel & Strain (2011, p. 29)

Sourced by kind permission from: http://​realestate.berkeley.edu/​sites/​default/​files/​hsr_​smythfernwald_​ march2011.pdf

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Planning, knowledge and technocracy in historical perspective

and subsequently Governor of Puerto Rico, in each context applying a planning methodology of data collection, collective goal-​setting and medium-​term strategy. In the extensive literature on social reconstruction of the 1940s it was axiomatic that the future division of labour should include an expert-​based collective planning system as a third sector, breaking the traditional duopoly of politics and the market. Routledge & Kegan Paul published a prominent series on the topic, the International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction, edited by Karl Mannheim, with the logo ‘tree of science, tree of life’ (Figure  2.4). It included E.A. Gutkind’s two volumes on Creative Demobilisation (1943) and his own posthumous Freedom Power and Democratic Planning (1951). While Karl Mannheim’s preached the doctrine of democratic planning from his new academic base at the London School of Economics, his colleagues and fellow-​emigrés Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek laid the philosophical basis for its antithesis. Popper’s Poverty of Historicism (1957) argued the impossibility of planning. He challenged both the epistemological basis of knowledge for collective action and the moral claim of its historical inevitability. ‘You cannot centralise within a planning authority the knowledge relevant for such tasks as the satisfaction of personal needs or the utilization of specialist skill and ability’ (1957:  64). Given the fundamental flaws in the knowledge base for holistic planning the only rational basis for action, so Popper argued, was piecemeal incrementalism. Hayek’s earlier book The Road to Serfdom (1944) offered a more polemical critique of the efforts of the planning movement to build a welfare state upon the basis of impartial expertise. He prophesied that specialists and single-​ issue reformers were being drawn by the promise that their agenda would be advanced in a future planned society:  implementation of this utopia was bound to disappoint since it could only bring out the concealed conflict between their aims. Disappointment would trigger further self-​defeating attempts to centralise control. So democratic socialism was a slippery slope, leading inevitably to authoritarian denial of freedoms. Hayek’s sophisticated advocacy of private property rights as the only guarantor of freedom appealed to the nascent American neo-​conservative movement, causing the business activist Harold Luhnow to arrange for him to be appointed by the University of Chicago with a ten year subsidy on his salary (Phillips-​Fein,  2009). Hayek’s time would come, but for the first three postwar decades –​ les trentes glorieuses –​the advocacy of the planning movement shaped the institutional design of the postwar world: at the local level, in

25

Planning and Knowledge Figure 2.4: Arbor Scientiae Arbor Vitae. Title-​page symbol of the International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction published by Routledge Kegan Paul

Source: Valada (2008)

systems of land use planning such as the UK’s celebrated Town & Country Planning Act of 1947; in the seminal regional planning mechanisms of the French state, whose designer Paul Delouvrier deliberately excluded the possibility of ‘sterile’ political participation (Valade, 2008: 136); in macroeceonomic mechanisms of five year plans, devised and implemented by the technical élites of the grands écoles, that drove the growth of the French economy over the three decades of les trentes glorieuses; and internationally, in the multiple expert-​led agencies established under the auspices of the UN, or the Commission established by Jean Monnet as the foundation-​ stone of European integration. Faith in rationality lay at the heart of the Modern project (Beneviste, 1972). Technocracy shaped institutions and institutions shaped the contemporary city:  in a direct and physical sense the built environment bequeathed to us by the later twentieth century embodies the values and solutions of its knowledge-​providers.

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Planning, knowledge and technocracy in historical perspective

The most direct and visible translation of knowledge into physical form occurred within residential neighbourhoods. Mass housing, supplied by the state and designed formulaically to scientific principles of the existenzminimum, had always been a defining vision of the Modern Movement. Implemented on a vast scale around the world, the planned residential landscape proved entirely unlike any earlier typology of human settlement (Urban, 2012). Thanks to the intrinsic standardisation of mass housing it displayed remarkable similarities to either side of the Iron Curtain (Monclús and Díez Medina, 2016). Salient common elements were the emphasis on output, standardisation, economy and movement of assembly cranes, and the disregard for user preferences, tenant convenience, residential mobility and local culture (Pawley, 1971; Ravetz, 1995; Cupers, 2011). Discontent with the depersonalisation of mass housing contributed significantly to a wider disillusion with the supposedly omniscient planner.

The second wave Reaction against the institutional landscape of postwar decades explains the second surge of interest in technocracy. Armytage’s Rise of the Technocrats (1965) opens with that image of Laocoön and ends with a warning of the inherently hierarchical, authoritarian tendency of rule by experts. The political ferment of the 1960s had thrown open the postwar assumption that the technical knowledge of planners would serve a benificent public interest, and that the trees of science and of life necessarily grew from the same root system. The Frankfurt School challenged that assumption through the critique of instrumental rationality by Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and then Jürgen Habermas. Jean Meynaud’s Technocracy (1964) traced the shift of power and accountability within the French state to autonomous agencies controlled by engineers and scientists, a process critiqued equally from the Christian anarchist perspective of Jacques Ellul (1964) and the humanistic Marxism of Henri Lefebvre. British town planners active in urban redevelopment found themselves challenged from the grassroots by affected residents and workers, their voices amplified by activist social scientists such as Norman Dennis (1970; 1972) and Jon Gower Davies (1972). In a pincer movement, the critique from specific and local considerations was matched by generic shifts of post-​modern epistemology that undermined all forms of holistic expertise and emphasising the relational, provisional nature of human knowledge.

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The word ‘technocracy’ thus became, as Gunnell puts it, ‘Janus-​ faced’ (1982: 382). ‘Few terms in political sociology are used as loosely’ (Centeno, 1993: 309). On the one hand it continued to be used to describe any institutional arrangement that empowers non-​elected professionals, insulating decision-​making from the play of political opportunity and market speculation. To take two examples from the relevant literature, Trevor Goldsmith (2011) shows how the Spanish Ley del Suelo of 1956, devised as a technocratic measure under Franco, became a cornerstone of municipal policy after the restoration of democracy. Miguel Angel Centeno (1993) analysing the phenomenon of technocracy among national policy elites of Pacific Rim states such as Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, notes how their acceptance is contingent on an ability to deliver sustained economic growth: should that falter so would the model. The alternative meaning of technology is pejorative. Measured against the implicit norm of democracy, it implied –​like kleptocracy or theocracy –​a capture of power from the demos by an unaccountable elite. Jürgen Habermas’s Lure of Technocracy (2015) faults Jean Monnet, Jacques Delors and their successors not because they erected the European project on a foundation of independent, functional expertise but because they failed to develop the matching superstructure of discursive politics that would give it legitimacy. As Larochelle notes (1993: 124), this concept of technocracy as ‘a deviationist syndrome’ came to dominate the literature. Once seen as a solution, the t-​word had become an imbalance requiring correction. This was the critique that played into neo-​conservatism’s emerging attack on public sector expertise. It fed the sea-​serpents swimming below the social horizon of the Welfare State.

Technocracy and neoliberalism The accessions of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1981 marked a turning point. Both brought advisers from the secretive realm of neo-​conservative think-​tanks and turned their libertarian conjectures into hard political reality. The shift was sudden and profound. As an illustrative example, consider the White Paper Streamlining the Cities published by the government of Mrs Thatcher four months after her second election victory in 1983. It posed an audacious challenge to the conventional wisdom that the governance of the modern metropolis required metropolitan-​scale institutions (White, 1975; Barlow, 1991). In the libertarian perspective of James Buchanan’s Public Choice theory, all big-​city governments were Gargantuas imposing redistributive

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Planning, knowledge and technocracy in historical perspective

levies to subsidise their inherent inefficiency. The alternative proposed by Vincent Ostrom, Charles Tiebout and Robert Warren in a classic paper for American Political Science Review (1961) was for big cities to be governed polycentrically, by multiple municipalities contracting for shared services as their voters saw fit, and competing among themselves to attract population and investment (Bish, 1971). Streamlining and the resulting Local Government Act of 1986 translated the New Right’s theoretical blueprint into an operational design for England’s seven largest conurbations. Many aspects of this rash, Nietzschean act (O’Leary, 1987) proved unworkable and have been reversed over the past three decades, but the basic shift towards reliance on quasi-​market mechanisms was prophetic and has proved irreversible. It is worth remembering that the New Right was technocratic in both senses of the word. On the one hand it embodied the presence of social scientists at the seat of power: Martin Bulmer writes of the influence of Professors Brian Griffiths, Alan Walters and Milton Friedmann, ‘paradoxically the free-​market policies pursued by the Thatcher government provide impressive evidence of the impact which social science ideas may have upon practical affairs’ (1988: 39). After all, as Centeno notes (1993: 311) the market logic of non-​zero sum games yielding equilibria through the invisible hand of competition might well appeal to the technocrat who aspires to abolish conflict through optimisation and efficiency. On the other hand, libertarians drew upon the prevailing concept of technocracy as an elite conspiracy. The anti-​technocratic consensus, as DuPuis and Gareau (2008) call it, undermined the analytic base of general welfare economics and opened the door to methodological individualism, political particularism and a free play of sectional interest.

Conclusion Narratives of the history of ideas are rarely linear. Concepts twist and reverse and their meanings are shifted through a process of historical dialectic. In the century since its first appearance, ‘technocracy’ started as a political movement to empower public expertise in the tradition of Saint-​Simon, Auguste Comte and Thorstein Veblen; dissolved into the larger advocacy of planning within the Modernist project; reemerged as a critique of synoptic knowledge and advocacy of discursive pluralism; and has been overtaken a second time by the sea-​serpents of neoliberalism as they twine round the institutional structures of the mid-​twentieth century, privatising many, eradicating others, or penetrating their value systems to align with global corporate agendas.

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The final message of this chapter is, therefore, beware the de-​ legitimisation of technical expertise. We can see it in the ongoing transformation of the everyday infrastructure of local public services –​ schools, parks, housing, buses, social care, planning, the public realm and the local state system that sustained it. The institutional capacity of local governments, built over a timespan of a century and a half, included expertise in strength and depth. Technocracy had its pathologies but was also an essential component of an effective public service. Arguably the heart of this conflict lies in the arena of environmental management where the scientific advice of climatologists and environmental economists is pitted against the business interests of global petrochemical corporations for stakes of no less than planetary survival. The periodic reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change represent a massive technocratic application of scientific knowledge to the central contemporary question of human welfare. The 1987 intergovernmental initiative to ban ozone-​depleting gases (chlorofluorocarbons and methyl bromide) under the Montreal Protocol has often been held up as a successful precedent for greenhouse gas limitation under the Paris Treaty. But implementation of the methyl bromide phaseout has been slowed by the liberal allowance of exemptions, justified not through a general calculus of costs and benefits but through ‘market disruption’ impact on particular classes of users. In their important study of neoliberal knowledge, the decline of technocracy and the weakening of the Montreal Protocol, Melanie DuPuis and Brian Gareau provide a timely take-​home message to end our historical chapter: The legitimization of a particularist knowledge regime opens up policymaking to domination by private interests playing the stakeholder game. Stakeholder input and particularist knowledges are important to democratic decision making. However, technical expertise, despite all its weaknesses, is a form of knowledge that remains necessary to the protection of the environment and public health. (2008: 1212) …and, we can add, to cities that are equitable and liveable, and to a sustainable future for planet Earth.

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PART II

Public planning and bureaucracies in contemporary urban development politics

3

Dealing with tensions: the expertise of boundary spanners in facilitating community initiatives Ward Rauws and Martine de Jong

Introduction In this chapter, we investigate the tension between bureaucratic expertise and situated knowledge in the context of social innovation. We address the frictions that emerge internally in public organisations when they attempt to respond to local demands of social innovation, citizen’s engagement and democratic participation. Our contribution to a critique of contemporary technocratic urban management and planning lies in identifying the key axes of internal conflict between public professional expertise and the situated knowledge in urban neighbourhoods. We particularly look at the actions of ‘boundary spanners’, and their narratives, to examine the role of a new professional profile within public organisations. Boundary spanners work across organisational boundaries developing a specific expertise which is instituted to connect the internal working of bureaucracies with the external demands and needs of actors in particular urban areas. Throughout Europe, organisations with a public task aim to facilitate community initiatives, as these are believed to strengthen citizens’ capabilities and community cohesion, as well as contributing to more tailored responses to the local context and needs (Boonstra and Boelens, 2011; De Wilde et al, 2014; Edelenbos and Van Meerkerk, 2016). Community initiatives are collaborative activities by citizens through which they provide community goods or services based on their own motives and under their own conditions (Bakker et  al, 2012; Denters, 2016). Examples include citizens starting community gardens, setting up local sustainable energy companies or organising community activities to increase interaction between neighbours. Facilitating such initiatives will entail public professionals serving the ambitions of citizens and generating conditions which support

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community initiatives in realising and managing their initiative, such as providing means, networks and intellectual support (Oude Vrielink and Van de Wijdeven, 2011). However, a facilitating role comes with complicating tensions as the informal and action-​oriented logic of community initiatives (CIs) are often at odds with the formal and procedurally-​oriented logic of organisations with a public task (POs) (Van Dam et al, 2014). For instance, there is a tension between acting fast to retain the enthusiasm of initiators and simultaneously carefully aligning the initiative with the policies and interests of the PO, to support the initiative more sustainably. In this chapter we analyse such tensions and explore how boundary spanners, who provide POs with specific expertise in facilitating CIs, can make tensions productive. Boundary spanners, for instance in the role of community workers, stakeholder managers or policymakers, are specialised in negotiating the interactions between their own organisation and other actors, organisations and coalitions, in order to establish a better ‘fit’ (Van Meerkerk, 2014). They play a key role in facilitating CIs as they have the skills and competences to identify and exploit opportunities for building relationships across borders and have the capacity to empathise with the perspectives, values and interests of the ‘other side’ (Akkerman and Bakker, 2011; Metze, 2010; Schruijer and Vansina, 2008). As such, they link agendas, attune investments and efforts, and highlight potential synergies between the needs and drivers of CIs and the policies and politics of POs. However, while the contribution of boundary spanners in connecting and aligning CIs and POs is acknowledged (Van Meerkerk, 2014; Specht, 2012), limited attention has been paid to understanding how the conditions and day-​to-​day tensions under which boundary spanners operate affect their boundary spanning activities (Van Meerkerk and Edelenbos, 2018). In this chapter we therefore aim to analyse how boundary spanners can deal with tensions in facilitating CIs. Our argument is twofold. We show that four types of tensions can be identified. Such categorisation can assist boundary spanners in making tensions recognisable, discussable and workable. Next, we cast POs as complex adaptive systems demonstrating that tensions are organisationally embedded, meaning that they are connected to various levels and units of the boundary spanner’s own organisation. This implies that dealing with tensions is not only an individual responsibility, but also a collective one. In analysing the tensions which come with facilitating CIs, we draw on the ‘Buurtmakers’ research and training project. This project was commissioned by a housing corporation in the northern Netherlands and was conducted between September 2016 and May 2017. Housing

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Dealing with tensions

corporations in the Netherlands are hybrid organisations (Blessing, 2012): they are private entities with an explicit public task which is defined and constrained in a legislative framework established by the national government. Housing corporations therefore pre-​eminently experience the tensions between public interests, business needs and civic wishes. The authors mapped 82 community initiatives and their characteristics at community level (Rauws et  al, 2017). Furthermore, our data is collected from and with a team of seven boundary spanners from different (strategic and operational) parts of the organisation and one tenant. We mapped the tensions they faced in facilitating CIs during training sessions, corporate meetings, field trips, and during the interviews which the boundary spanners conducted with their colleagues. In this chapter, we first deepen our understanding of the tensions boundary spanners face when facilitating CIs and how they are embedded in a multi-​layered organisational landscape. Then we analyse the tense situations that became apparent in Buurtmakers and discuss the strategies boundary spanners can use in making tensions productive.

Tensions in the facilitation of community initiatives To facilitate CIs, public organisations need a broader repertoire of actions. Community initiatives are by definition led to a large degree by the initiators themselves and as such dependent on the motivations, ambitions and ways of working of these initiators (Lowndes et  al, 2006). Hence, the relationship between POs and citizens inverts in the context of community initiatives; initiators decide how and on what topic they want to become active in the public domain, while this is traditionally shaped by POs (Van de Wijdeven, 2012). As the traditional, directing role would return the ownership and leadership at the PO level, a facilitating role is recommended as more effective if these organisations want to preserve the energy, activity and responsibility at the initiator level. A facilitating role is not meant to replace, but rather to supplement a directing role (De Jong, 2016; Van der Steen et al, 2015). It is described as an indirect management method focused on empowerment, capacity building and creating conditions for effective collaboration and communication (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Schwarz, 2002). In the context of facilitating community initiatives, Bakker et  al (2012) define two main aspects of facilitation: network structuring and process management. Facilitation by network structuring includes rule setting to structure the action arena for initiatives, for instance through

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the appointment of specialised coordinators, the implementation of subsidy schemes, best idea competitions or explanation of approval procedures for initiatives. Facilitation by process management refers to actions which help initiators to reach their goals. Examples include demonstrating engagement by listening to and thinking along with initiators, connecting them with other relevant actors and helping them in navigating the often bureaucratic governance structure of POs. These facilitation activities require the specific expertise of boundary spanners and their role is crucial to combine the various organisational logics of CIs and POs (Van Meerkerk, 2014; Morgan-​ Trimmer, 2014). The expertise of boundary spanners is therefore not to provide relevant domain-​specific knowledge, but to bring together the ‘expertise’ of the many actors involved. They focus on the transfer of skills, knowledge and rationalities, and the creation of new successful patterns of collaboration (Richardson and Tait, 2010). The world of CIs is driven by the interests and demands of particular groups of citizens who typically have a more creative, informal and action-​oriented way of working (Innes and Rongerude, 2013; Sampson et al, 2005). We refer to this as the ‘logic of improvisation’. In contrast, POs are expected to serve the public interest, resulting in a strong emphasis on the legitimacy, accountability and transparency of their actions (Van der Steen et al, 2014; Scholtes, 2012). As such, POs are typically characterised by formalised working methods, here described as the ‘logic of institutionalisation’. Boundary spanners thus have the difficult task of balancing institutional and improvisational logics, managing the inter-​and intra-​organisational tensions which emerge from these paradoxical practices (Van der Steen et al, 2015). We will concentrate here on the tensions which boundary spanners experience within their own organisations when facilitating CIs. CIs are grounded in everyday life situations that transgress the often sectoral structure of POs. Therefore, facilitating CIs usually involves several PO departments. The differences in how different departments think and work and their orientations towards CIs can cause tensions. These tensions emerge due to the stress, anxiety and discomfort felt in the clash of ideas, principles and actions (Putnam et al, 2016; Fairhurst et al, 2002). For instance, in a housing corporation context, tenants can be encouraged to take ownership of their living environment through facilitated self-​directed alterations to their homes and public spaces. At the same time, the corporation simultaneously aims for efficiency, with large-​scale maintenance schemes and guarantees for professional quality and safety. We argue that dealing with such intra-​organisational

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Dealing with tensions

tensions productively is a key condition for boundary spanners to strengthen both the community initiatives and their own organisation. Based on paradox theory, Smith and Lewis (2011) and Smith et  al (2013) distinguish four types of tensions. We argue that this categorisation offers a useful framework for analysing the intra-​ organisational tensions that boundary spanners face in POs which aim to support CIs. The first are performing tensions. These emerge when organisations aim for varied and conflicting goals. This type of tensions affect boundary spanners, particularly because they also pursue goals established by citizens outside POs. Organising tensions, as the second category, arise from the commitment of actors to conflicting organisational structures, cultures and processes. These tensions are felt by boundary spanners because they seek to address the organisational capacity of (different departments of) their own organisation as well as of various community initiatives. Third, belonging tensions are connected to articulations of identity and core values. This is relevant for boundary spanners because facilitating CIs opens up alternative identities and sets of values which affect who feels ownership for what. Finally, learning tensions arise from contradictory strategies for developing and implementing new ideas and innovations. This type of tensions matters to boundary spanners as, on the one hand, experiential knowledge is key to dealing with the idiosyncratic nature of CIs. On the other hand, they have to make use of codified knowledge to persuade their colleagues and implement new ways of working across the organisation. Distinguishing various types of tensions can be regarded as the first step in understanding the complicated work of boundary spanners. The second step requires attention to be paid to the structural nature and organisational embeddedness of tensions. Viewing POs as complex adaptive systems allows us to formulate four basic assumptions to deal with tensions. First, tensions are structural. Organisations are always in a process of becoming as a result of their open and dynamic nature (Connolly, 2011). A  stable equilibrium between improvisation and institutionalisation will therefore never be achieved. Second, dealing with tensions requires incremental strategies, as processes of becoming follow non-​linear paths (Dooley, 1997). Third, tensions are essential for an organisation’s vitality. While tensions often complicate internal and external collaboration, the coexistence of opposing values contributes to a system’s capacity for change (Seo and Creed, 2002; De Roo, 2017). Finally, from a complexity perspective, organisations are embedded in, overlap with and consist of multiple semi-​autonomous units which each aim to maximise their fitness while also being interdependent (Dooley, 1997). This implies that tensions surface between multiple

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layers and units as interactions run in all available directions, vertically and horizontally. A complexity lens thus urges for sensitivity towards the multi-​layered nature of tensions and their dynamic interplay.

Tensions and their organisational embeddedness in practice Based on the conceptual framework presented earlier, this section discusses the four typical tensions that the boundary spanners of the Buurtmakers faced within the housing corporation when facilitating CIs. These tensions were all brought about by the two opposing logics of institutionalisation and improvisation, as summarised in Table  3.1. To understand how these tensions were embedded in the multi-​layered structure of the housing corporation, we analyse particular moments at which tensions surfaced. The analyses show how tensions are connected to various organisational levels (for example, employee, department or management) and organisational units (for example, real estate department or purchasing department). We also illustrate some of the strategies which were applied in dealing with these tensions. Performative tensions: diverging goals In the Buurtmakers’ case performing tensions concerned the provision of housing for low income groups, which is the primary task of a housing corporation by law, and improving the quality of life in a community, a goal shared by a network of actors in the neighbourhood. For the boundary spanners, these diverging goals implied that support for their boundary spanning efforts could not be taken for granted and had to be actively sought. One point at which performing tensions surfaced was during a field trip attended by the boundary spanners and the CEO of the housing corporation. We spent a week together visiting best practices for facilitating CIs and a collective act of reflection was held midway through the programme. During this reflection, the CEO expressed his appreciation of the holistic and participative approach to improving quality of life in the communities visited and the close alignment he felt with the ambitions of his own organisation. However, in response the boundary spanners pointed out that they experienced this differently, as they felt confused and uncertain due to a perceived ambiguity in their organisation’s goals. They felt that encouraging citizens’ goals for improved liveability in communities was not considered a central goal

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Dealing with tensions

in many of the daily practices and was often overshadowed by the goal of providing social housing. Some boundary spanners indicated that the aim of improving liveability sometimes seemed little more than fine words as it did not suit their already full agendas. They lacked support from the real estate and purchasing departments in developing shared solutions with active citizens and struggled with different priorities set by different board members and middle managers. Others argued that the liveability goal is insufficiently integrated into budget approval and communication procedures with tenants. The boundary spanners thus experienced a tension in balancing the housing provision goal, thoroughly grounded in the organisation, and the liveability goal, passionately advocated by the CEO. This occasion made the boundary spanners realise that discussing this tension with the CEO already required courage and that dealing with this performing tension demanded an even broader dialogue. Alignment of time allocation, priority setting and procedures required the involvement of the other board members and middle managers. The position and contributions of various departments in facilitating CIs had to be addressed as well. All in all, actions at various organisational layers were required to make the performing tension workable. Examples of strategies which have been attempted include a ‘draw your caricature workshop’ to feel more at ease with talking about implicit tensions, open sessions with the board to discuss potential conflicting goals, and redesigning employee assessments to include performance on both the housing provision goal and the liveability goal. Organising tensions: conflicting structures, cultures and processes In Buurtmakers organising tensions comprised the contrast between the informal and personal ways of working and organisational principles of the CIs, and the formal and generic ways of the housing corporation. This means that the boundary spanners often acted as ‘translators’, helping both colleagues and citizens become aware of and be able to anticipate the attitudes and working ways of the ‘other’. The tensions between formal and informal ways of working became apparent during the redesign of the public space surrounding a social housing estate. Invited by the housing corporation, a group of four active tenants brainstormed and developed a plan for the redesign themselves. To garner the support of their neighbours they conducted a personal visit to all the households and intuitively selected the best of three offers made by landscaping companies. The costs were considered

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excessive and an amended plan was presented to the community, after negotiations with the help of the housing corporation. However, when the order was transferred to the housing corporation’s purchasing department it was refused: selecting a different landscaper than the one contracted was not possible. The boundary spanners had not been informed about this procedure and did not realise that this procedure was difficult to alter. The plan was ultimately realised by the initially contracted landscaper, and the organising capacity of the tenants was left unused. The boundary spanners found themselves caught in the clash between the organisational structures and cultures of their own organisation and those of the citizens’ initiative. To deal with the organising tension, the boundary spanners indicated that they had to address the relationship with the active tenants at the organisational level in general, as well as their own contacts with the tenants at the personal level. This was viewed as necessary to manage expectations and to foster an understanding of each other’s ways of working. Similarly, they felt that they needed to involve the purchasing department earlier in their activities to achieve a better mutual understanding and alignment of tasks and responsibilities. Several strategies were followed at Buurtmakers to raise awareness of the organising tension. An interactive group game was played with the employees in which they had to vote with their feet to clarify their position on the several opposing ways of working. Internal guidelines were also developed to ensure the early involvement of possible relevant departments when dealing with a civic initiative. Finally, the boundary spanners organised short sessions during lunch breaks to make their colleagues more acquainted with the organisational nature of civic initiatives and the potential implications for the organisation’s relatively formal working methods. Belonging tensions: competing identities and values In Buurtmakers belonging tensions surfaced as a clash of identities. The institutionalised identity of the housing corporation is constructed around social housing production, referring to ‘product delivery’, ‘expert role’ and ‘tenants as consumers’. Facilitating CIs triggered critical reflection on this identity and the corporations’ tendency to think and to decide for tenants on what is best for them. Alternative identities were devised related to ‘user value creation’, ‘supportive role’ and the ‘tenants as producers’ of a pleasant living environment. The boundary spanners had to empathise with both identities and find ways to incorporate them in a workable narrative.

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The belonging tensions became apparent during the project’s kick-​ off phase. The manager of the real estate department initially resisted allocating team members to the project, as Buurtmakers was not considered the organisation’s core business. The department manager and staff mainly identified themselves with their organisation’s position as a housing provider and its associated values. After some negotiations, one real estate department staff member sceptically joined Buurtmakers. The tensions persisted and angered the manager and staff of the community management department, who promote cooperation with tenants and other citizens in support of liveability as a central value of their organisation. They blamed the real estate experts for being inwardly orientated and fearing the loss of control. The situation exposed differences in the values and beliefs of the employees of both departments and their ideas on the position of tenants in the conduct of the business of the housing corporation. As the Buurtmakers team consisted of a selected group of boundary spanners from various departments, including the two departments mentioned, they faced the challenge of working with belonging tensions at various levels: at a personal level between the various team members, at the level of the two departments, between the managers of these departments and also in the external profiling of the housing corporation. One strategy applied to address these tensions was to conduct interviews with colleagues to help them become more aware of each other’s personal views, motivations, experiences and struggles. The scope of the project was also adjusted to include site visits to best practices with an explicit link to real estate. This adjustment facilitated the exploration of the complementarities between housing provision and co-​creation with tenants. They also organised an external event with active citizens and professionals from other organisations to explain the role the housing corporation wanted to play in facilitating CIs. Eventually, the initially sceptical boundary spanner from the real estate department became an ambassador of both identities. Learning tensions: contradicting strategies for integrating innovation The boundary spanners in Buurtmakers experienced a tension between ‘learning by knowing’ and ‘learning by doing’. The former includes evaluating and improving the housing corporation’s products and procedures, informed by codified knowledge such as explanatory models, checklists and pattern analyses across cases. The latter concerns personal reflections on skills, attitudes and intuition, based on

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experiential knowledge in specific situations. The boundary spanners encountered this learning tension in transferring the lessons learnt in facilitating CIs to their colleagues. An example of such a tense situation was the preparation of the final project presentation. The boundary spanners experienced the value of learning by doing, by visiting and engaging in a series of initiatives while at Buurtmakers and in their daily work. The specific characteristics and personal stories behind each of these initiatives triggered them to reflect on their own attitudes, skills and intuitions. However, these results were difficult to define within a frame of direct and SMART outcomes. In organising the final presentation the boundary spanners therefore expressed major diffidences in how to incorporate learning-​by-​d oing activities. For instance, the idea of organising a real-​life simulation for civic initiators and professionals, to offer their colleagues an experience of what it is like to facilitate initiatives, was considered too risky. They also felt insecure about whether the board and the middle management would support launching a series of pilot projects intended to create structural opportunities for learning by doing. The boundary spanners therefore struggled with how to position hard to document experiential knowledge gained through learning by doing, as valid and complementary knowledge alongside codified knowledge. In making the learning tension workable, the boundary spanners had to address at least three organisational layers. First, the internal tension experienced at a personal level: equally valuing codified knowledge and experiential knowledge as useful outcomes of diverging learning strategies in improving the facilitation of CIs. Then, in the interactions with colleagues, the challenge was to find a productive balance in introducing colleagues to the value of learning by doing, while linking in with the dominant organisational approach of learning by knowing. This balance is important to lower the barriers for colleagues to integrate the lessons collected into the broader organisational practices and make facilitating CIs more successful. The final layer included the interactions between the boundary spanners and the management and concerned the provision of means and explicit support for activities which enable learning by doing, such as pilots, working visits and buddying. Two strategies applied to address the learning tension were informal lobbying for pilot projects and inviting CIs initiators to share their experiences publicly. These strategies aimed to show that actors working according to institutional or to improvisational logics can each learn from the other.

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Dealing with tensions

Conclusions on a multi-​layered approach to organisational tensions when facilitating CIs The boundary spanner, a new professional profile that is becoming central in todays’ Dutch urban management and planning processes deals with the key tensions between bureaucratic public procedures and situated know-​hows. The institutional logic of organisations with a public task (POs) and the improvisational situated logic of community initiatives (CIs) challenge each other when facilitating community initiatives. Due to their expertise and unique position as intermediaries, boundary spanners are tasked with a key role in balancing these logics. Our analysis shows that social innovation in urban areas requires the ability by these actors to deal with performing, organising, belonging and learning tensions. Such tensions not only emerge between the CIs and POs, but also within POs between the different organisational levels and organisational units. These intra-​organisational tensions are both structural and vital aspects of today’s public organisations that attempt to ‘reach out’ to communities beside their bureaucratic and standardised procedures and protocols. At the same time, in the Netherlands these tensions are symptomatic of the stable role of public bureaucracies in planning, that are adapting their organisation to address important priorities of social innovation. The ‘both/​and strategies’ performed by the boundary spanners, in which contrasting poles are simultaneously accommodated, can be recognised in the Buurtmakers project. These strategies were however not self-​evident and were specifically encouraged in the context of the research project. Rather than choosing one pole of a tension field (‘either/​or strategies’) and masking, avoiding or ignoring the state of tension, during the project the boundary spanners applied the following three steps to deal with these tensions: making tensions recognisable, discussable and workable (see De Caluwé, 2015). Tensions were, for instance, made recognisable with help of a ‘voting with your feet’ game. Discussing tensions was enabled through the lunch sessions with board members and the interviews with colleagues. Strategies for making tensions workable included the early involvement of experts with contrasting approaches and responsibilities in CI facilitation activities. Furthermore, site visits to observe best practices and starting pilot projects were instrumental for identifying complementarities between the different logics to help them coexist.

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Table 3.1: Tensions boundary spanners in the Buurtmakers project faced within their organisation when facilitating CIs (Table layout partly based on Smith et al, 2013) Tensions boundary spanners faced in facilitating CIs

Connected organisational levels and units in illustrated tension

Performing tension

Provision of housing for low income groups

Improving quality of life in the community

How can efforts to achieve the housing provision and the liveability goals be balanced and complementary?

• • • • • •

Organising tension

Formal ways of working based on procedures, contracts and allocated responsibilities

Informal ways of working based on experimentation, personal relations and sense of ownership

How to commit to both ways of working when aligning efforts within and outside the organisation?

• Active tenants • Community management department • Purchasing department

Belonging tension

Staff and departments which mainly identify with product delivery

Staff and departments which mainly identify with user value creation

How to respect and relate to competing values and identities in the cooperation with colleagues?

• • • •

Learning tension

Learning by knowing

Learning by doing

How to ensure that codified knowledge and • Board experiential knowledge reinforce each other in • Middle management collective learning? • Boundary spanners • Direct colleagues of boundary spanners

CEO Board Middle management Real estate department Purchasing department Community development department

Among boundary spanners Community management department Real estate department Middle management

Planning and Knowledge

Institutionalisation Improvisation logic logic

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Type of tension (Smith and Lewis, 2011; Smith et al, 2013)

Dealing with tensions

Smith (2014) argues that individuals have deeply rooted mindsets which limit their ability to work with tensions. As a solution she suggests stimulating diversity in teams and groups. Based on our findings, we believe that this alone is not enough. The Buurtmakers case illustrates the multilayered nature of intra-​organisational tensions. We argue that public and semi-​public organisations need to address internally the need to diversify their layers, professions and tasks in order to respond adaptively to informal and dynamic social innovation. Tensions may become manifest at one level, but as showed in Buurtmakers the different levels and units need to deal with these tensions collectively. Our study therefore suggests that, in order to address the emerging role of expert knowledge of boundary spanners, it is crucial to investigate the internal reorganisation of public bureaucracies and the functioning of their organisational layers. This can be a crucial step in building strategies for dealing with the inherent tension between bureaucratic action and social innovation.

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4

Plurality of expert knowledge: public planners’ experience with urban contractualism in Amsterdam Tuna Tasa̧ n-​Kok and Martijn van den Hurk

Introduction Focusing on the Dutch planning experience, which is traditionally highly institutionalised and consensus-​oriented, we aim in this chapter to understand how planners, as government actors, learn to deal with contracts in complex partnerships with private sector actors. We do so in order to question the technocratic logics of contemporary public–​private partnerships (PPPs) focusing on an institutional context where public governments still retain a major leading role in planning for urban development but increasingly operate by devising financial agreements with the private sector. To do so, we specifically look at the use of ‘contracts’ in urban development. Consensus building in the Netherlands is the key approach in any decision-​making process, implemented through the ‘polder model’, which is defined as harmonious patterns of interaction between social partners (Glasbergen, 2002; Needham, 2005; Terhorst and Van der Ven, 1998; Van der Valk, 2002). The Dutch experience demonstrates very clearly that the ways of deal making, and the mechanism of checks and balances in this process, are very dynamic and reflect the changing dynamics of urban governance. This also means that public planners, very consciously, try to reposition themselves to safeguard the public interest. Dutch planning has diverse forms of contracting for urban development embedded in the polder model of policy implementation, which is defined as harmonious patterns of interaction and negotiation between social partners (Glasbergen, 2002; Needham, 2005; Terhorst and Van der Ven, 1998; Van der Valk, 2002). Although the overall system is institutionalised through top-​down regulation, this system has been decentralised in recent years through the development and adoption of new laws and regulations. The decentralisation of

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planning regulation explicitly aims to decrease bureaucracy in order to ease private sector involvement for large-​scale projects. Under these conditions, public planners in Amsterdam (a central magnet for businesses and speculation in the Netherlands) are more likely to become project contractors given the stress involved in land deals. However, our study argues that this picture is ambiguous, as planners have a diversity of positions to deal with in a complex set of contracts. Moreover, planners work with certain safeguarding mechanisms based on experience from the long-​standing tradition of contracting private sector companies to develop projects on publicly owned land. All these experiences, as we display later in the chapter, add to the new plural forms of knowledge which the public planner accumulates and uses. Contrary to the traditional approach over the past few decades, Dutch local governments have increasingly welcomed private financiers and investors to assume responsibilities in urban development (Heurkens, 2010). As a result, the popularity of private sector involvement has increased considerably, starting with large-​scale greenfield developments serving urban expansion in the early 2000s. This trend continues to this day, albeit mainly in rather small-​scale redevelopment projects, supported by a public land development system where local governments play regulating and facilitating roles (Van der Krabben and Jacobs, 2013; Verhage, 2003). The arrangements made between public and private partners are usually laid down in sets of contracts, deeds, by-​laws and other regulatory instruments to determine who does what, when and how. While public-​law instruments, such as land-​use plans and environmental permits, have remained important resources for governments to safeguard public values, there has clearly been a significant growth in the relevance and importance of contractual arrangements (Heurkens and Hobma, 2014). In addition, the role of contracts is likely to grow in these times of government downsizing, decentralisation and the financialisation of city planning (Janssen-​Jansen, 2007; Janssen-​Jansen et al, 2012). This evolution has an impact on traditional systems of regulation and control, including the roles played and responsibilities borne by planners (Heurkens and Hobma, 2014). A number of scholarly contributions provide an understanding of contractual urban development mainly in the form of contracting out municipal services, and its consequences for the city (Lloyd and Peel, 2012; Raco, 2013a; Roberts and Siemiatycki, 2015; Sagalyn, 2007). However, the new profile that this form of urban development requires for the public administrators, policy executors, municipal project managers or planners has received little attention in the scholarly

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literature (Wolf-​Powers, 2013). Little is known about how public planners manage the contracting process and how this may influence their roles in public policymaking. We focus on the shifting roles and positions of municipal planning agents (project managers, municipal officials and planners whom we will simply call ‘public planners’) in an increasingly ‘contractualised’ planning practice in order to see whether these shifts are leading to the emergence of technocracies characterised by exclusive knowledge, selective institutional capacities and pre-​emptive power. More specifically, in this chapter we explain the implications of contractual planning with a focus on planning knowledge. We seek to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how public planners learn to contract in complex partnerships. In line with the argument made by the editors of this volume, we see a diversification of knowledge as a consequence of planners’ involvement in contract making and negotiations. This is reflected in a fragmented collection of lessons learned in urban redevelopment trajectories. However, the role of contracts in the organisation of these processes may not be that important, and their impact in terms of abstracting the representation of spatial and social dynamics may not be that significant. Planners continue to use the discretion available within a particular mandate, and contracts are not set in stone as much as theories suggest. Contractualism thus requires new urban managerial approaches based on contractual deals, which requires strong negotiators (technocrats) who are able to get things done. And yet, while within this framework planners may appear to be merely contractors, the reality is often more complex. By focusing on the contractual planning experience of the City of Amsterdam, in the next two sections we discuss the theoretical background of our study to support our views on how public planners acquire knowledge, put it to use, and how those practices influence their technocratic positions. Following that, we present our analysis of documents and interviews conducted in 2016 and 2017. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how the knowledge of public planners may help define their roles in new technocracy.

A critical perspective on technocracy: focusing on expert knowledge of public planners One of the key backdrops against which this volume is set is how technocratic planning creates an increasingly abstract way of representing the urban experience (see Chapter 1). It is argued that by using contracts and special purpose instruments, which are key

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to allowing and encouraging private sector involvement in urban development, policymaking and implementation become more difficult to understand (see, for example, Savini and Aalbers, 2016). Although this high level of abstraction is expected to provide an opportunity for private sector actors to find ways of using that lack of concreteness to their own advantage, the private sector actually requires long-​term certainty provided by a technocratic bureaucracy to secure risk-​free investments (Raco, 2013b). As a consequence, policymaking can become an instrumental activity, leaving out considerations of public participation, democracy and accountability (Foley and Martin, 2000). Additionally, the significant technical and legal complexity of urban redevelopment contracts requires the incorporation of expert knowledge offered by lawyers in particular. As their specific, meticulous knowledge is increasingly used ‘to understand, or influence, general social dynamics’ (Savini and Raco, this volume), a rather reductionist view on city building is presented. This can, inter alia, be seen in the current and increasing use of contractual frameworks in planning interventions. Within this framework, it is argued that urban contractualism challenges the quality of planning processes by infusing exclusive forms of knowledge and pre-​emptive powers. The process of governance, thus requires ‘scientific forms of knowledge’ used by ‘technical experts’ (Riles, 2004) to justify the actions of the policymakers. This knowledge is used as a legitimised tool to govern complex urban dynamics. However, this form of regulation leads to a new technocracy under the contemporary political-​economic conditions. As Winner (1977) suggested, public planners can no longer merely be seen as scientific and technical elites. According to Lauria and Long’s research (2017) planners more often have technical roles but they can take different positions while making choices and can maintain a mixture of principles too. This creates new plural forms of expert knowledge, which becomes the legitimising form of democracy. Within this framework, some fixed technocratic positions of the public planner integrate with new positions that do not fit well within the classical boundaries of technocracy. We have found it difficult to see the benefits of planning technocracies and contractualism if we use the classic technocratic view as our frame of reference. Viewed this way, the role of the planner is jeopardised by the current practices of contracting-​out and ‘hiring’ knowledge external to local governments. However, by assuming a position this sceptical, critics may overlook signals that prove otherwise. In contractual deals planners retain strong positions, continue to be in charge of the

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process, and fulfil more positions and play more colourful roles than the narrowly defined role of a contractual planner or contract maker, thanks to high degrees of plurality of expert knowledge in terms of the way they achieve knowledge and put it to use. In other words, planning as a scholarly discipline needs to explore the grey areas. The role of the public planner may not be as simple as just his or her role as a contractor. In the remainder of this chapter we will explore other perspectives using interviews and both publicly available and nondisclosed project documents.

Changing Dutch planning knowledge on contractualism: grey areas rather than rigid distinctions The Dutch national government showed increasing interest in PPPs by the end of 1990s, which was demonstrated by the establishment of a Dutch Knowledge Centre on PPP by the Ministry of Finance, and by the establishment of Key Projects to regenerate large urban areas (Klijn and Teisman, 2003). These projects, mainly located in large cities, were some of the first large-​scale contractual endeavours in the form of PPPs (Spaans et al, 2010). Although diverse forms of contractual relations between the public and private sector actors in urban (re)development were seen in subsequent years, these were often converted into a set of loosely-​linked and fragmented projects, rather than large-​scale one-​off projects (Klijn and Teisman, 2003). The City of Amsterdam, being the financial and cultural capital and offering the most profitable property market in the country, actively engages with private sector actors through contracts. Especially in recent years planning activities have become a fragmented collection of contracts, and the public planner has become a collector of learning processes through these experiences. As Korthals Altes and Taşan-​Kok (2017) report, in the current and widespread practice of planning, planners are expected to resolve disagreements and to find consensus between different interest groups or stakeholders within the framework of communicative planning. Moreover, as Özdemir and Taşan-​Kok (2019) report, Dutch public planners use experimental ways and apply unorthodox methods instead of classic ‘participatory planning’ practices in this process. Within this framework, those who practice planning in the Netherlands accumulate a diversity of specific forms of learning practices through these processes that generate what we call in this chapter a ‘plurality of expert knowledge’. While it is difficult to define the disciplinary boundaries of public planners

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in general, our research shows that there are some characteristics of urban contractualism that influence the role of public planners through diverse forms of accumulated knowledge. These include the accountability mechanisms of contracts, the diversity of contracts, and the mutual dependency of the actors involved in contracts. We will explore these forms in the remaining parts of this chapter. Learning to use contracts for public accountability As public planners have increasingly been dealing with contractual instruments and the mechanisms inherent to these instruments, such as monitoring performance and holding contractual partners to account, they have developed an ability to translate experiences within one project to lessons learned in other projects. On the basis of this learning process, planners may develop some mechanisms to better safeguard the public interest in future deals, although this is not the ideal way to practice egalitarian principles of planning. The mechanism of incorporating lessons learned into newer, better contracts has been discussed at length in the general management literature (Argote and Miron-​Spektor, 2011; Ariño et al, 2014), but only in a few studies of urban and infrastructure planning (Van den Hurk, 2016; Van der Veen and Korthals Altes, 2012). The following is the first example of a lesson learned. One of our respondents aptly referred to a contract where a conflict arose revolving around rent prices. This occurred in North Orleans, a student housing project in northern Amsterdam. In this case, the municipality allowed the private sector partner to increase rents after the completion of the project. During the project preparation phase the city had actually demanded that the private developer defined a maximum rent to be collected after construction. However, although the construction of the dwellings was permitted pending an agreement on the rent prices, the ‘cap’ on the rent prices was not formally established at that stage. Therefore, the developer could set the rent as they wished, resulting in a €1,200 monthly rent for 30 m2 student apartments –​a rather high, if not unaffordable price for the great majority of students. Having no clause in the contract with the developer to regulate the rent in the long run, the municipality missed the opportunity to control the increase of rents in this case. However, this misstep was recorded by the public planners and project managers at the municipality to remember for the next contract. This form of learning from individual contracts is a ‘daily practice’, as our correspondent reported.

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Another example of learning that can be seen in planning practice is that contracts have become more strict and contingent. For instance, planners have become aware of the need to include in the agreements certain exit options. While this was relatively uncommon prior to the global financial crisis of 2008 and the years after that, planners have made progress in this ‘contingency thinking’. This evolution is also reflected in the increased incorporation of clauses serving as ‘safeguarding devices that mitigate the perceived risk of opportunistic behaviour’. Penalty clauses that can be used in the event of inappropriate behaviour by a particular actor are a good example of this (see also Girth, 2014; Schepker et al, 2014). A typical example has been the increased use of ‘option agreements’ in the Netherlands. These documents give a private actor a predefined period in which to prepare a plan for the proposed development. During this period the municipality can monitor the private party. In case the private party is not able to deliver a solid plan by the end of the predefined period, the municipality is allowed to terminate the agreement and look for alternatives. Several respondents in our sample who worked at the municipality of Amsterdam acknowledged the value of this relatively new instrument. Some of them referred to other penalty clauses, such as fines that could be imposed should self-​build initiatives not be completed within a specific timeframe. Also, while planners are surely mastering negotiation skills to ensure fair deals and become technocrats of a sort, recent scholarly work shows that this system also brings in new positions and space for planners to manoeuvre within and beyond technocratic and bureaucratic boundaries (Özdemir and Taşan-​Kok,  2017). All in all, when we look at planners’ knowledge relative to contracts, we observe that working with contracts not only has the potential to increase a planner’s expertise and knowledge, but also to increase public accountability. This perspective is new to the planning literature and offers interesting opportunities for analysis and theory building on the role of the planner in regard to contracts. A contract is never like another contract There is a wide range of contract forms that are used by local governments, representing different degrees of risk and responsibilities (Table 4.1). As we see so many different types of contracts, it is not difficult to see a large diversity in arrangements, and consequently a wide range of options for a municipality to choose from. This wide

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variation of contractual models belies the claim that contractualism leads to a ‘reductionist’ view on planning. Planners can pick from various options, and they remain the professionals that have the last word on which model is going to be used; a private sector actor cannot pursue a planner to select a particular contractual arrangement, be it a joint-​venture, a concession, or any other model. Moreover, we need to bear in mind the ability of planners to exercise discretionary powers up to a certain level. As public officials they have a mandate, and a lot of room is generally available for flexibility. For instance, within the confinements of an area of barely 2 km2 north of the river IJ, three different districts are undergoing a transformation, and each of these demonstrates different contractual arrangements. While certain areas follow an organic, step-​by-​step path of reform, using many small-​scale agreements with individual landowners, in other parts of the area we find large-​scale, comprehensive land development deals with major developers. Public needs private, but also vice versa: the relative importance of contracts We need to put the role of contracts, particularly implications in a consensus-​oriented model, in perspective. As demonstrated in the previous section, redevelopment projects come in a variety of forms. However, what they usually have in common is that neither public, nor private sector actors can realise their objectives on their own. That is exactly why actors come to negotiate a contractual arrangement. Korthals Altes and Taşan-​Kok come up with an important statement in regard to this mutual dependency: Authorities aim at planning policies that enjoy broad support among stakeholders. In the context of coalition governments, stakeholder commitment may help planning policies to become more sustainable and grow into a planning doctrine. Such a consensus needs to be maintained, and this, of course, is the work of planning professionals. (Korthals Altes and Taşan-​Kok, 2017: 242–3) While the former point addresses the fact that we need to put in perspective the role of the planner in that he or she is just one of many actors involved, it also implicitly emphasises that we should nuance the role of the contract. The structure of contractual arrangements may influence directly or indirectly the performance of urban

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newgenrtpdf

Table 4.1: Categorisation of contracts for urban (re)development in the Netherlands Public development (traditional approach)

PPP coalition (building claim model)

PPP alliance (joint-​ PPP venture model) concession

Private development (incl. self-​build)

Initiation

Initiative

Government

Either government OR market

Either government OR market

Government

Either government OR market

Vision document, project content

Government

Joint approach

Joint approach

Joint approach

Market

Plan development

Government

Joint approach

Joint approach

Market

Market

Land development

Government

Government

Joint approach

Market

Either government OR market

Project development

Either government OR market

Market

Either joint approach OR market

Market

Market

Construction

Market

Market

Market

Market

Market

Operation and/​or maintenance of public space and infrastructure

Government

Either government OR market

Either government OR market

Either Either government OR government OR market market

Feasibility

55 Construction

Operation

Source: Adapted from www.gebiedseconomie.nl/​content/​p /​publiek-​private-​samenwerking

Plurality of expert knowledge

Phase/​activity

Planning and Knowledge

redevelopment projects, but it is never the only determining factor. In fact, many respondents addressed how little use they made of the contracts with which they have been involved. That is, while drafting and signing the contract typically takes months, if not years, once the deal is done the document often literally goes into a drawer to gather dust. Some respondents even stated that they were not aware of where to find the document, let alone know what is actually in it.

Discussion and conclusion In this chapter we have embarked on a discussion on the role of the public planner in a world where contracts, which are technocratic instruments par excellence, are generally accepted as planning tools. We argue that projecting planners’ profile as contract managers, ignores the richness of the planning profession and the rather diverse and colourful characters of planners themselves. Considering the planner as a contractor who applies a laser focus on management issues such as time, cost and quality, leaves out the many other roles that planners continue to play in an historical period in which public governments depend on contractual agreements with private interests to deliver public services and qualities. Squeezed between diverse and fragmented projects and tasks that require his or her flexibility to deal with the diversity of expectations on the one hand and legal certainty on the other, does the public planner become merely a contractor? Within the boundaries of this chapter and bearing in mind the specific profile of Dutch public planners, we emphasise that it would be an oversimplification to argue that planners’ knowledge from these diverse experiences is merely an exclusivist form of professional knowledge that claims legitimacy over other forms of knowledge. We elaborated on the diverse characteristics of ‘contractualism’ that contribute to what we call a ‘plurality of expert knowledge’. Plurality here refers to the diversity of learning practices through accountability mechanisms of contracts, the diversity of contracts, and the interdependency of contracts. To become a competent planner in the current urban development milieu requires not just learning to plan but also learning to make deals (Sagalyn, 1997; 2007; Wolf-​Powers, 2013). Having complex, diverse and frequent contractual deal-​making practices as everyday experiences, it is hard to believe that the public planner just follows instrumental rationalities of problem solving in which professional expertise is the only factor determining policy goals (Fainstein, 2010). We think that this way of looking involves a flawed perception about expertise of the public planner as it treats expert knowledge devoid of its human possessors

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(Özdemir and Taşan-​Kok, 2017). In the Netherlands public planners can step outside the boundaries of their technocratic role and create alternative channels for public involvement. The ability and willingness to create alternative, and even as yet not tested channels lie at the heart of the ‘human’ dimension of their roles, and can be crucial for finding solutions in complex situations. In the case of a city like Amsterdam, public land ownership and negotiations on development processes put the public agency in a technocratic position. The inherited powers of the existing agencies of the formal governance processes influence the position of the technocracy today. However, these fixed and technocratic positions lead to new positions that do not fit into the boundaries of technocracy as our analysis briefly elaborated. The role of the planner has arguably never been more dynamic and exciting; there is no ultimate recipe for success, no matter one’s abilities or expertise. The challenges of negotiating agreements with private developers are abundant, yet we ought to view them as positives, as opportunities to help the planning profession move forward. Even in more established and traditionally strictly coordinated planning systems like the Dutch system, it is shown that practitioners always push boundaries (Taşan-​Kok et al, 2016). Dutch planning has been traditionally about land-​use management in a form of top-​down controlled governance model which allows the active participation of and collaboration between diverse stakeholders at early stages of the planning process. Even in this model, there are channels for a social turn in planning processes and forms of safeguarding mechanisms created by the macro-​level planning frameworks, which affect the behaviour of the public planner (Özdemir and Taşan-​Kok, 2017). This allows planners to maintain high degrees of power and influence, which helps explain the moderate impact of contractualism in the Netherlands. However, by analysing empirical material from the Netherlands it is likely that we have seen a form of contractualism where the actors involved did not necessarily recognise the novelty of it. After all, the Dutch modus operandi of deal making goes back ages rather than years: it is arguably one of the key parts of the consensus-​oriented planning model. This emphasises the need for research on contractualism in city building in jurisdictions with a different background in terms of planning history.

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5

Local government in the face of crisis: changing public management of urban projects in Amsterdam Thijs Koolmees and Stan Majoor

Introduction To profile a better physiognomy of contemporary technocratic logics of planning, this chapter explores the reform of the working processes and organisational structures of the public management bureaucracies in the Amsterdam municipality. It does so in order to reflect on the mechanisms through which technocratic thinking gets institutionalised within existing public government bodies, and to reveal the development of public planning expertise in contemporary urban governance. As in other chapters in this section, here we particularly question the changing role of public bureaucracies in the Netherlands, a country where public expertise still plays a central role in urban governance, but is progressively being reformed to accommodate private actors. Since the mid-​1990s, political leaders and industrial elites have been celebrating the value of large-​scale and integrated urban development projects in responding to the socio-​economic challenges of cities (Healey, 2010). The tight alliances between local governments, landowners, financers and major developers that characterise these projects have been hit hard by the global financial crisis (GFC) (Enright, 2014; Savini and Salet, 2017), creating a rapid decline of demand and an oversupply of available locations for urban development. Strong austerity measures have also reduced the capacity and the willingness of local governments to provide large upfront investments in infrastructure, public spaces or iconic buildings in many western settings –​in the recent past these were all important strategies to trigger private investments. Recent studies on the governmental reactions to the crisis show that public governments have adapted their management practices in order to accommodate smaller scale, more ‘organic’ and

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people-​oriented, demand-​led practices of urban development. This change was reportedly oriented to enable investments under uncertain economic circumstances and invite smaller investors in real-​estate projects (Savini et  al, 2016; Bertolini et  al, 2011; Buitelaar, 2012; Hajer, 2011). In the following, we show how the GFC, often perceived by public managers as an extreme economic turbulence, has triggered a process of reorganisation of the internal processes of public governments in order to allow transitory and contingent approaches to urban development based on the prime goal of delivery and realisation. Urban projects have to be studied in relation to, and in interaction with, a changing environment. ‘Delivery’ is thus understood as more than the simple execution of a pre-​defined plan, but rather as a journey through an often volatile ‘landscape’ of factors in order to organise complex processes towards a particular end (Teisman, 2008). We show that recent reforms in Amsterdam have targeted the way in which planning authorities, investors, subsidisers and politicians interact in the complex process of urban development. In Amsterdam, policies of austerity were combined with debates and proposals to create a ‘lighter’ government, by de-​regulation and privatisation of certain public functions in urban development. For public planners and project managers, both internal reforms and external turbulence has dramatically increased the complexity of urban development projects themselves. Public sector planners feel the contradictory pressures to realise stability and transparency on the one hand and to increase adaptivity and innovation on the other. While the first types of pressure steer practices and subsequent technical expertise towards more stricter protocols and financial control, the latter is an incentive towards interaction and experimentation. The recent reforms of the Amsterdam public planning bureaucracies aim to find a balance between both, although they struggle with these contradictory pressures throughout the public management components of structures, processes and leadership.

The public management of urban development projects The specific role of public offices and their officials in the planning of urban development is a crucial factor in understanding the rationalities of governments’ reforms. Their role has been mostly researched through the analysis of political processes, positions, roles, instruments and financial mechanisms. Regime theorists have shown that after past

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financial crises public bureaucracies have internally restructured their working tasks in order to favour investments by large corporations and to enable new forms of public and private partnerships in urban development (Fainstein, 2000; Stone, 2005). The influence of New Public Management philosophies, which have entered bureaucratic thought since the second half of the 1970s (Ferlie, 2007; Hood, 1995), has created a tension that many government organisations are still experiencing. On the one hand officials have to be efficient, accountable, reliable and equitable; on the other hand, to cope with growing complexity and uncertainty, they have to be flexible and able to respond to emerging needs and events. How organisations (can) deal with different pressures has been further explored, particularly in the field of private sector organisations (Clegg et al, 2002; Farjoun, 2010; Lewis, 2000; Lüscher and Lewis, 2008; Smith and Lewis, 2011). To understand the organisational reactions to these pressures, these studies analysed bureaucratic change across three main dimensions: structures, work processes and distribution of leadership (see Table 5.1). Organisational structures of public organisation have similarities to private sector organisations, but the internal relations within public departments often differ from those of corporations. The classic public configuration is categorised by Henry Mintzberg as the ‘machine bureaucracy’: a large organisation with a high degree of formalisation and job specialisation, with an extensive technostructure (controllers, screening, analysts) and support staff and strong centralised hierarchy, focusing on standardisation of work processes and output (Mintzberg, 1979). While formal structures organise the division of tasks and responsibilities, work processes take place on a day-​to-​day basis and can be much more varied. They can be reformed, suppressed or promoted within these structures. A  broad number of studies have shown that work processes in public organisations are often volatile, or even routinised (see, for an overview, Van de Ven and Poole, 1995). In urban development, public organisations work towards a particular end, a delivery or project item, which needs to be reached by adapting the working processes. In this rather rationalistic and teleological process, organisations often establish new work processes, and foster change and learning. These processes may ultimately affect the final outcome or even enable a redefinition of the initial problem (March and Olsen, 1976; Etzioni, 1983; March and Simon, 1958). Whether public-​led or private-​led, the five means by which a public organisation can mobilise towards a particular end are project finances, organisation/​ team, time planning, quality and information output (Kor and Wijnen,

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Planning and Knowledge Table 5.1: Analytic overview of the research Public management components

Sensitive processes

Organisational structures Structural relations between strategic apex, middle management, operating core, technostructure and support staff

1 Identification of basic organisational structure 2  Capacities of basic structural elements 3 Hierarchy and distance between executives and operating staff

Work processes Strategies of steering means (time, finances, quality, information, communication) to reach an end goal

4 Priority of (a combination of) steering means 5 Contribution of steering means to the end goals of projects

Leadership Misaligned/​aligned leadership in various hierarchical layers of organisation

6  Identification of leadership roles 7 Misaligned or aligned leadership: top-​down, bottom-​up, modification

Source: Authors

2012). Each of these means can be prioritised over others, and this prioritisation evolves over time. Later we show these variations in a particular case study. Alongside the working processes and structures of an organisation, leadership is a very important factor in the working of public bureaucracies. Leadership goes beyond institutionalised hierarchies and, instead, operates on the way individuals influence each other within a formal hierarchy of leadership roles. Local management does not only consist of a functional system of structures and processes, it is also a social reality (Selznick, 1948). The behaviour of individual managers can influence the organisational strategies and bridge the gap between existing competences and the constantly changing outer world of competitors and markets. Floyd and Lane (2000) describe top-​down, modification and bottom-​up leadership practices, in which managers on top, middle and operating layers of the organisation need to act in alignment with other management layers in order to progress. Alignment is reached when strategic leadership roles on all layers create a productive top-​down, modification or bottom-​up process. This can happen in different ways and through different constellations of leadership. For example, top-​down, when the top management is directing, middle management is championing those directions, and the operating management conforming, or bottom-​up, when the operating management is experimenting, the middle management facilitates those experiments and ratification takes place in the top management (Floyd and Lane, 2000). According to this analytical infrastructure, the changing of public organisations across time can be observed as an intertwined mutation

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Local government in the face of crisis

of work processes, within changing organisational structures, and through active redefinition of leadership roles. In the following we show that in order to prioritise delivery and activate urban projects in times of economic uncertainty, Amsterdam planning bureaucracies have tackled uncertainty by means of a deep internal restructuring of its own bureaucracy.

Changing urban development in Amsterdam The Dutch urban development context has been strongly affected by the turbulence of the GFC (Savini et al, 2016). Economic reports of the Amsterdam municipality explicitly show a deep crisis in the housing and office market from 2008/​2009 onwards (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2015), after two decades of relatively stable conditions of economic and demographic growth (Savini et  al, 2016). Urban development in general and large-​scale urban development projects in particular, have been managed throughout this recent history by a powerful local government bureaucracy that was primarily concerned with creating certainty and continuity in planning processes (Healey, 2007). Since the 1990s, Amsterdam entered an era of a more explicit entrepreneurial approach to large-​scale urban development as the largest landowner and major investor in urban development in the municipality. This ‘pre-​crisis’ development approach showed a large variety of sites that were developed by separate municipal project bureaus. They focused on long-​term agreements with housing associations, large developers and banks to realise integrated programmes of real estate development, public space and infrastructure improvements. Due to the financial crisis this system collapsed. Both public and private actors were unable to make any long-​term financial commitments. In this situation of uncertainty, the municipal administration claimed to proactively explore new practices with a focus on smaller municipal risks and more ‘organic’ development programmes (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2010; 2011; 2012; 2013). We explore this major turnaround in the municipal management of large-​scale developments more in detail in the case of the Overhoeks project,1 one of the prime development areas in the city, near the Central Station, today identified as one of the most iconic spots in the city.

Dockland transformation and the case of Overhoeks For the last three decades, the transformation of docklands areas around the IJ Lake to mixed use developments, just outside the old city centre,

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has been a central priority for municipal planning offices (Kloosterman, 2012; Dembski, 2013). The Overhoeks project was first conceived in 1989 by local district council Noord as an economic redevelopment project to improve the infrastructural quality and attract new businesses. After a long and contested process of strategic visioning of the whole North, the city starts to rethink the north banks as a housing location in the late 1990s. Overhoeks is officially launched in 2004, as the first large-​scale urban development project on the north shore of the IJ Lake (Figure 5.1). Overhoeks was initiated somewhat differently to other projects due to its location in the local district, Noord, and its past as an active industrial and research facility of Royal Dutch Shell, but was quickly included in the regular local management of large projects. It has witnessed both the development boom in the stable and high market conditions of the early 2000s and the effects of the subsequent economic crisis after 2008. In the period between 1990 and 2014 the organisational structure, work processes and leadership of the municipality have undergone a number of larger and smaller adaptations.

Organisational structures: centralisation and separation of political and financial departments Between the early 1990s and 2014, four distinctly different organisational structures of the Overhoeks project can be identified (see also Table 5.1). First, the economic redevelopment project office of Buiksloterham. This is a local department of economic affairs charged with the task of preparing and renewing industrial sites to accommodate new business districts. Second, there is an agency, the project agency Panorama Noord, that is tasked with the transformation of all industrial sites into mix use neighbourhoods, managing the combination of housing and new economic functions. Third, Overhoeks has a specific project management unit, within the project agency Noordwaarts. This agency has a coordinator role for all projects in the district and the task to coordinate between the district policies and the central city policy. Its main objective is to develop the North in a way that it is coherent with the spatial change of the city of Amsterdam. Finally, Overhoeks is also a specific project office within the Municipal Land Department. This is the city department managing the valorisation and use of land properties citywide. It has a very important role in governing land investments and pursuing urban growth. The four agencies work at different levels of scale and with different roles but their tasks often overlap and clash with each other.

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Figure 5.1: Urban development projects on the banks of IJ Lake in Amsterdam. Overhoeks is located just north of the Amsterdam Central Station area.

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Moreover, while their differences have the potential to provide checks and balances to particular development processes (for example, the planning department may counteract the profit seeking strategies of the land department), their overlaps have often been seen as inefficient for the fast delivery of projects. It is worth pointing out that for a considerable time the city of Amsterdam’s main planning officers ignored the development of the Northern IJ Banks because the central and district offices were somewhat separated and autonomous from each other. Due to the decline of the industrial and harbour functions in Noord, from the late 1980s the local district focused primarily on the economic redevelopment of the Northern IJ Banks into business districts. In the late 1990s, the local district made the decision to initiate a vision, to set up new land-​use plans and ultimately promote urban development on the IJ Banks (Gemeente Amsterdam, 2001). In order for the urban development to be locally managed, the local district moved further with the founding of the district agency Panorama Noord, the first agency of its kind in Amsterdam to exclusively focus on urban development within one local district. The institutional separation of city and district organisational structures was abolished in the mid-​2000s, when the Overhoeks project had to be activated and managed in line with the ambitions of the private owner of the land, the Shell company. The possibility of facilitating new housing was an important incentive for Shell to redevelop its site, as housing creates much more added value and that value could cover the costs of realising a new facility within the same area. As it is not only a local goal to preserve this important employer in the area, but also a municipal goal to pursue active land policy in order to create a better urban development, the municipal alderman for urban development and the director of the Land Department led the negotiations on the acquisition of this piece of land. This resulted in a major change in the organisational structure of the project, with the introduction of the special project agency Noordwaarts. This agency, also defined as a ‘compromise’ arrangement sees both the city alderman and the district alderman as key decision-​makers and it was substituting the district-​based Panorama Noord. The establishment of a separate project agency also aimed at creating independence for projects taking place on the strategic area of the Northern IJ Banks. The aim was to insulate these projects from regular sectoral policymaking and implementation and enable more direct control by political decision-​makers. The project agency Noordwaarts provides a stable organisational structure from the start of the Overhoeks project into the crisis years

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from 2009 onwards. However, in 2014 the Municipal Land Department re-​gained direct control of all the large urban projects, terminating the mandates of all project agencies throughout the city. This centralising measure was taken to overcome the limited financial oversight on all projects and to accommodate the demand of municipal aldermen to regain central control over the finances of land development. The City Land Department created a new central management team, TeamGO (Team Area Development), supervising all projects that were formerly part of separate project agencies spread out over the city. One of the effects was to increase the ‘organisational distance’ between the political leadership and the project management of Overhoeks. The changing organisational structures made the project much less dependent on local politics and allowed a centralised overview of the finances. Yet, as we show later, to compensate for these centralised structures, several leadership and working processes were adapted to keep the local district involved (Figure 5.2). What becomes clear in this overview of the organisational structures, is that after 2009, it took four years to implement these dramatic organisational changes in the project. The reforms were oriented to centralise control over the financial processes of the project as well as to clearly separate political and technical roles in the project. Yet the effects of these changes are today extending over time, despite a new change in the economic conditions of the city.

Work processes: focus on short-​term delivery and planning flexibility Work processes also underwent major shifts. In the initial phase of Overhoeks, the approach of public officials was to accommodate the wishes of two important contract partners:  Shell, the original landowner, and ING, the contracted developer. This resulted in a focus on quality of urban design and time planning of the project. The most urgent tasks were to determine when to deliver which parts of land from Shell to the municipality and further to establish the conditions under which the developer ING could start the project. This process proceeded following some very fine negotiation on the details of a contract, as the city project manager explained: In the contract protocols had been written to be able to determine who is responsible for added costs when a delay occurred…therefore in the work processes we constantly had to follow those protocols like robots. (Municipal project manager, interview 2014)

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Planning and Knowledge Figure 5.2: Overhoeks is the area surrounding the white building in the centre of the picture, located opposite to Amsterdam Central railway station

Photo: Municipality of Amsterdam

The contractual approach to which working processes were followed showed its limitations after the first indications of economic uncertainty became evident to the developer. ING rescinded the earlier agreements and the city had to react in order to keep the project going. What follows is a period of renegotiating the contracts, first focusing on the delays in the schedule, but later on a way out for all involved. This occurred for many other urban development projects in Amsterdam between 2009 and 2013 (see, for example, Savini, 2016). The renegotiation of a number of contracts of ING with the municipality was settled in 2011:  in Overhoeks, ING returned around half of the development rights and paid immediately for the other half. Consequently, the municipal project management was faced with the new reality of a number of existing buildings and plots ready for development, but without a developer, in the middle of the financial crisis. The strategy was adapted to activate new and sometimes temporary activities to Overhoeks, which included, among others, a high school and an incubator for small businesses in the creative sector. The philosophy became that the area first had to become an attractive ‘destination’ to spur development in

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a later phase. City marketing strategies were also activated. In this light the opening of the iconic Eye Filmmuseum was one of the last tangible deliveries of the original developer, ING. The municipality also sold a remaining old office tower to a local coalition of music industries in 2012. In reaction to the uncertainties related to contracts and responsibility with ING, the city engaged in many initiatives to boost the project, investing time and resources in maintaining development pressure in the area. The resulting working processes focused on both incremental projects of place-​making (such as temporary uses) and on step-​by-​step adaptation of all plans to increase flexibility. The municipality adapted its work process from solely guarding the contracts to also facilitating the developer to prepare a more flexible land use plan, which was also based on a more open and discretionary interpretation of spatial qualities. The municipal funds created to finance urban development projects showed dramatic losses during the crisis as almost no new income was generated from plots ready for development. The Land Department consequently introduced new work processes for the project agencies to invest exclusively in tangible preparation for selling plots, focusing on short-​term delivery. This plot-​level approach was a drastic shift away from project-​level land exploitation used in earlier years. This also meant more focus on short-​term time horizons with clearer indications on return of investments. The analysis of work processes in Overhoeks, contrary to the organisational structures, showed a more central role of local planning officials in coping with new circumstances since the crisis. The restructuring of organisational structures towards centralisation and insulation from politics activated working processes oriented to adaptation, flexibility and short-​term delivery at the local level (Figure 5.3).

Leadership: individual ambitions and the performance of structures Leadership roles have adapted coherently in order to enable rapid decision-​making under conditions of structural centralisation and short-​term delivery working processes. One particular episode provides an illustration of this leadership at work. Between 2011 and 2012 the project agency Noordwaarts had to adjust its approach for Overhoeks to enable short-​term delivery at plot-​level. This was the prelude to the introduction of the central TeamGO at the city level.

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Planning and Knowledge Figure 5.3: One of the urban design plans of Overhoeks with apartments blocks, park areas, high rise Strip

Photo: Municipality of Amsterdam

In 2011, after ING returned its development rights, the municipality needed to sell the existing office tower to a new developer. The project team shaped a tendering process of multiple rounds of selection open to all who were interested, which was finally approved by the city alderman. While this tender conformed to a top-​down leadership process, the local project director strategically revised the tender into a new approach, based on its previous experience in the area, a direct one-​on-​one negotiation with interested developers and investors. As he explained, Listen, we are not going to do it like that, we have sold The Grand [a major historical municipal building in the old city centre] within three weeks for a great price, and you know it looks great now, so let’s do it in the same way. (Municipal project manager, interview 2015) The team responded flexibly by adjusting the process, but this new process was not synthesised with policymakers in the departments, nor championed by the top management in such a way that the alderman recognised it. What this episode shows was a willingness of one project director to experiment outside the general policy set by the top management (that is, the alderman), even when the project team was already conforming

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to this policy. Despite the organisational change and the rapid reform of working processes, we see internal routinised and entrepreneurial practices by specific public officials to activate investments and delivery. Changes in work processes and organisational structures do not occur as a purely functional routine, but as a tacit choreography between individuals of role performance and alignment and misalignment of leadership. The exact sequence of actions, and thus the clear separation of top-​down, bottom-​up and modification processes is not easy to make though. In the case of Overhoeks and the public management in Amsterdam, various strategic roles were adopted simultaneously (which is also argued by Floyd and Lane, 2000) and a mix of roles makes it hard to define whether the leadership is aligned and, if yes, if it is caused by a bottom-​up or top-​down force. This particular example of how individual leadership can operate within formal structures in times of uncertainty also allows for the normative underpinnings of the described reforms to be reflected upon. It is important to question the nature of the performance of government bureaucracies in urban development. Local public managers face a fundamental tension between providing stability and fostering adaptivity and innovation, which is relevant for any organisation(s) operating in changing environments (Raisch and Birkinshaw, 2008). The way this tension is institutionalised depends on the specific structures and processes at hand. Yet, it also depends on the specific instrumentalities and entrepreneurial behaviours of specific officials who are ‘able to respond creatively in the present and with agility in the future’ (Smith et al, 2010: 451). Even within changing structures, it is important to reflect on the capacity of local public bureaucrats to find temporal solutions to cope with contradictory pressures, namely the pressure to deliver a project and that of exploring new opportunities and working processes (Majoor, 2015). Across Europe, the GFC has resulted in ad-​hoc measures, policies and governance changes (Enright, 2014; Oosterlynck and Gonzáles, 2013). Only in a longer time perspective is it possible to understand what the potential deeper changes (and dangers) of this reform will be on the spatial and quality outcomes of specific projects. While some reformists may argue that reformed local government bureaucracies would increase stability in high market contexts and increase adaptive capacities to uncertainty, we found evidence to the contrary. Since 2008, we observed a progressive centralisation, simplification, standardisation and de-​politicisation of structures and working strategies.

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The technocratic logic of a bureaucratic reform The general evolution of the local management within the Amsterdam public bureaucracy shows the severe impact of the response to the crisis on public governments in a context that does not have extensive privatisation of public services and where the public expertise retains a central and legitimate position in decision-​making. The response to the global financial crisis in Amsterdam, as elsewhere in the Netherlands, shows how public governments have internally adjusted their working processes so as to favour fast delivery, public–​private negotiations and efficient project management. As we showed, this is a process of reorganisation fully internal to public bureaucracies that were clearly oriented to develop bureaucratic procedures of problem-​solving and streamlining in project management. The project Overhoeks delivers an example of how a mentality of austerity and efficacy becomes institutionalised into bureaucratic procedures in times of uncertainty and instability. This occurred through processes of centralisation of financial management of plans, the separation between political and technical tasks, the shortening of the time horizon of working processes and the opening up to entrepreneurial initiatives by specific managers in the lead of public offices. The case study shows that in a context of external turbulence, organisational structures, work processes and leadership directions are not always aligned in public management. Public sector organisations are struggling to adapt to changing external circumstances, both economic and political. The most intriguing are the complementary sides of change and stability. External change needs certain types of stability of existing organisational structures, work processes and leadership roles to be productively handled, particularly in a public organisation that needs to operate in an accountable way. At the same time, organisational parameters should evolve to critically help planners and the wider public to achieve optimal societal results. While the case here presented tells a story only five years long, today the economic conditions of Amsterdam have dramatically changed again. Yet, planning departments still operate according to the structures, working processes and leaderships established in times of perceived uncertainty. Since 2014, Amsterdam is witnessing another turbulent turn into a hyper-​growth regime, with sky-​rocketing house and land prices (Koolmees and Majoor, 2016). Whereas the organisation structures have not been altered, the work processes of plot-​based delivery have been extended and enlarged to address much larger projects, with thousands of housing units. The current work of

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public bureaucracies is oriented to radically and effectively reform the most important institutional pillars of Amsterdam’s planning tradition, increasing the delivery of affordable housing as well as enabling a restructuring of the land lease system. The challenge today is thus to combine the quantitative requirements of housing delivery in times of economic growth while (re)defining robust long-​term strategies for the city, addressing broad challenges of sustainability, affordability and spatial quality. It is important, however, that the technical expertise of public planners should therefore not only evolve with the changing economic circumstances and goals of their political bosses. They should also reflect the public management components that built their daily routines and decisions. Here it is important to actively acknowledge tensions and contradictions, most prominently between control and innovation. Expertise on both is needed to steer public management through changing times. Note 1 Qualitative empirical data was collected through mixed methods:  municipal archives study, news and background articles, in-​depth interviews with aldermen and municipal project managers.

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Captured by bureaucracy: street-​level professionals mediating past, present and future knowledge Nanke Verloo

Introduction This chapter explores the role of ‘street-​level professionals’ in planning, a peculiar expertise that emerges in response to the decreasing legitimacy and efficacy of public action in urban governance processes. In particular, I look at the street-​level professional in order to question the uneven tension between bureaucratic and tacit knowledge in contemporary participatory processes. I show how initiatives that attempt to mediate between governmental and local community ambitions are today trapped in existing bureaucratic structures (Scott, 1998). Lipsky’s classic study of street-​level bureaucrats (1980) reveals how frontline workers are embedded in the logic of bureaucracy on the one hand and the messy reality of the street-​level on the other. Street-​level workers are required to translate the rational norms of bureaucracy –​ which are guided by accountability, quotas and transparency –​to the norms and practices of everyday life at the street-​level –​where they need experience, tacit knowledge and improvisation. In Lipsky’s work, street-​level bureaucrats are typically teachers, police officers, social workers and court officials (Lipsky, 1980: 3). In this chapter, building on the seminal work by Lipsky, I look at policymakers and planners who have the responsibility to organise a deliberative or participatory process as street-​level professionals, those mediators who are today filling the widening gap between retrenched public governments and civic society. I use the term ‘professional’ to include the growing body of experts who, because of a growing demand for participatory planning, are in the unique position to bridge plans of the local government with plans of the community. I argue that planners are in a unique position to develop an expertise for such street-​level mediation. However, existing institutions tend

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to ‘capture’ that mediation through norms that require organising, reducing and abstracting the complex knowledge of the community. This entrapping capacity of institutions is, as I argue, a distinctive logic of today’s technocratic planning. I will use an interpretative approach (Yanow, 2000; 2007) to analyse several ‘critical moments’ that shaped one particular planning process in Amsterdam. These challenging moments provide a lens into three ways in which the deliberative process was ‘captured by bureaucracy’:  first, by excluding informal stories from the institutional memory; second, by a top-​down problem definition; and third, by the changing meaning of the decision mandate. In response to these moments of capture, street-​level professionals used their discretionary space to develop skills to translate past, present and future knowledge.

Challenges of the deliberative professional The challenge of working at the street-​level Planners and policymakers can be understood as ‘street-​level democrats’ because their ‘work involves  –​day by day  –​practical challenges of democratic responsiveness in realms such as community development, youth work, school administration, and urban planning’ (Laws and Forester, 2015: 12). They have to implement participatory policies, as well as determine who is to take part in the deliberation and how that process should unfold. Since Lipsky’s account of street-​ level bureaucrats, however, local governments have changed. Urban developments have become complex multi-​stakeholder processes in which diverse types of knowledge have to be mediated and folded into decision-​making. This gives public professionals such as planners, policymakers and welfare workers a central position in the negotiation between accountability and the use of discretionary space, between the government and its citizens, and between technocratic knowledge and everyday tacit knowledge. Street-​level democrats have substantial discretion in the execution of their work. Their practice shapes the meaning of policy in two ways: first, they choose how to implement policies and plans and thus shape citizens’ experiences of policymaking and planning; and second, they determine the eligibility of citizens for government benefits as well as involvement in participatory processes. Street-​level bureaucrats thus ‘implicitly mediate aspects of the constitutional relationship of citizens to the state’ (Lipsky, 1980: 4). That discretion, however, is not always positive. A general concern is that street-​level professionals

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use their influence over policy implementation to serve their own interests (Hogwood and Gunn, 1984). At best, street-​level influence contributes to the use of state resources to respond to community and individual needs, but at worst, it displaces service goals with self-​ interest (Maynard-​Moody et al, 1990: 833). Street-​level professionals and the administrations for which they work thus constantly have to balance these two sides of the same coin. Researchers, however, argue that despite its inconsistency with the bureaucratic ideal of hierarchical control and rationality, ‘delegating authority and including the perspective of street-​level workers in programmatic decisions is one realistic alternative to managerial control when the objective is to reduce the dangers of discretion’ (Maynard-​Moody et al, 1990: 844). The double role of street-​level professionals can thus be viewed as problematic, but it also provides an opportunity to improve policy programmes, plans and the relationship between the state and its citizens. The challenge of mediating knowledge The role of planners as street-​level democrats requires an ability to mediate knowledge. In a deliberative process, street-​level professionals are placed in a position to translate technocratic or expert knowledge from bureaucracy to the local –​often considered mundane –​yet expert knowledge of citizens (Durose, 2009). That position is hardly new; Lasswell was calling for a functionality that moved beyond expertise to incorporate mediation as early as 1941: ‘The task of the emerging scientific policy professional –​the urban planner, policy analyst, health or environmental specialist, etc. –​would not be just to provide technical information for problem-​solving, but also to combine it with a new function of facilitating public deliberation and learning’ (Lasswell in Fischer, 2004: 21). In recent decades, however, Lasswell’s ideal has turned into a type of planner who presents the opinions of the public to elite decision-​makers (Merelman in Fischer, 2004: 21) and not the other way around. In that role, the public professionals merely function as the only experts who have the technical expertise to intervene. Growing uncertainty and reliability on expertise has reinforced the importance of expert knowledge and has simultaneously diminished the ability of laypeople to contribute their knowledge to decision-​making processes (Callon, 1999). This ‘quasi guardianship of autonomous experts’ (Dahl, 2000) makes it difficult to hold public professionals accountable to the public  –​a process that makes the gap between

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policy professionals and ordinary citizens bigger instead of smaller (Beck, 1992). Planning theory has provided several responses that seek to bridge this gap between expert and lay knowledge. Of paramount importance is the approach to engage laypeople in the deliberative processes. Since the argumentative turn (Fischer and Forester, 1993), several approaches have been developed to emphasise the quality of dialogue and engage a variety of stakeholders in the deliberative process. Healey’s work on collaborative planning (1997) proposes the organisation of the planning process as a collaboration between stakeholders. In these processes, planners take a role in mediating planning and policy disputes (Susskind and Ozawa, 1984). In the deliberative approach, power is located not only in institutional spheres or particular social spheres, but rather it is distributed throughout the entire realm of human action (Innes and Booher, 2015: 199). To translate knowledge means not only that street-​level professionals work with citizens in a way that enables them to make intelligent political judgements, but also that they inform their institutions with more tacit and informal knowledge from the street level. Professionals do not render judgement, but instead function as mediators between the bureaucracy and the world of citizens. Mediating between different types of knowledge is thus a key skill for successful street-​level democrats. The challenge of capture With the term ‘capture’, I  seek to address a particular and often unintended institutional reality. The term capture marks a moment when professionals are challenged to innovate their way of working, but are pulled back by the bureaucratic reality of institution. Institutions use bureaucratic norms that shape the routines and practices of street-​ level democrats, which can in turn be used to maintain the status quo. On the other hand, street-​level democrats have discretionary space that provides them with space for improvisation (Lipsky, 1980). The innovation of practice routines takes shape in between these two institutional realities. The concept emerged from observations that David Laws and I made during four years of training sessions with local professionals. We observed how local institutions stimulated their employees to innovate the deliberative process, but got ‘stuck’ because of institutional norms and technocratic conditions. Local professionals got ‘stuck’ when they tried to innovate their work and use a participatory way. They were

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supported by their organisation, but often found themselves facing the same problems which they had faced before. David and I started to use the term ‘capture’ in relation to these challenges. Institutional norms may capture professionals unintentionally, while also instrumentally using bureaucracy to capture professionals and pull them back into the status quo. Studying moments of capture empirically, as critical moments (Verloo, 2018b) in a process of deliberation, is helpful to understanding how practitioners build capacity for dealing with such moments. Laws and Forester (2015) used a similar approach to show how the relationship between expertise knowledge and context-​related knowledge should always be diagnosed in action. ‘Those working in the immediacy of local situations, in the specific settings of such cases, need to diagnose the context at hand and the problem at hand together in order to design actions that draw on the features of the case to address concerns for respect, for fairness, for democracy’ (Laws and Forester, 2015: 348). Dealing with capture thus requires the ability to mediate expert knowledge and street-​level knowledge. In the next section, I analyse how that mediation takes shape in a deliberative process. As in any process, the past, present and future also shape and affect deliberative processes. The past is important because it sets the significance of a process. Memories of experiences in the past –​like an attempt to participate in a planning process, or the memory of a fight with neighbours –​shape people’s willingness, expectations and therefore behaviour in planning processes. The present is often the source of disputes around value:  what kind of knowledge is validated to shape and inform decision-​m aking? Yet engaging stakeholders in the process itself could also validate the process for all stakeholders. The future sets an intention about the goals of a process –​what kind of neighbourhood, public space, or community should be created? One could understand the past, the present and the future as types of knowledge that shape the decision-​making process. In the following sections, I look into ‘critical moments’ (Verloo, 2018a; 2018b) that reveal how street-​level professionals mediated between past, present and future knowledge within a planning process.

Mediating knowledge: a case study1 The case study took place in Amsterdam between 2011 and 2015. At the time, the attempt to become a so-​called ‘participation society’

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was high on the political agenda at all levels of Dutch political institutions (Hurenkamp et al, 2012). The Council of Amsterdam East wanted to facilitate a participatory planning process for a recreational facility on Java Island in Amsterdam. In 2011, a group of local citizens came together and requested that the local government facilitate the construction of a neighbourhood playground. At the time, the municipality of Amsterdam was decentralised and comprised several local districts that each had a broad mandate to make decisions and plan public spaces. Roos was a so-​called ‘participation broker’ at the local district council –​her job was to organise the process and contact the neighbours about a possible playground. The aforementioned request by the constituents of the Amsterdam East district concerned the plan for a ‘playboat’ –​a public boat that would be placed at the quay of the island and on which a playground would be built. Roos’ first step was to find out about the wishes of the residents of the area. Very few people responded to her attempts, which meant to the professionals that the playboat enjoyed the support of many of the area’s residents. In April 2012 a local politician made a promise on the local news that ‘they would start planning and building the playboat soon’ (Sophie, area manager housing cooperation, June 2015). Interestingly, nothing happened until February 2013, when the municipality decided to buy a boat that could function as a playboat. Then, again nothing happened until June 2014, when the municipality decided to send a letter to the residents of the Veemkade –​the quay at which they planned to permanently dock the playboat –​to inform them about the boat. That letter caused a pandemonium that the local policymakers had not expected. Many citizens were surprised about the decision and were very much against a playboat right in front of their houses. This was a big surprise to Roos: ‘The local government expected that the project had much support and now it suddenly turned out to have none! We did intend to have a dialogue with the neighbourhood as a whole. So we decided to organise a meeting with residents’ (Roos, participation broker municipality district East, May 2015). Roos and her team had to deal with the many angry responses to the letter. Furthermore, they did not send an invitation to people living on the other side of the quay –​the Javakade. This area was considered outside the ‘participatory area’. The people living there had a memory of failed attempts to prevent the plan for a playground in their inner garden called the Tosari garden, and it was that memory that shaped the critical moment that made the whole project fall apart.

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Capturing the mediation of past knowledge The people of the Javakade had been in a conflict with the municipality over the Tosari garden. The Tosari garden was a green inner garden surrounded by apartment buildings in which the local government had previously placed a sliding slope. When the garden was renovated in 2011, the local council wanted to add additional playground equipment, but the people living around the garden were against this decision. Nevertheless, a swing was added. Residents of the Tosari garden tried to resist that decision and organised themselves in a variety of ways; the municipality, however, did not listen. Four years later, that same group found that they were not invited to the public meeting about the playboat. These citizens mark the memory of the Tosari garden as a loss of trust in the local government and their intent to facilitate ‘real’ participation. Roos’ team of street-​ level professionals did not know about the memory of the Tosari garden. She and her team only began working at the local district after the discussion about the Tosari garden was over. When arriving at the public meeting in November 2014, Roos and her team were surprised to find that the people from the Javakade were present. When the meeting started, they were even more surprised by the story they were told. The residents of the Javakade were well prepared and able to use their tacit and local memory of the Tosari garden to determine the discussion about the playboat: ‘What I remember vividly is the incredible anger and lack of trust. It seemed a moment to discharge all distrust and astonishment about the way the municipality treated us in the past. I also said things that were very angry and emotional’ (Linda, resident of Javakade, April 2015). The institutional body of the local council lacked a structure to pass on the kind of narrative knowledge from the past to new colleagues working in the present. This local memory turned out to be a salient piece of information for professionals working with citizens. Especially when ‘things are at stake’  –​during meetings where citizens and professionals negotiate about future plans –​narrative knowledge from the street-​level can provide a capacity to bridge differences. Creating a story that includes the memories and emotions of diverse stakeholders is itself creating a community (Verloo, 2015). An inclusive story underlines the meaning of interdependency among the stakeholders. ‘Where the task is typically defined to mean that citizens need to learn more about the professional’s mode of reasoning, we come to see that the expert also has to learn more about the practical modes of reason that inform the citizen’s world’ (Fischer, 2004: 24).

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In Amsterdam East, the street-​level professional’s ability to immerse herself in the practical modes of reason that inform the world of citizens proves to be crucial. Stories are a specific form of institutional memory that are usually shared among people in informal interactions. For example, stories spread easily in the corridor or around the coffee machine. They involve a kind of reasoning that is often understood as informal, ideographic and symbolic. Technocratic as well as democratic institutions are focused on reasoning that is formal, representative of the public good and accountable. From that perspective, stories and memories of what has happened in one community are placed outside the kind of knowledge that the institution uses to inform professionals working in another community. In Amsterdam, however, it was exactly that kind of knowledge that captured Roos and her team and created an obstacle for developing a deliberative process. Narrative knowledge is critical information for street-​level professionals mediating between bureaucracy and citizens. Street-​level professionals are in a unique position to translate lessons from historical cases to deliberative processes in the present. However, that capacity cannot be utilised if narrative knowledge is bound to ideographic memories of individuals working for the organisation and does not find a place in the institutional collective memory. The narrative knowledge about the Tosari garden could have enabled street-​ level professionals to acknowledge the earlier attempts of citizens to actively participate in decision-​making at the very beginning of the process. Such acknowledgement would have deepened the recognition of interdependency among the local institutions and citizens. At the same time, it would have discursively communicated the intention to take citizens seriously. The lack of acknowledging this specific history inadvertently communicated what Arnstein called tokenism (Arnstein, 1969) –​pretending participation but acting with authority. Capturing the mediation of present knowledge Not long after the meeting in November 2014, the playboat plans were cancelled. The local council, which had changed after local elections, decided that there was not enough support from the community. Nevertheless, the assignment to design more playgrounds remained on the agenda. In January 2015, the local council decided to redesign the western corner of Java Island (de Kop van Java) and place a large playground on the open site. The local council strategically involved the team of Roos and the other professionals who were now informed about the memory of the Tosari garden and had a chance to build a

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network within the community. They faced the challenge of rebuilding trust with the community. Their strategy was to start with a public workshop to which everyone in the neighbourhood was invited and which would facilitate a dialogue about the plans for a playground. The workshop was not fully open to deliberation, however. The problem was already defined –​there was a need for a playground –​and the site where the playground was to be built was no longer up for debate; a playground would be constructed on the Kop van Java. In preparation, the local council had prepared two designs: civil servants of the local council made one design and the citizens’ organisation ‘the Javaarde’ prepared a second. The workshop would allow citizens to reflect on the designs and to prepare them for an ‘e-​voting’ –​an internet referendum about the two plans –​that would take place a few months later. Henk was the moderator for the public meeting that took place in the local school. He, Roos and others on the policymaking team prepared the workshop in several rounds in which citizens would talk to each other and professionals from the local district. The room was set up like a workshop environment; there was no stage, and citizens could place themselves around tables on which drawings of each design were placed. Local politician Thijs wanted to be transparent and started the meeting by explaining what was already decided and what was still open for deliberation. He did not question the decision for a playground itself, which led to a reaction from a neighbour who criticised, ‘When did you decide that the site should become a playground? Who made that decision and why?’ (Citizen at public meeting, May 2015). At that moment, Henk did something that, upon reflection, others later considered very useful. Instead of looking to the politician for an answer, Henk turned to the audience and to the collective memory of the community for an answer. He asked, ‘Who has an answer to this question?’ At that moment, the representative of the Javaarde was able to explain the support for the process. Local professionals later revealed that this was a critical moment because it turned over ownership of the process. The district council was not the only party claiming ownership –​the citizens’ organisation did as well. On the other hand, citizens later referred to this moment as a way to steer the discussion away from a new conflict. Despite rising tensions, the meeting went on to a second round, which allowed citizens to discuss ideas for the Kop van Java. During these sessions, one group came up with a whole new plan which included a playground, but which also left more space for dog-​ walking –​a general concern among citizens. At that moment, Henk

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was challenged to choose between the initial agenda of the meeting or to allow this shift in plans. He intuitively chose the latter and asked the citizens to inform the rest of the people about this new third plan. The responses to the third design were very positive. Henk reveals an interesting capacity to translate present knowledge. He commits to representing the knowledge of citizens and decides that this third design should also be included in the plans for the e-​voting. He mediates present knowledge in three ways. First, he mediates between the politician who represents a top-​down decision and citizens who represent support for that decision. Second, he mediates between the existing information that is communicated through the existing designs and the new information that comes in through the work of citizens at the meeting. He allows both types of information to shape the outcome of the meeting. Third, he mediates between what is expected about the continuing process, that is, an e-​voting about two plans, with an unexpected shift in that process –​an e-​voting about three plans. As a mediator Henk, has to make these decisions in a split second and in the challenging context of a meeting where many things are at stake. Henk explained later that building trust was on the top of his mind throughout the whole meeting. It was trust that informed his choices. His working theory of trust was to work on collective ownership. He used a fascinating practice to develop that trust:  ‘I used the technique of giving back what people say. So repeating their words so that they know and feel that I listen to them’ (Henk during reflection session, July 2015). The public meeting reveals how the institutional process of decision-​ making captures the discretionary space of the mediator because many decisions were already made beforehand. There was no room to negotiate about the problem-​definition itself. Fischer argued that it is typically ‘the implicit or hidden normative assumptions of expert advice that concern the citizens, not the technical per se’ (Fischer, 2004: 24). Citizens seek to deliberate about what makes a good city or neighbourhood, and these ideas and assumptions lie underneath the surface of what planning experts call rational planning and thus lie underneath any decision-​making process. If citizens are not engaged in the problem definition that lies underneath a plan, one could question the meaning of deliberation in the first place. Nevertheless, the mediator was able to gain some discretionary space by translating the present knowledge that was available in the room in two ways. He first steered the conversation to acknowledging collective ownership. Second, he allowed the inclusion of a future imaginary of

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citizens that was not on the agenda. He thereby mediated the dispute over values that are at stake in public meetings. Capture the mediation of future knowledge The decision to include the third design in the e-​voting had direct effects on the rest of the planning process. The third design had to be recalculated and checked by planners of the municipality, and it also had to be translated into a design that could be executed. The planner’s reason for taking on the extra work was very pragmatic: ‘we did not want to ignore the new plan and lose all the goodwill that we created in the meeting’ (Mark, project leader municipality, July 2015). The e-​voting took place in the summer of 2015, with 292 citizens voting, of which an 89 per cent majority selected the third design that came out of the meeting. That clear outcome caused a new dilemma for the street-​level professionals; they proved to be able to translate the street-​level knowledge of citizens into a future plan for the public space, but were they also able to translate that plan to the political agenda of elected officials? The representative democracy model is organised in a way that places the mandate for the final decision in the hands of elected officials –​the local district council. Although they had approved of a deliberative process that engaged citizens, it was unclear whether they would also have approved of the third design that was now convincingly representing the future imaginary of citizens. A deliberative process among public professionals and citizens thus changes the role of elected officials. In effect, the meaning of their mandate changes. A participatory process shapes a promise that the outcome of the process will be the outcome of the political decision. Power is no longer only located in the institutional sphere, but distributed throughout the entire process (Innes and Booher, 2015: 199). The political mandate becomes less important than the decision-​making process itself. Furthermore, the role of the street-​level professionals becomes more important, because they are in a position to make that process as legitimate as possible, so that the council does not have another choice but to follow the advice of citizens. If the local council does not follow the outcome of a deliberative process, the council would capture the entire process. Elected official Thijs was engaged in the process from the start. This allowed him to play a role in mediating between the future imaginary of citizens and the political imaginary of the council. His engagement and close ties to Roos’ team provided him with information about the design, but –​what is more important –​with knowledge about

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the process that would underline the legitimacy of the third design to the rest of the council. In his speech during the council meeting, he emphasised that process. The local council decided to follow the outcome of the e-​voting. In September 2015, preparations were made for the execution of the plan.

Conclusions In this chapter we looked into the practice of street-​level professionals, a profile of expertise that emerged in the empty space left by the shrinking public bureaucracies and an increasingly active civic society. In a deliberative decision-​making process, street-​level professionals play a crucial role in mediating between the logics of bureaucracy and the world of citizens. The ability to mediate knowledge is a critical capacity in such a process. An interpretative approach was taken to analyse the critical moments in a case study in the east part of Amsterdam. Critical moments provide an insight into the way stakeholders negotiate about meaning and relationships in a process. By examining the details of interaction during several critical moments in eastern Amsterdam, we started to see how street-​level professionals tried to mediate knowledge, but also where they were captured by bureaucracy. Street-​level professionals have to mediate between memories of the past, roles in the present and imaginaries of the future, and all three will determine how successful a deliberative can be. What did we learn from this account? First of all, we learned that the ability to mediate past knowledge is highly dependent on personal experience. This means that when expertise moves beyond the codified boundaries of protocols and standardised procedures, the role of individual experts becomes more crucial, leaving more space for individual sensitivity and arbitrariness. Since Roos was new and her institution had no structure to pass on narrative knowledge of local memories, her attempt at citizen participation was captured before it had even started. The past conveys significance. In practice, that meant that the gap in Roos’ knowledge created a situation in which she could not assess how significant the memory of the Tosari garden was to citizens. She was therefore limited in her ability to translate past knowledge to the present during the public meeting about the playboat. Second, we learned that engaging citizens by engaging their tacit knowledge in the present  –​during a public meeting  –​does not compensate for citizens’ engagement in the problem definition and design of the process itself. The power of bureaucracy became

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prominent when the audience asked to be fully included in the definition of the problem at stake. Because the present conveys value, the eventual success of the workshop depended on the capability of the moderator, who was able both to mediate the dispute of values by building collective ownership and to include local knowledge by including a third and unexpected plan. Engaging local knowledge, however, did not shift power relations between the government and citizens to a more interdependent process. Elected officials were in control of all three aspects of the decision-​making process: the problem definition at the start; the process of e-​voting; and the final decision about the outcome. Third, the success of the whole process was dependent upon the mediating capacity of one particular street-​level professional. The centrality of autonomous experts is perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the working of street-​level professionals. It symptomises a progressive individualisation and fragmentation of public governments that leave room for all kinds of ad-​hoc professional profiles and forms of knowledge. Roos and her team, Henk the moderator and Thijs the local official, committed themselves to developing and representing the future imaginary of citizens throughout the process, thus conveying intention. Where the lack of past knowledge captured the first part of the process, the commitment to including present knowledge and the future imaginary of citizens provided the street-​level professionals with the capacity to resist possible moments of capture. Thijs’ commitment to the process allowed the council to follow the outcome of the e-​ voting. The relative autonomy of the moderator certainly allowed being responsive to the need of this particular process. However, the rising reliance on individual professionalism inevitably flags up the question of accountability, particularism and favouritism. This particular case shows that the ability to translate past, present and future knowledge may shape a successful deliberative process. But at the same time, the existing bureaucracy still plays an overarching role in determining which knowledge is understood as appropriate, which citizen groups should be engaged, which decisions are made in advance, and what mandate the outcome of a process has. The success of a deliberative process becomes therefore dependent largely upon the capacity of street-​level professionals to use their discretionary space and to predict how these bureaucratic norms might capture the process. In order to function as mediators, street-level professionals are in need of an active commitment of elected officials to include tacit knowledge of citizens and a mandate to manage moments in which they may become captured by bureaucracy.

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Acknowledgements The case study in eastern Amsterdam was developed in the context of a research project from the Public Mediation Programme at the University of Amsterdam together with the Municipality of Amsterdam between 2014 and 2015. I am grateful to Nadine Lodder and Hester de Gooijer, who were both a tremendous help in doing the research and transcribing the interviews and focus groups; to Dr David Laws for developing and rethinking the concept of capture; and to Martien Kuitenbrouwer, who deployed her network, which allowed us to work with a variety of local professionals to rethink the notion and apply it to a variety of practices. Note 1 This case study is based on an earlier policy briefing for the municipality of Amsterdam (Verloo et al, 2015).

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PART III

Corporate knowledge and the land and property development sector

7

Anticipatory knowledge: how development consultants see the future Rachel Weber

The expected ripple effect of GE (General Electric)’s move to Boston: The industrial giant says 800 jobs will be based in its new corporate headquarters. (Boston Globe, 14 January 2016) What happens if GE’s jobs don’t pan out? (Boston Globe, 10 April 2016)

Introduction John Maynard Keynes (1936) stressed that economic decisions are always made in the context of great uncertainty because they are based on an ‘unchangeable past’ and aimed at what he called a ‘perfidious future’. The same sentiment would apply to decisions made by planners, who act on future economies through both knowledge of them –​ gained from techniques like forecasting and predictive analytics –​and the capacity to intervene in ways that potentially influence them. Today, future knowledge is more commonly generated by private consultants than by planners or developers themselves. Economic development experts conduct regional economic modelling and produce forecasts to help local governments imagine the costs and benefits of major transformations, like the arrival of a corporate headquarters. These same consultants also work for private actors –​ developers and corporations –​to demonstrate the ‘public purpose’ and ‘economic impact’ of their prospective projects, which often leads to the transmission of public land and financial subsidies for development. In this sense, consultants are one of the strategic bridging agents between state and economy, providing the glue that has allowed myriad public–​ private partnerships to flourish (Weber and O’Neill-​Kohl, 2013).

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In this chapter I will discuss how the anticipatory gaze –​what some call ‘expectancy’ –​is formalised in the tools and techniques used by these consultants given the uncertainties associated with large-​scale investments and the volatility of the global economy. In doing so I am making the claim that planning technocracies can be understood through their ‘instruments’ (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007) and ‘governmental technologies’, that is, the ‘complex of mundane programmes, calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents and procedures through which authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions’ (Miller and Rose, 1990: 175). By enquiring the inner working logics of technical instruments used by policy makers and planners, it is possible to explain why certain expertise becomes so central in the definition of public policies and to question how technocratic logics of planning are enacted and institutionalised. I will pay attention to the actors that create and use techniques of anticipation in order to understand their motivations and ambitions. Influenced by critical anthropologies of the state and sociologies of economic knowledge, I seek to answer the following questions: Which organisations and experts engage in this kind of future-​seeing, and how did they develop this authority? What kinds of tools do they use to convert urban futures into objects of knowledge? What kinds of political and economic possibilities are inscribed in their models of local and regional economies?

Planning the future The future compels ‘anticipatory action…in the here and now’ (Anderson, 2010: 778) that involves ‘technological rationality…capable of reshaping collective and individual endeavors’ (Norbert et al, 2015: 247). We often call these kinds of technique-​laden anticipatory actions ‘planning’ –​whether it is emergency planning for extreme futures such as ecological disaster or economic planning for more mundane futures such as the need for more worker housing when a manufacturing plant moves in. Whenever planners are earmarking the uses of land, negotiating the terms of a bond prospectus, or thinking through the implications of a new transit line, they are mortgaging the futures of their constituents over the long term and have to ‘settle in the present’ the expectation of different events occurring at future dates (Esposito, 2011: 1). The importance of the future in planning raises questions about how planners come to know those futures and render them actionable. From risk assessments and cost–​benefit analysis, planners rely heavily on particular forms of calculative rationality (see Luhmann, 1993). Technical approaches to prediction presume that economic activity

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like urban development is not simply random, but follows discernable patterns that can be known in advance. These techniques include different forms of statistical foresight and visualisation, which offer the promise of building out cognitive access to and seeing the future. They also include embedded assumptions (or ‘market devices’) (see Muniesa et al, 2007) like ‘net present value’ which help actors telescope the future down to the present. Still other devices, like the concept of a development cycle, build out and rein in the future simultaneously in accordion-​like fashion (Weber, 2016). The techniques relied on by planners can be roughly grouped into the following categories (following Myers and Kitsuse, 2000; Isserman, 1985): a. Projecting, whereby actors enter hypothetical assumptions into a quantitative procedure or analytical model that provides probable outcomes or rates of change. b. Forecasting, which represents a best guess about the future, achieved by adding judgement –​about the likely rates of change in assumptions, future behaviours and contexts –​to the projections. c. Engaging, which includes proposals for action to take advantage of a forecasted future, enacts a more desirable future, or avoid an undesirable one. In an ideal world, planning processes involve this trio of activities. The authors imply that they are most effectively undertaken in the sequence shown. For example, first a regional economic model is run that provides different projections of the number of jobs created by the entrance of a new company. Second, the projections form the basis of the planning department’s forecast for what the actual scope and magnitude of the fiscal (revenue and cost) impacts from the move will be. Based on the most probable scenario, the local government may offer incentives to attract the company to a particular site or may charge it an impact fee to cover the additional cost burden. Properly conceived, ‘plans not only accommodate change but effect it, bringing projections, forecasts and vision together in a resolution for action’ (Myers and Kitsuse, 2000). During the immediate postwar period, it was believed that only the state had a comprehensive enough perspective, an ability to see the city as a totality, to mitigate the risks that potentially stood in the way of reaching intentional goals (lower carbon emissions, efficient traffic circulation). Such responsibility gave public planning what some consider its primary intellectual and professional identity:  foresight

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(Markusen, 1998). However, in most countries, the monopoly of state planners on the future has been chipped away at by fiscal and legitimacy crises. Scepticism about the government’s ability to outsmart the market has animated a Hayekian revolt against state planning. Meanwhile, regulatory capture has led progressive thinkers to question whether the state is sufficiently independent from the market and its time horizons sufficiently long to plan for the future. Increasingly, it is more common for a private consulting firm to generate projections and forecasts –​leaving only the engagement part of the trio to planners. In separating the generator from the consumers of future knowledge, planners may be more willing to accept consultant-​ generated forecasts as truth because they lack the expertise used to construct the models. Moreover, projecting and forecasting get rolled into one –​leaving out the element of judgement that is assumed in the second phase. Planners then assume that their job involves simply accommodating those projections (Myers and Kitsuse, 2000). The first ‘phase’ –​projecting the future –​appears to be the most mechanistic of these three activities, and therefore, one might assume, it could be outsourced most easily. Planning for the future appears to grow increasingly subjective, reliant on human judgement, and politicised as it moves closer toward engagement. I would caution against such a conclusion. Although models of future impact used to make projections rely on algorithms and quantitative data, they are also patently social constructions. The assumptions that consultants embed in these models shape how government planners and developers view future possibilities, shutting down some scenarios while drawing attention to others. Even before the addition of judgement in the forecasting phase, quantitative tools act as ‘(p)ractices that give content to specific futures, including acts of performing, calculating and imagining. It is through these acts that futures are made present in affects, epistemic objects, and materialities’ (Anderson, 2010). To understand how anticipation and expectancy are integrated into practice, producing a vision of the future economy that is ostensibly calculable and therefore controllable, I examine the case of fiscal and economic impact analyses in more depth.

Economic and fiscal impact analyses Fiscal and economic impact analysis does not refer to any single technique but to ‘a category of analysis that is defined by the output sought:  estimates of the effects of economic changes’ (Drucker, 2015). Such changes may include quotidian development and land use changes, including alternative densities, mixtures of units, and

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patterns of new housing or commercial space. They can also be radical economic ‘shocks’ like large plant closures or expansions, the discovery of natural resources, major sports or tourism events, or disasters. A wide variety of techniques, ranging from simple discounted cash flow spreadsheet models to more complex statistical modelling calibrated with primary data, are used under the cover of impact analyses (Drucker, 2015). The most popular method of impact analysis is regional input–​output (IO) modelling. IO models are representations of the interrelationships between different economic sectors; they make data-​d erived assumptions about what each sector must purchase from every other sector in order to produce a dollar’s worth of goods or services. The ‘ripple effects’ of an initial event can then be traced through the entirety of an economic region by identifying those sectors and businesses most likely affected by the event (Drucker, 2015). Effects are typically represented as changes in sales or spending, regional income and employment above and beyond what would happen without this event. These effects flow from backward and forward linkages that radiate from the initial event and can be separated into those that are direct, indirect and induced. For example, the direct effects of a corporate relocation are the new employees and income brought to the region from elsewhere (they may be new employees to the region or new jobs to be filled by existing workers, in which case so-​called ‘substitution effects’ must also be estimated). The indirect effects would include changes in sales, income or jobs in sectors within the region that supply goods and services to the sector in which the new employees/​ jobs are being created. Finally, the induced effects are the creation of new jobs in the primary sector, increased sales within the region from increased household spending and the creation of new supporting jobs in the secondary sector. Related but separate, fiscal impact analysis is ‘[a]‌projection of the direct, current and public costs and revenues associated with residential or non-​residential growth to the local jurisdiction(s) in which the growth is taking place’ (Burchell and Listokin, 1980: 3). While some economic impact models include estimates of likely expenditures and revenue effects for local governments, they are more focused on alterations to the economic base than to the public coffers. Separate methods of measuring fiscal effects of development (including multipliers that capture public costs per new household, job and school-aged child based on per capita, service standard or proportion of property tax base) have been devised with no one method outranking any others. It is common to use several in tandem.

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The institutionalisation of IO and fiscal impact models has not been studied systematically although it is possible to speculate about different explanations for their popularity in planning and development. A functionalist account for their use would stress the important role they serve (see critiques of functionalism by Pierson, 2004). Knowing the possible impacts of different development scenarios allows local government to calculate and compare the costs and benefits of each. Such knowledge helps planners implement policy responses to market changes. Economic development consultants build and use these models to fulfil a strong demand for quantitative estimates of economic impact. Why, however, is there such demand for these estimates in the first place? A more critical take would stress the fact that these techniques, and the experts who wield them, rose in prominence due to specific historical events and trends. I propose that they gained in popularity in response to three interrelated demands on bureaucrats: for more accountability with regard to spending, for more empiricism in decision-​making, and for more reliance on technical and non-​ governmental expertise. Starting in the 1970s, local governments in the United States were pressured from above and below to provide more ‘accountability’ in spending. Decades of administrative devolution, attacks on the state and fiscal scarcity meant that public funds had to be allocated on a more competitive basis and had to be justified based on more clearly stated goals and plans (Peck, 2014). The concept of a ‘handout’ was vilified by a strong ideological current that ran through government as development dollars from higher levels began to dry up. New accounting systems were put in place by state and federal governments to monitor local spending to eliminate waste and fraud. At the same time, grassroots activists scrutinised what had been routine development and subsidy decisions, demanding that governments put into place contracts that quantified costs and benefits and specified public expectations of any new project that received government (that is, taxpayer) assistance (Weber, 2002). Local governments gravitated toward incentive programmes that promised to ‘pay for itself ’ so that government assistance would be less obvious or at least more calibrated to the benefits provided by the subsidised project. To participate in the new audit cultures imposed on local government, planners needed ways of measuring the costs and benefits of economic changes. The adoption of economic and fiscal impact models is also the product of new relations of reciprocity between state, academia and economy. Experts moving between universities, government and think tanks were

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responsible for the mathematical formalism that took hold in planning the postwar period (Light, 2003). The technocracies associated with the postwar state favoured the rigours of quantitative thinking and data science over political connections, sentiment and values, and whim and chance. In the emerging subdiscipline of economic development planning, sets of expert analysts emerged from academia to plot and interpret movements in labour and property markets. Many of them came out of the field of ‘regional science’ (a hybrid of geography and economics) (see Boyce, 2003), and several found work in federal and state government agencies and in the extension offices of public ‘land grant’ universities. The publication of key texts like Real Estate Research’s 1974 study The Cost of Sprawl for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and Burchell and Listokin’s handbooks on fiscal impact analysis (1980; 2012) popularised these methods (Bunnell, 1997). Government agencies and university-​based research centres also developed spreadsheet-​based software packages that were marketed as easy ways to analyse local economies and justify planning and development decisions. Because of copyright restrictions and the potential to commercialise the knowledge generated in universities and government agencies, several of the economists and planners who developed these software packages, models and databases began their own private consulting firms in the 1970s and 1980s.1 These consultants became paid providers of advice at the exactly the time when the public sector faced pressures to privatise and contract out as much ‘non-​core’ work as possible. Because it became more difficult to pay salaries for staff that had the expertise to do this kind of analysis and because such analysis was not needed regularly, local government sought to tap the myriad economic development consulting firms incorporating across the country (Weber and O’Neill-​Kohl, 2013). The privatisation of future knowledge was also ideological: consultants were expected to be less politically loyal and more neutral than government staff. In this sense, consultants’ power was enhanced by the very models of governance for which they advocated –​namely those that were technical and data-​driven, and that ‘remove(d) decisions from politics, and thus public scrutiny’ (Saint-​Martin, 2004: 20). Consultants marketed their work heavily, stressing the importance of the predictive analytics they could provide to both public and private sectors. Today, some of these private firms are small and local in scope, while others –​such as accounting giants KPMG and property firms like CBRE  –​are active on a global scale. Still others are national players who market their proprietary software and data packages

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and specialised knowledge of the US political scene through the local government–​university–​chambers of commerce networks that predated their existence. As a commission-​based practice, they often team up with other kinds of planning consultants (site location, market analysis) and join national membership organisations such as the Urban Land Institute, the Council of Development Finance Agencies, and the International Economic Development Council to cultivate connections. Those who seek additional stature and distinction in this field publish in academic journals, present papers at conferences, and conduct work internationally.

What kinds of futures do these techniques construct? If we view economic and fiscal impact techniques as constructing the future in the present and not as reading a future that actually exists, we can begin to generalise about the kinds of futures they anticipate. We can also unpack how such models lead to particular problematisations of issues in economic planning, as they reinforce assumptions and prioritise certain values and relations above others (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007). What follows is an attempt to articulate the anticipatory politics that are embedded within these techniques or get expressed through their use. When governments and developers contract for future knowledge of local economies, they often know what they want to find before they even bid out the contract. The high stakes nature of those real estate projects that would require a fiscal or economic impact report make it such that those procuring the analysis have a strong sense of, if not the actual outcomes, the general direction of the projections and forecasts. The precarious, contract-​to-​contract existence of consultants creates structural incentives to give their clients what they want, undermining the potential for independence.2 Relations of reciprocity and mutual dependence, in turn, ensure that results of these studies are system maintaining. For example, Bunnell (1997) argues that planners popularised the use of fiscal impact analysis because this technique helped justify an, albeit weak, form of growth management in capitalist property markets. Such analysis could demonstrate through numbers that a new proposed development would not ‘pay for itself ’ and would therefore justify levying an exaction on the developer to pay for some of the externalities and public costs (for example, infrastructure) necessary to support the project. The expense of growth could thus be shared (although the developer would likely pass on costs of the exaction

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to the occupants). Such studies legitimated public governance of the economy as planning; the art of anticipation and control is necessary to calibrate the costs and benefits of growth. These models also have a tendency to enact an economic status quo. Both FIA and IO models are predicated on future economies that do not look so different from the current ones (Drucker, 2015). Key assumptions, such as rates of change (in appreciation, interest on capital), tend to project growth or decline in small increments from an existing baseline, as opposed to ‘Black Swans’ (like the financial crisis of 2007–​08) that fundamentally alter pre-​existing relationships between sectors and cannot be compared to anything experienced prior. Because only futures that resemble the present are calculable, these models are better suited for stable economies. In contrast, ‘predicting’ radical changes is only possible retrospect –​and less through technique than selective revisionist history. Popular histories like to lionise the Cassandras willing to break with the models and who ‘saw it coming’ (Roubini and Mihm, 2010). One of the critical roles played by these methods is to represent the economy as spatially and temporally bounded by aggregating economic events across time and space. In spreadsheet form, such events and relationships can be rendered visible and calculable, which helps regional economies acquire a ‘solidity and a density that appears all their own’ (Miller and Rose, 1990: 186) –​even more so when they derive from the calculations of ‘independent’ agents. For example, IO models draw boundaries selectively around a geography that is meant to capture ‘the regional economy’ so that the direct, indirect, and induced effects of changes within it can be estimated. Model users admit that geographic boundaries are rarely optimal –​ that is, they do not capture the extent of economic relations that undoubtedly bleed across space-​time in haphazard and random ways. Often it is the convenience of having data in hand that determines whether one county or another will be included in the calculations –​ not whether it makes sense from an economic perspective. While the methods themselves tend to be useful at a more localised level such as a neighbourhood or city scale, employment data is often only collected at regional or state ones. Such mismatches present challenges to researchers attempting to draw borders around the areas of economic impact. Similarly, fiscal impact analysis is more accurate when applied to the short term and local scale even though policy makers really need to make decisions knowing the long term (beyond an electoral cycle) and state and federal fiscal impacts of a specific development.

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Another critique of IO and fiscal impact analysis models is that they are narrowly economistic and instrumental, measuring only those areas of impact that can actually be measured. For fiscal impact analysis, the cost–​benefit ratio is the primary criterion for desirability and acceptability; as long as a new development pays its own way, it is beneficial. The environmental or ethical dimensions of new development are rarely considered because they cannot be captured in numerical form or because their relationship to economic growth is harder to estimate. In existing outside the calculative space of the model, they are rendered less important. Impact models make several calculative rationalities capable of deployment but key among them is the rationality of commensurability (Joseph, 2014). For example, they account for the costs of development so that they can be compared to the benefits. Impact analyses assign a value to an economic change (for example, a firm moving into the region is worth 500 jobs, which is equal to a $10 million increase in net income). The economic change can be valued by the government and converted into public dollars (for example, the local government is willing to pay $8 million for a $10 million increase in regional net income). In other words, commensurability allows the government to charge for future costs (‘impact fees’) and pay for future benefits (‘subsidies’) of economic change. Local government also uses these models to acquire funding from higher levels of governments and taxpayers to alleviate or mitigate the negative fiscal and economic effects of economic changes. In effect, money forms the bond between present and future (Green et al, 2012). Despite their efficacy on the surface, such forms of government accounting encourage a fragmented, case-​by-​case approach to the future where whether a project pays for itself or should receive a subsidy overrides its contribution to, say, the goals of a comprehensive plan. Zoning, for example, becomes ‘fiscalised’ so that local governments designate land uses based on which ones generate the most tax revenues relative to expenditures rather than which ones create more equitable distributions of households or businesses. The abstracting and instrumental logic underlying these tools is similar to those found in the financial sector and therefore can lend themselves to privatisation efforts because seeing the future costs and benefits of economic changes allows public assets to be valued by private actors. For example, the parking forecasts developed by the City of Chicago’s consultants were used as part of their long-​term lease to a private investment consortium led by Morgan Stanley (Ashton et al, 2016).

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Although it is the primarily the private market’s role to create jobs and new revenues, the use of the models contributes to the illusion of direct government control over the economy. The problematic of causation is assumed away as if by measuring possible future impacts (and then offering a subsidy or levying an impact fee), the state claims to cause that same impact. In actuality, the effect of policy interventions on subsequent economic changes can only be verified in retrospect due to the lack of real time, accurate data. And even retrospective analyses of impact are far from foolproof: the issue of whether an intervention or major change (and not some other change or secular trend) was solely or primarily responsible for subsequent alterations to other sectors or to a localities’ fiscal condition is often ambiguous. But while causation is rarely questioned, the magnitude of the impact is. Competing models are wielded by different parties (other government agencies, developers, community and business groups) to demonstrate the impact of a particular project and to serve their own interests. Such rivalries expose the malleability of such instruments but have not undermined their basic premises. Similarly, a post-​facto analysis of the effect of the economic change may call into question the techniques used ex ante to measure future impact. But when actual impact turns out differently to what the commissioning agent hoped, the economy can be converted back into something that is out of technocratic control. Risk-​taking behaviour and the inevitable ‘bad bet’ can be easily discounted. In this sense, such models produce their own uncertainties about the future under specific conditions of the present (Zaloom, 2009).

Conclusion Planning today is exercised, much like political power, by a profusion of ‘shifting alliances between diverse authorities in projects to govern a multitude of facets of economic activity, social life, and individual conduct’ (Miller and Rose, 1990:  174). One such authority is that of economic development consultants, themselves the product of historic unions between local governments, universities and private development firms. Ideological and fiscal pressures have allowed consultants to monopolise expert knowledge about the future economic and fiscal impacts of development projects. They do so through modelling techniques that themselves constitute a condensed form of knowledge about how an abstraction called ‘the local economy’ might behave in the future (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007). These instruments ‘build

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out’ and ‘cost out’ economic futures, folding those futures into the present so that they can be known and managed. Depictions derived from impact models demarcate a calculative space that enters into the political consciousness and subsequently becomes the domain of political authority. In other words, the models present a vision of the economy that is outside of politics, but into which the state can intervene without losing legitimacy. At the same time, these technologies are neither neutral nor purely speculative. They have the potential to produce ‘specific effects, independent of the aims ascribed to them, which structure public policy according to their own logic’ (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007). They present an image of future economies that are abstracted, decontextualised and simplified. If the planning technocracies that consume their results without understanding the assumptions and biases that are baked into the models, the application of quantitative techniques becomes a hollow exercise that supports any and all competing claims to the perfidious future. Notes George Treyz, an academic who developed early regional macroeconomic models with state and federal funding, started Regional Economic Models, Inc (REMI) in 1980 ‘for the purpose of developing regional forecasting and policy analysis models to inform and improve the quality of public policy decisions’ (REMI website). The USDA Forest Service originally developed the IMPLAN (Impact M for Planning) model with funding from the Rural Development Act of 1972. In 1988, the Agricultural Economics Department of the University of Minnesota began offering the IMPLAN software, eventually spinning it off into a private consulting group (the Minnesota IMPLAN Group). 2 Notes Wachs (1982: 247, from Myers and Kitsuse, 2000): ‘The political salience of many forecasts and the technical complexity of the forecasting process combine to create for the forecaster an important ethical dilemma. Forecasts which support the advocacy of particular courses of action are often demanded by interest groups or public officials. Forecasters must rely upon so many assumptions and judgemental procedures that it is usually possible to adjust forecasts to the extent that they meet such demands…Public policy heightens this dilemma by requiring through laws and regulations forecasts which are supposedly technically objective and politically neutral, while distributing political rewards to those whose forecasts prove their positions most emphatically.’ 1

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Towards an ‘information technocracy’: discourses of London’s post-​referendum real estate markets Nicola Livingstone

Antagonistic Brexit Britain: The rise of the technocrats and ‘anti-​expert’ rhetoric Technocracy / ​ tek- ​ n ok- ​ r uh-​ s i /​ noun (pl. technocracies): a social or political system in which scientific or technical experts hold a great deal of power. (Compact Oxford English Dictionary, 2006: 1063) This chapter specifically looks at the media narratives disseminated by real estate market agents in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in London. It does so in order to question the role of media exposure and private consultancy firms and reflects on the way specialist expert knowledge is publicly disseminated to directly shape public opinion and, indirectly, real estate decision-making. London’s real estate market is considered as it is the leading destination for global capital flows into commercial real estate in the UK, and therefore the centrepiece of an evolving socio-​technical system. Sabeel Rahman suggests that technocratic approaches ‘cannot be purely neutral or objective, even when broader goals are set democratically by society. Technocratic institutions necessarily make judgements in attempting to identify and pursue the common good’ (2011:  270). There is, of course, subjectivity in both what is considered as ‘rational’ and how the common good is defined. The UK in 2016 saw the emergence of antagonistic responses to technocrats, as expert-​informed, apparently rational, economic and political insight into the debate surrounding European Union (EU) membership was characterised by conflicting ‘anti-​expert’ rhetoric. Preceding the referendum on 23 June, technocrats were portrayed by anti-​EU politicians as elitists playing on ‘team remain’, while the then Justice Secretary and leave

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campaign’s Michael Gove announced that people had ‘had enough of experts’ (Mance, 2016). Ironically, those campaigning to leave the EU were also supported by their own particular technocratic evidence in pursuit of an EU exit, as diverse discourses dominated headlines. These discourses, emerging from a spectrum of actors in relation to the Brexit vote, adopted technical information, which is interpreted in a varied and context specific way. In this chapter, context specific forms of technical thinking in the real estate market are manifest as a ‘dynamic assemblage made up of particular actors, agencies, materials, practices and discourses that are variable in time and space’ (Prince, 2016: 426). The chapter considers practices and discourses that connect the mainstream media (MSM) and real estate market economies in the UK, in order to reflect on the way these two industry sectors adopt data analyses to represent particular market relationships in order to shape public opinion. The chapter concludes that discourses relating to constantly emerging real estate information are not only actively creating markets, but are also diversely interpreted by subjective, context specific media, which reimagine the market in particular ways. I will examine how information and data relating to the London market are created, presented and interpreted by both active networks of professional real estate market agents and the wider media, concentrating on three specific publications:  Estates Gazette (EG, property specific publication), the Financial Times (FT, finance /​business specific newspaper) and the Guardian UK (national newspaper). It provides an overview of varied perspectives in relation to headlines and content, however this exploratory research does not seek to offer an in-​depth analysis of all published content. It offers a ‘snapshot’ of the articles published at two points in time; in the month following the ‘out’ vote (23 June–​31 July 2016) and a year later across the same time period for comparison. By analysing publications, which are likely to have diverse readerships from real estate market authorities to the non-​specialist, the chapter offers insight into how information mediated by industry experts is interpreted, adopted and presented in particular ways to create rich, context and temporally specific post-​ referendum real estate discourses.

Questioning the socio-​technical real estate markets The twenty-​first century real estate market is characterised by increasing levels of information transparency (JLL, 2014; 2016a), the development of globalised service providers (De Magalhães, 2001) and significant

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cross-​border capital flows (McAllister and Nanda, 2016). Today there are ‘increasing options for investing in real estate internationally, with a series of more robust and better-​governed investment platforms covering most of the world’s real estate markets’ (Aussant et al, 2014: 3). The UK is the world’s most transparent real estate market, and is both dominated and driven by London: the second most active city for transactions globally, only surpassed by New  York (JLL, 2017). However, transaction volume in 2016 dropped by 40 per cent year-​on-​ year (JLL, 2017), with dips in transaction volumes directly attributed to the post-​referendum uncertainty. Today, investment in London remains strong: the office market saw cross-​border transactions to the value of $9bn, equivalent to 68 per cent of the market (BNP Paribas, 2017). The increase in activity in the latter half of 2016 was reflective of both the ‘resilience and momentum of the UK economy’ (CBRE, 2017: 5) although there is inherent doubt in the real estate market surrounding how and when the UK will leave the EU. The market-​related insight presented in the previous paragraphs is reflective of the information mined and interpreted by the real estate industry service providers. A specific jargon is adopted, and a market ‘language’ is created, within the profession of real estate intermediaries, investment advisors and developers. In recent decades, the informational inefficiencies linked to the real estate market have been overcome to an extent, as transparency increases (JLL, 2014; 2016b) and more and more relevant data becomes available. Real estate brokers adopt this data, which represents the market in particular ways, and act as ‘anchoring agents’ (Halbert and Rouanet, 2014), potentially influencing the decision-​making processes of developers and investors. Real estate industry professionals can be viewed collectively as an ‘epistemic community’ (Haas, 1992), as they encompass professional, competent and authoritative expertise. The market itself can be understood, from an organisational perspective as systems which occupy ‘a world very much of their own making, organisationally, technologically and on the level of agency and action…Complete with strong insider–​outsider distinctions, membership criteria and interiorised forms of monitoring and regulation’ (Knorr-Cetina and Preda, 2012:  122–​4). The question of how the functionality of such markets can be understood is the cornerstone of socio-​ technical theory (STS). Of course, it is not just the real estate actors who occupy an ‘epistemic community’, but the media can also be understood in this way.

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Framing conflicting subjectivities: a media technocracy? If the real estate market’s epistemic communities in London can be viewed as actively producing and creating expert knowledge on the sector, then the MSM can be seen as the interpreters of such information. For the purpose of this chapter and in line with the earlier definition of technocracy the media are not seen as technocrats: although they are creating a discourse within both a social and political system, they are not technical nor scientific experts. However, there are clearly grey areas, as those from the real estate specialist publication (EG) may also have specialist knowledge, just as contributors to the Guardian and FT could potentially be both real estate experts and contributing authors. Moving beyond these possible grey areas, the impact of both the type and granularity of real estate information reflected upon by the media in relation to London’s market post-​referendum can have a direct impact on the story being told. Artz discusses how ‘journalistic descriptions and theoretical observations…are differentiated primarily by the quality of their research, analytical expertise, and conscious or unconscious political preferences’ (Artz, 2003: 3). This chapter therefore, seeks to initially ascertain whether the media’s reflection on expert information from what is typically a complex epistemic community of real estate professionals, successfully captures market nuances and how such information creates a particular knowledge-​based narrative. Media narratives have often been integral in both the construction and perpetuation of perceptions associated with social and political ‘elites’ (Mercille, 2015; Herman and Chomsky, 2008), although these can often be pluralistic, gendered and potentially conflicting depending on the diversity of publications and authors considered. From a political economy viewpoint, it has been suggested that ‘capitalist hegemony needs parallel media hegemony as an institutionalised, systematic means of educating, persuading and representing subordinate classes to particular cultural practices within the context of capitalist norms’ (Artz, 2003: 16–​17). In the case of the Brexit vote and how it is represented, the media can clearly be divided into ‘leave’ (the Sun, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph) and ‘remain’ supporters (the Independent, The Times, the Guardian). Media discourses can be considered as either stimulating political involvement in the best-​case scenario or contributing to the political alienation of the reader in the worst case (Curran et al, 2014), and such extreme experiences are likely to have emerged throughout the ‘divisive, scaremongering’ referendum campaign (Moore and Ramsey, 2017: 10). Irrespective of whether it fosters political alienation or involvement, ‘the media is crucial to public discourse’ (Rafter,

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2014:  598) and is clearly key to presenting varied perspectives and shaping opinion. In the case of the referendum rhetoric of the ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ campaigns, technical information typically appears to flow in one direction, as real estate industry professionals and economic experts produce narratives and information that are then left open to interpretation by the MSM. How this real estate market information is presented and articulated by the media in line with a particular rhetoric or emerging discourse is reflected upon in the following section’s analyses of specific post-​referendum snapshots.

Post-​referendum media discourses There are limited precedents for academic media analyses in the wake of the Brexit vote. An existing study examined how the referendum coverage was presented by various news outlets in the ten weeks leading to the vote (23 June 2016), and identifies almost 15,000 related articles published by 20 different media outlets, in both print and online format (Moore and Ramsey, 2017). Two of the publications examined in this existing research are included in this reflection, as they are typically considered as MSM, rather than specialist publications: the Guardian published 1,628 Brexit related articles, the largest number overall, and the FT published almost half this number, at 850 articles (Moore and Ramsey, 2017: 13). Articles were classified in relation to specific policy issues, with the most prolific outputs related to the ‘economy’ (7,028 articles), followed by ‘immigration’ (4,383) and NHS/​Health (1,638). Across the ten weeks there were 370 articles relating to ‘housing’, and it is likely that any direct comment on the commercial real estate market was included via the ‘economy’. Moore and Ramsey’s research provides general insight into the nature and themes of media narratives pre-​ referendum, whereas this chapter presents a more particular analyses of the real estate knowledge created and communicated post-​referendum. Both the MSM and real estate specific publications are examined through temporal snapshots of their content immediately following the referendum (23 June–​31 July 2016), and a year later across an identical timescale. These two separate snapshots allow an element of comparison to emerge from the research, to assess whether perspectives altered with time; the content, data and potential knowledge being articulated may have shifted across publications considering the variety of epistemic communities operating within the fluid nature of the real estate market, media and wider economy. Each website was searched for relevant content within the two five-​week periods in 2016 and 2017, by searching for a variety of key words, such as ‘property’, ‘real estate’,

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‘Brexit’, ‘London’ and from these, ascertaining whether ‘technocratic’ expertise or data were referenced (see Table 8.1). Articles relating to both the residential and commercial real estate markets were examined. The most obvious initial observation that emerges from the media sources examined is that the MSM (both the Guardian and the FT) published more articles in the period immediately following the Brexit referendum vote than the specialist real estate press. It is also interesting to note that for the MSM, the number of articles in the same time period one year on had substantially decreased (by 36.5 per cent for the Guardian and 69.7 per cent by the FT), whereas the number of specialist real estate articles had grown by over 400 per cent. This clearly indicates that for the real estate market the issues surrounding the potential impact of Brexit are becoming increasingly important to consider and communicate effectively to their readers, although the circumstances are inherently uncertain. As different types of publications with particular epistemic characteristics and cultural norms, such a shift may be less of a reflection on the MSM’s desire to reflect on real estate related discourses, and more a reflection on the fluid interests of their readership. However, it is clear that in line with Prince (2016), the landscape of real estate actors, media publications and journalists, create discourses that are both temporally variable and dynamic in their representations of the London market. Looking beyond the numbers and into the articles themselves, the following two propositions have developed.

In the media, technical information mediates and reforms market perceptions In the five weeks immediately following the announcement that the UK was to leave the EU, a plethora of related articles emerged Table 8.1: Numerical overview of articles consulted Source

No. Articles June–​July 2016

No. Articles June–​July 2017

Estates Gazette (EG) www.egi.co.uk

46

204

Financial Times (FT) www.ft.com

390

118

Guardian www.google.com /​www.theguardian.com

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66

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across all three publications. This in itself is unsurprising, but the way in which technical and data-​based information was adopted offers interesting insight into how the media contribute to the creation of market knowledge. By adopting real estate information, the media are actively forming their own systems of understanding and transmit powerful scenarios of what may or may not happen as a result of the Brexit vote (in line with Knorr-Cetina and Preda, 2012). The EG reflect on a diverse range of interrelated market topics including; how geopolitical shocks have affected house price growth in a longitudinal study over 20 years; assessments of the drop in share prices for specific companies (both residential and commercial); consideration of market specific opinions from real estate industry experts on resilience; alternative safe havens for funds; and predictions of impacts on office developments. Articles are consistently and comprehensively informed by expertise, with the key points presented in an accessible and factual manner. Opinions are explicitly stated and easily identifiable, and although there is some level of speculation in terms of how London’s real estate market could be affected, the articles are well reasoned and typically lack sentimentality. The FT adopts a similar approach to how technical information is presented, although it brands Brexit a ‘disaster for City and business’ (Guthrie, 2016), and predominantly considers real estate market volatility in line with the wider financial sector rather than devoting a lot of column inches to it as an independent topic. The FT reflects on impacts for international banks, the rout in currency value, the implications for house price volatility, as well as the collapse of property deals, associated property market opportunities for international investors in pursuit of a London bargain, and the shelving of development schemes. Interestingly the FT also reflects on how the referendum vote represents an anti-​elite narrative, one which demonstrates the discontent at the London’s economic centricity and the disconnections between the capital and regions. Such discourses illustrate the anti-​ expert, and anti-​technocratic positions adopted by many media and public opinion makers. However, the findings indicate that much of the technical information relating to real estate is not as detailed in the MSMs as it is in the more specialist EG. This trend continues in the Guardian’s take on the London real estate market in the wake of the vote; however, it gives more perspective on real estate issues arising in London, independent of the financial markets. Information is once more presented through consideration of property companies with falling share prices, how investors in prime luxury London residential property could find a Brexit bargain, the impact of a burgeoning

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slowdown in the construction industry and housebuilding, and the possibility that commercial real estate could drop in value by up to 20 per cent. From the online searches the Guardian, unlike the other two publications, deliberates on the impact of Brexit upon the housing market, more so than commercial real estate. However, the uncertainty ahead is explicitly communicated to readers in both the 2016 and 2017 snapshots across all three publications. Evidently, each publication explicitly questions the post-​referendum impacts on the real estate market and to different extents they effectively capture nuances in the market and relevant data. This builds on Artz’s (2003) suggestion of how the media adopt information, and the varying degrees to which they attempt to analyse it. Although each publication considers real estate impacts, each carries out and presents analyses through diverse perspectives, which create market perceptions. In some respects, this may be very discrete and similar between publications (such as overlap in article content), in others, such as the branding of Brexit as a ‘disaster’ (from a ‘remain’ paper), less so. In the case of the latter example, such strong vocabulary reinforces the position of the publication itself, and therefore adopts relevant detail in support of their approach. However, as one commentator in the EG suggests, it is ‘dangerous to generalise’ about the impact of Brexit on the real estate market (Peace, 2016). The consistency with which real estate technocratic knowledge is adopted by the media also indicates a standardisation of processes, and by improving the analytical capacity to evaluate expert real estate knowledge routine behaviours have been created, which determine the ways in which media outlets adopt and report this knowledge within their own particular epistemic community. Although the information being provided is dynamic, it continually feeds into public channels, to the point of it becoming somewhat institutionalised within various media cultures, for example, EG for detailed property knowledge, the FT for analysis of interconnected real estate and business interests, and the Guardian for a more ‘populist’, often critical or speculative take on the wider socioeconomic characteristics of the residential and commercial real estate markets. It is the media’s role to interpret, and legitimise a particular ‘angle’ on an issue, in a performative way, which is itself actively promoting and creating a dominant real estate discourse. Each publication demonstrates that they are rapidly adjusting to the increasing amount of technical information available, and although the general direction in which they take this information may be similar, the language adopted reflects nuanced differences.

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Language dynamics and semantic choice are key to creating particular understandings Different language dynamics emerge between the MSM and EG. In the former, in the case of the Guardian, it is apparent that the content and context is adjusted somewhat to ensure that it is clearly understandable to readers. Whereas in the FT and the EG, the technical data produced and disseminated often adopts specialist, jargon rich and context specific language which in the articles consulted doesn’t appear to the same extent in the Guardian. There is a challenge for the MSM to mediate particular knowledge and present data to a range of audiences, which then creates a type of currency within the media –​ across two very different aspects of a broad spectrum of actors and networks –​the real estate industry experts and the wider non-​specialist readership of the publication. It can be surmised that this attempt at increasing accessibility to information by the Guardian is reflective of its readership characteristics, and how the publication processes and presents technical information. With the other two publications, it seems that there an assumption of prior knowledge on the part of the reader. It is likely that this more specialist information, especially that of the EG (which is only available to subscribers), is also useful to key actors within London’s real estate market. We have seen how the topics covered by the media publications studied have some similarities in terms of the topics they cover, but that markets are presented in varied levels of detail and in specific ways. Specialist information may therefore influence key actors’ responses to the real estate market’s fluctuations and their decision-​making process in relation to what they choose to divest, develop or invest into in the London market. It then follows that dynamic technical information may have a level of influence on the practices and outcomes of both broader market actors and experts in London’s real estate markets, depending on the publication. Examples include those on individual residential households (‘Housing sales forecast to fall sharply this summer after Brexit vote’, Osbourne and Monaghan, 2016, the Guardian being one such), and on investors interested in the flow of global capital into the commercial sector (for example, into London offices markets, such as ‘WeWork: “We’re only at the very beginning in London” ’, EG, 2017). Therefore, the written representations created by the media in relation to London’s real estate markets are presented through particular language which is built around technical real estate information.

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It is more difficult for non-​experts (such as the general public, public policymakers and their consultants) to challenge the information emerging from EG as it is predominantly reporting knowledge produced within and for industry actors. The language dynamics are much more definitive and clearly emerge from market dynamics, rich with jargon. Clarity of purpose and strongly communicated perspectives emerge from EG; there is little speculation within articles and that which does emerge represents technocratic, rather than journalistic opinions (unlike opinion pieces in the MSM). Varied perspectives are recognised across the publication and in line with changing industry opinions and information, as observed through the two snapshots. Although technical experts can be seen to be in pursuit of what they consider to be the ‘common good’ in relation to real estate markets, as institutions they are not neutral (Sabeel Rahman, 2011) and nor are the media publications who adopt and present information. Within the wider media there are extreme movements away from neutrality in more speculative pieces, the routine integration of technical real estate data creates more informed and reasoned, yet still potentially subjective, market-​based discourses. It is not just a question of what articles are written about in relation to technical real estate information, but how the articles are written, and the type of language adopted within them, which goes towards creating a specific, collective understanding of the market.

Moving towards an ‘information technocracy’ This chapter has examined the transmission of technical information in the UK’s real estate market in the wake of the Brexit referendum, and considered how such information is adopted and interpreted by the media to create certain discourses pertinent to London’s post-​ referendum landscape. There is clearly an active connection between epistemic communities of the real estate market and the media, with varied levels of dependence upon the functionality and processes adopted by each other. This chapter has reflected on how these various networks of actors intersect to tell particular stories, from particular perspectives but for dissemination to the general public. It concludes that market perceptions are consistently informed and influenced by the media, and its adoption of varied subjective perspectives relating to the real estate market and relevant data. Such perspectives remain temporally contingent; the shift in the number of articles published one year on in 2017 demonstrates that the MSM has lost some of their initial appetite for real estate articles post-​referendum, while

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the specialist press (EG) produced more articles and continued to build on the technocratic information emerging from the real estate sector. Initial findings from these connected perspectives could be further developed from the point of view of the networked market agents themselves, the impact of the media and the spatio-​temporal shifts in how markets are established, imagined and recreated over a longer time period. There is more research to be done on how privatised networks of real estate and media operate. For example, there may be further questions to explore in relation to the power dynamics between the epistemic communities of the media and real estate technocrats. Influential knowledge creation and narratives reflect the ways in which particular perspectives are adopted, enhanced, reaffirmed and perpetuated through the MSM in particular. Such discourses directly relate to available technocratic information and how it is understood and processed. Following this increasingly normalised approach to analysis, the information is then presented through publications and therefore actively informs how aspects of the real estate market are understood by readers. Understandings are often diverse and different, and are in turn, interpreted by both mainstream and specialist readers who understand the world from particular and yet dynamic perspectives. Each publication is directly responding to the available technical information available to them from the market, to inform their writing, as well as the expectations of their readership. Through this analysis, it has become clear that the interpretation of market based, expert real estate knowledge, and the resulting reflections upon it, varies within and between publications. In addition to this, how such knowledge is constructed and presented is contingent upon both the journalist producing the article and the publication for which it is written. Therefore, there are specific factors at play across the media spectrum that may symptomise technocratic, modes of governance in the planning of real estate investments and public policies associated with them. These include the creation of the analytical and specialist information by the real estate market itself (who may also wish to construct a particular market story), the ‘identity’ of the publication and its associated reputation, as well as the analyses of the data and the individual journalists presenting it within a particular and purposeful article. This chapter has demonstrated that both MSM and specialist publications are actively creating subjective market perspectives drawn from what can be called an ‘information technocracy’, where specialist real estate knowledge and data has increasingly become central to informing the media and indirectly to form public opinion. This

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evolution towards incorporating technocratic information into market representations produced by both the mainstream and specialist media become ever more important today, especially in light of political and economic disruptions such as Brexit, which clearly have an unsettling impact on the global perceptions of London as a destination for real estate capital.

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9

Finance as technocratic agent in urban development Sabine Dörry

Introduction Current city rankings, cities’ global advertising campaigns and large-​scale urban development dynamics with iconic ‘trophy’ buildings, among others, suggest a somewhat schizophrenic trend in contemporary urban development. Cities take much pride in scoring high as the globe’s most affluent places. Yet, they pay a high price for doing so by conceding to the powers of a planning ‘technocracy’, whose activities often intensify the inequalities of living conditions and the unaffordability of housing, to name but a few. This chapter explores the impact of a specific type of economic elite that should be included in the equation of technocracy on contemporary urban planning: the financial and advanced business services (FABS) such as legal, tax, property and other advisory firms –​the ‘technicians’ who keep the financial capitalist system afloat. My argument is that this diverse landscape of private experts is becoming increasingly influential in shaping public planning policies and private corporate strategies in real estate development, yet they operate as unaccountable actors, far from any transparent democratic process. The role of the FABS industry is characterised by this sector’s ability to generate power and strategic knowledge that determines urban and regional development. I develop and exemplify my argument in the context of Luxembourg and its vastly dynamic financial economy. Like in the UK, finance is one of Luxembourg’s strategic industries. Although Luxembourg’s financial centre is tightly embedded in Luxembourg City’s urban fabrics, it is also largely disarticulated from it and forms part of a global archipelago with other financial centres. Specifically since the early 2000s, Luxembourg City has been responding to the demands of the international FABS elite in its provision of economic policies and large-scale urban development projects (Dörry, 2015). I therefore

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situate FABS as technocratic agent at the interface of financial economic policy and urban development. Today, the world’s major urban economies offer extensive opportunities to firms and investors, and the imperative of financial capitalism has boosted the significance of firms operating in the FABS economy. Such firms flock to places with favourable regulations, sophisticated interconnectivities and urban vivaciousness to fully grasp the vast opportunities offered, for example, in global cities and international financial centres (IFCs). In the language of one of the world’s leading real estate brokers, ‘[a]‌ccess to talent’ is increasingly driving corporate real estate and location strategy, with corporate occupiers becoming far more forensic in their analysis of talent clusters. In the U.S.…downtown and urban submarkets [are] the most desired locations as companies pursue millennial talent and renewed corporate energy. In Asia Pacific, where proximity is often key to employee retention, tech companies are more and more occupying traditional CBD premises which were formerly occupied by the financial community. (JLL, 2016b: 14) Cities and city-​regions’ new planning and urban development leitmotivs are ever more determined by economic rationales, designed to keep pace with their peer cities in a ferocious inter-​urban race. Embellished with vested interests of the private economy, cities seek to secure sources of current and future income generation. Increasingly, groups of the private economy initiate strategies to match the urban environment with their needs; this chapter focuses particularly on the power of the FABS sector to do so. The comprehensive involvement of private interests in the service supply to the public sector raised much criticism. Critical observers speak of ‘anti-​political development machines’ (Raco et al, 2016) in an epoch of a rising ‘global policy consultocracy’ (McCann, 2011) able to valorise urban policies that in turn serve the new formation of the ‘post-​democratic city’ (MacLeod, 2011; compare Swyngedouw, 2011). In IFCs, the intricacies between private and public interests to ‘co-​manage’ urban development against the background of fully blooming financial capitalism are particularly palpable. IFCs shape an important category of cities at the top of the global locational tournament (Taylor and Derudder, 2016), and Luxembourg City is a vivid example for host economies with such dense finance clusters

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and a powerful, globally operating financial industry. Of specific influence to its urban development are the pronounced revolving door mechanisms between the private and the public sector, whose explicit socio-​spatial implications have been solidifying only recently. IFCs are –​not least with regard to their significant office and commercial spaces  –​pacemakers of economically motivated planning strategies and building practices, in which public interests have converged with private interests for years. This chapter argues and illustrates that, to a certain degree, firms belonging to the FABS industry have become a serious influencing power in support of technocratic planning. This chapter’s argument develops as follows. The second section defines FABS firms as a group with strategic knowledge that they generate and valorise, and which in turn is justified by both the state and the broader society. Their stipulation has empowered private interest to design practices directed to infuse ‘technocratic’ urban development policies. The third section scrutinises how this knowledge is injected into concrete place-​based practices in Luxembourg. Alluding to this concrete example, the fourth section discusses FABS power strategies by drawing on ‘functional coupling’ mechanisms between the private and the public sector. We argue that these characteristic matching processes link local governments in city-​regions with global businesses and are key modes to understanding technocratic planning influences by finance experts aiming at a city’s (long-​term) income generation and economic growth. The emphasis on the ‘social’ dimension of these coupling processes ultimately boils down to a technocracy-​controlled urban development. The fifth section concludes with a brief, but nonetheless critical, outlook.

Financialisation and the rise of expertise and technocracy Veblen’s (1899) utopian technocratic society excludes the meddling influence of politics and replaces it by fact-​oriented policy-​making of ‘independent’ experts. This basic idea of technocracy rests upon the fact that the society largely fails to manage complex challenges because (elected) politicians too often sacrifice long-​term reason to the charm of the moment. Indeed, other than the representatives of technocratic organisations, for example, urban planning authorities, the councils of local government are elected. Their political mandate makes them –​ not least according to Veblen’s technocracy notion –​susceptible to myopic decision-​making. FABS firms have been benefiting disproportionately from the deeply pervasive financialisation and the respective ‘valuation’ of financial

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economic activities. Their significance to the influencing of public policies rose alongside growing deficits in the public budgets. The resulting roll-​back of the state (Leitner et  al, 2007), the ideology of ‘austerity urbanism’ (Peck, 2012), and far-​reaching welfare cuts (Brenner and Theodore, 2002) spawned far-​reaching socio-​spatial fragmentation, for example through ‘buy-​to-​let gentrification’ (Paccoud, 2017) and strategies of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2003) followed by investor-​driven urban mega-​projects (Orueta and Fainstein, 2008). Financialisation misleadingly suggests that financial activity is exceptionally profitable. This delusion derives from the sector’s myopic high revenue generation and remuneration, underpinned by prominent doctrines of neo-​classical and positivist financial economics, and sophisticated econometrics in university academic departments. Their technologies and practices, buttressed by the forcefully narrated ideology of financialisation, spilled over from academic research into the world of corporate management (Frankfurter et al, 1994) and finance, and eventually intersected with the public sector. Generating such distinct, financialisation-​serving bodies of knowledge is, however, one thing; validating and legitimising such ‘strategic knowledge’ in order to benefit economically from it, is the important other side (Faulconbridge et al, 2009). The shifts in the various forms and manifestations of capitalism illustrate vividly that emerging bodies of dominant knowledge and practices can be sufficiently powerful to challenge incumbent ideologies and societal order. Urban development –​which diverts from the traditional planning ideologies in many forms (Savini and Raco, Chapter 1, this volume) – underwent such dynamics. A fruitful way to scrutinise the underlying (shifts in) power is to incorporate an agency-​ based perspective with a focus on the FABS ‘firm–​profession nexus’ (Dörry, 2018). This nexus proposes that firm power is supplemented by the power of profession. Professions’ specific mechanisms of generating epistemic authority and introducing rhetorical framing of finance and finance-​related ‘expert work’ helped institutionalised professions such as accountancy, law and real estate (Abbott, 1988; Greenwood et al, 2002) to co-​constitute institutional power and to receive state backing and wide/​r societal legitimisation, at least since the 1990s. This firm-​cum-​profession taxonomy’s devices, methods and techniques have formed distinct bodies of knowledge derived from the demand for technologies of financing and property valuation during the gradual introduction of the new systemic instruction sheet, that is, financialisation. The expertise which constitutes the FABS group provides this system with a strategic, economically exploitable skill.

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That skill corresponds with the FABS’ new economic significance and its influence in urban economies, which themselves are ever more aligned with the needs of the FABS industry. Gradually, FABS formed an influential group of expertise in urban development oriented on the fierce inter-​urban competition. FABS’ influence on technocratic governments can be linked with the emergence of a ‘new managerialism’ (Thrift, 1997) in the private sector that eventually transformed the public sector’s ‘time-​honoured methods of accountability [into] quasi-​c orporate management structures’ (Hebbert, Chapter  2), fittingly termed public real estate management or the ‘entrepreneurial city’ (Hall and Hubbard, 1998). They reflect the consequences of privatisation and neoliberalisation, whose implementation under the administrations of Thatcher and Reagan could not have worked without a substantial supply of (newly developed) technologies of financing and property valuation, among other things. Accountants, lawyers and property consultants re-​defined, broadened and eventually rewrote their professional ‘scripts’, thus, reframing their practices, key bodies of knowledge and identities (Dörry, 2018). Today, they have morphed into a well-​equipped technocracy able to form and benefit from ‘institutional arrangements that insulate decision-​making from the play of political opportunity and market speculation’ (Hebbert, Chapter 2) leading, in a way, to the commodification and ‘assetisation’ of the urban public space.

Urban development in Luxembourg Urban planning is inherently political as governments seek to manage development and to reconcile opposing market and public objectives and interests. In many of the world’s regions and cities, top-​down planning processes were enriched by bottom-​up participation of civil society. In Luxembourg, however, this turn never took place, and critical observers note that it does not fit contemporary planning theories (Hesse, 2013). Luxembourg City’s urban development has been deeply conflated with its thriving finance industry. Strategically embedded in an archipelago of IFCs, Luxembourg accommodates the needs of global capital by flexibly adapting its legal arrangements, thus reaping the fruits of national sovereignty. This is a telling story, but also one that strongly hints towards the country lacking a planning culture. It builds on two uniquely entangled power struggles that have created a planning ‘power niche’ which, so the argument goes, are increasingly occupied by global business actors. The power struggle entails, first, a severe power mismatch between the national and the local planning

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level, and, second, Luxembourg’s required annual economic growth rate of 4 per cent to sustain its generous national welfare system. We start by explaining the second aspect and link it subsequently with the first one. The international FABS industry is a shaping player of Luxembourg’s economic export model. Finance accounts for more than 35 per cent of the country’s GDP and essentially puts the small-​sized country as an economic heavyweight on the geo-​political world map. FABS’ significance became apparent when Luxembourg successfully entered the newly emerging Euromarkets in the late 1950s, and since the late 1980s, when it successfully exploited new EU regulations for its investment funds industry (Dörry, 2016). Luxembourg’s location in the geographical and political heart of Europe and Luxembourg City as one of the EU’s three capitals further entailed the location of new European institutions. To accommodate these new functions and to provide the necessary infrastructure, the state acquired land on the Kirchberg area in 1961, which, at that time, was only a field just outside Luxembourg City, and the State financed its urban transformation. The 1990s and 2000s witnessed immense building activity on the Kirchberg. The expanding service sector and a growing European bureaucracy, due to its eastward enlargement, framed the provision of office facilities in and close to Luxembourg City. Its large-​scale urban projects, including flagship buildings designed by international star-​architects, ideally fit the concept of ‘competitive city-​regionalism’ (Ward and Jonas, 2004; Brenner, 2004). Recent large-​scale urban projects, including, for example, the Kirchberg areal but also the office town of Cloche d’Or, were initiated by the international FABS industry and form prototypical enclave spaces today. These enclaves are typically ‘disconnected from their local environment’ (Hesse, 2016: 618). Instead, they showcase the self-​ styled global-​ness of Luxembourg City, attractive to the command and control functions performed by the global FABS industry. The nature, magnitude and speed of the urban development in Luxembourg City over the past decades, however, has been causing growing tensions. One cannot help feeling that the effects of economic-​driven urban development today and their social impacts on the life in the City are not thoroughly thought through; let alone that forward-looking city planning does indeed take place. It seems that the legitimacy of planning is questioned by myopic decisions to the benefit of, foremost, economic success. These projects…in their very functional specialisation, are built upon borrowed size. As they are most specifically

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designed for providing office space for international service industries, they lead to rather flawed patterns of urbanisation and urbanism. Consequently, as these projects are an integral part of the Luxembourgian planning trajectory, they contribute to problems, not to solutions. (Hesse, 2016: 619–​20) Not least due to its large degree of internationalisation, Luxembourg faces insurmountable obstacles to achieve ‘sustainable, integrated spatial development’ owed both to the state’s generic large-​scale urban projects-​based planning philosophy (Hesse, 2016:  613) and its ‘borrowed size’ (Alonso, 1973). Borrowed size exhibits a surplus in functional significance based not on its regional embeddedness in its larger metropolitan area (Durand et al, 2018; Schulz, 2008), but predominantly on its positioning in the centre of global capital/​-​ism. Yet, speaking solely of a public–​private growth coalition –​in silent consensus with civil society –​it falls too short on the realities of both Luxembourg’s peculiar planning system and its unique situatedness in the larger metropolitan area, both of which represent two sides of the same coin. Luxembourg’s institutional setting is primarily designed to secure future economic growth and to foster urban development, but essentially subordinates urban planning to the economy. The country’s development policies are sandwiched between private commercial interest at the global level and the state-protected monopolies of commercial developers and real estate agents at the local level who have been cultivating tight politico-business relationships over years in Luxembourg’s cosy, intimate networks. However, the country’s local communes ‘lack the planning capacities required to successfully steer [mega] projects; as a consequence, the power of private agents becomes unusually high, lacking effective public control’ (Hesse, 2016: 620). Hence, Luxembourg’s ‘dysfunctional real estate markets and…extraordinarily high housing prices’ (Hesse, 2016: 613), which essentially prioritise office space over housing, are no surprise and fuel exactly ‘this dynamic further, instead of moderating it’ (Hesse, 2016: 620). Luxembourg’s communes compete against one another for local income and development, a competition for revenue largely absorbed by the powerful capital Luxembourg City. The key instrument communes apply in this competition is their right to set the level of business taxation. Offering the lowest tax rates by far, Luxembourg City attracts most business and accumulated tax income, which it

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redirects in large infrastructure, star-​architecture and urban mega-​ projects typical for places thriving on borrowed size (compare the notion of Luxembourg’s ‘Kirchberg-​Syndrome’, Hesse, 2013). It goes without saying that Luxembourg’s real estate developers and private planners, protected by a national monopoly, have been playing a vital role in this process. They form strong local coalitions with the land-​owning communes who define future building plots and (re-​) allocate land ownership, which has already propelled land speculation throughout the country. Further, more than half of the members of the national parliament exercise both state and communal political mandates, which makes these deputies committed to both (repeatedly conflicting) state and local interests (compare Hesse, 2013), which every so often revolve around issues of (affordable) housing and attracting business activity. Due to its small size, the country lacks a regional planning authority, thus solidifying the conflict between the communes and the State. Luxembourg’s urban development has been following an exigent functional specialisation of space that has helped to cement the finance business generating strategy. To date, 180,000 people commute daily from the neighbouring countries of Belgium, France and Germany to Luxembourg, mainly to the agglomeration around Luxembourg City. One defining reason is the marked difference in the cost of living on either side of the border. House prices, for example, are much lower in the border regions compared to those in Luxembourg’s communes close to the capital. Luxembourg has therefore primarily focused on attracting international business, whereas its border regions have ‘specialised’ in providing housing, with cross-​border transportation links reaching their capacity limits and being a constant source of disagreement. Hence, Luxembourg’s functional specialisation of space is basically possible due to its ‘welcoming hinterland’, with Luxembourg City sucking in commercial success but being increasingly inundated by the resulting pressures of that urbanisation. Efforts by the government to implement measures for a more sustainable spatial development in the country have been confounded by economic growth imperatives steered by the ministries of economy, finance and transportation, but also by the strength of the communes and their gatekeeping power regarding scarce land resources when it comes to the provision of housing, for example. A lack of political means and will so far to indeed enforce strategic spatial planning on the national level has created a power niche increasingly successfully filled by the FABS industry. Private developers link the specific needs of FABS’ economic activity with a specific location and its

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disproportional rises in land value, thus reinforcing the industry’s mutual relationship with place, upon which FABS activity hinges. While this general mechanism is well known, Luxembourg’s specific institutional setting has boosted FABS’ power in a spatially highly concentrated urban development.

Linking technocracy with place Processes of ‘coupling’ (Coe et al, 2004) help to broker (strategic) knowledge between the realms of private and public interests. ‘Regional assets in the form of specific kinds of knowledge, skills and expertise provide an important resource for regional development, but must be harnessed by regional institutions’ (MacKinnon, 2012: 230) to match the strategic needs of international business and to attract their economic activity to the region. Businesses decide deliberately for a specific location. Coupling gives private agency strategic access to concrete policy fields, whose resource-​and time-​strapped policymakers often lack the instruments and information to respond to posed challenges (Bok and Coe, 2017). It has left the state relying increasingly on knowledge and policy mobility by non-​state agency, thus creating ‘relational policy spaces’ (Dörry and Walther, 2015) that enable and empower them to influence and ‘make’ policy. The unequal nature of the relationship between global (financialised) business and the local communities reveal also a ‘dark side’ of such strategic coupling processes (Coe and Hess, 2011). The previous section illustrated how Luxembourg’s economy-​driven policies of urban development are bound to the market ideology. City rankings, published regularly by private consultants (who in turn offer consultancy contracts to improve poor performance), are important control technologies for public actors within this setting. Rankings –​ however poorly designed –​have disciplining effects on public planning and impose financial compliance measures that can initiate change in urban development. The growing market imperative has also contributed to the new ways state and firms work (and plan) together. This is fittingly invoked by the imperative to create new ‘strategic partnerships’ between the state and the economy, and the introduction of a corresponding ‘new kind’ of ‘strategic diplomacy of economic development’ (Yeung, 2016):  the state facilitates developmental partnerships with the economy that equally suits both the public and the private. Niche policies and intensified strategic coupling processes are suggested strategies to invoke a ‘calibrated approach to strategic economic diplomacy’ (Yeung, 2016).

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Change in public policies to attract economic activity is hence echoed in the ways we can understand ‘change’ in urban planning (which has indeed morphed into urban development). Conceptions of power, that is, combinations of different modes of power like inscribed capacities and practices, are highly useful heuristics (Allen, 1997) to explain the mechanisms on which change in urban development and the significance of a group of new ‘technocratic’ actors build. If we assume that the FABS industry acts as boundary spanners that link highly specialised and high-​ranking cities with one another, we could define FABS as gatekeepers for Luxembourg as an IFC whose regional assets are invoked due to their deeply embedded functional division of labour with other financial centres (Dörry, 2015). In this sense, FABS firms generate power to achieve certain outcomes. They can mobilise resources like strategic knowledge and their technologies/​practices are the medium through which they exercise power. If, however, states, encouraged by the imperative of the market and fiscally disciplined by the financial market, increasingly act in concert with the economy as the calls for more strategic economic diplomacy suggest, then they can both exploit the complementarity of their technologies towards a harmonised collaboration between an entrepreneurial state and the FABS industry. The FABS economy further applies power as a technology (Allen, 1997). It exercises power via its situatedness towards one of the key technologies of financialisation, that is, land and property markets. Commercial real estate markets fit well into the ‘value’ extraction dynamics of financial capitalism and new urban economic development strategies. The reification and commodification of office property markets into tradable assets, and the development of prime locations in Luxembourg City has endowed the FABS industry with mechanisms that are both lucrative investments and a constant (re-) production base. Property is a crucial production factor for financial services industries. FABS firms do not only invest in but also occupy and rent these offices (Lizieri, 2009). Property development and building must be financed, and the cities’ prime locations need to be actively produced. These processes involve FABS firms such as property developers, banks and other financial institutions, as well as legal, tax and other advisories. Their power has shaped crucial parts of the urban landscapes, that is, commercial spaces, in line with their own needs and investment interests, thus transforming the built environments in IFCs based on the development of global capital market requirements.

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Strategic, that is, intentional, coupling processes can therefore serve as a frame to understand the observable power patterns that foster FABS’ ‘technocratic’ influence on urban development strategies and processes in Luxembourg. Both the state and FABS are highly interest-​driven and form a distinct managerial-​technological apparatus in which the state of Luxembourg positions itself as a successful ‘dealmaker’ (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012: 92). However, this myopic urban development strategy has deepened the country’s social divide and created new challenges in the realms of housing, welfare and development, for which the State will be held accountable, not the private planning technocracy.

Conclusion This chapter explored the role of a particular group of private actors, that is, the large group of finance and finance-​related industries increasingly able to exert influence on urban development policies. Their capacity to do so is not, however, based on the circumvention of existing regulations. Rather, it relies on their ability to actively re-​/​ write regulations, thus creating a somewhat different ‘market of public planning’. The FABS industry’s influence is particularly deeply rooted in such processes in global cities and financial centres that epitomise the contemporary financialised economy. Luxembourg as a ‘globalised micro-​metropolis’ (Hesse, 2016: 624) presents a somewhat distinct case. Its smallness in size is outclassed by its substantial international economic weight, which stems in turn from its international FABS economy and largely industry-​oriented planning policies that increasingly rely on the technical expertise that the FABS economy transmits to public bodies. Because the FABS sector is of strategic importance to Luxembourg’s economic model and to the small nation’s craving for international recognition, the government nurtures it by many means, first by setting up urban and regional policies that accommodate them. In turn –​and in the absence of a coherent national spatial planning strategy and a lacking planning culture –​the FABS industry has secured increasing influence over large-​ scale urban development projects in highly specialised economic areas. These are often located in or just outside Luxembourg City palpably confronted by urbanisation pressures. The characterising metaphor of ‘borrowed size’ has further indicated that Luxembourg’s urban development dynamics are shaped by two groups of private economy. On the one hand, national property developers enjoy state protected monopolies and have joined

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leading representatives of local communes to safeguard their access to land, thus preventing the state from successfully performing and enforcing sustainable spatial planning policies, but contributing to rapidly accelerating land price hikes, most noticeable in the country’s notoriously overheated housing market. On the other hand, international FABS businesses and their location choices mainly in and around Luxembourg City (where commercial tax is low/​est) contribute with their excessive demand  –​on which Luxembourg’s economic wellbeing relies disproportionally –​to similarly overheated office markets typical for ‘borrowed size’ urban development, which has sent Luxembourg up in diverse global city rankings. This chapter developed its argument on the example of Luxembourg and its specific settings. However, the FABS industry is a globally operating sector, and its economic activities are spread across the globe and located in cities which are home to firms’ headquarters, banks and other financial services, and public administration sites. Hence, a key question is to what extent these powerful actors of the globally operating FABS industry can pass on and implement their technocratic practices between those places. Further, to what extent are FABS firms forceful/​powerful enough to ‘homogenise’ technocratic policies through the ‘value’ of and demand for their economic activity? The locational tournament between rivalling European financial centres to attract finance and finance-​related business from London in times of a looming Brexit is in full swing and serves as an apt reminder that governments are well on their way to exploiting new technocratic technologies in urban development. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Antoine Decoville and Antoine Paccoud for valuable advice on an earlier draft of this chapter. Any errors, however, remain mine alone.

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10

Planning professionalism in the face of technocracy: ethics, values and practices Susannah Gunn

Each profession needs to find its own professional justification, and set among other built environment professions and interests discussed within this book, planning’s claim is founded largely on its statutory remit to utilise political systems, legal instruments and economic drivers to intervene in land and property development transactions, and mediate between different stakeholders and their competing goals to achieve better economic, environmental and social outcomes in the longer term. While others may disagree with this positive construction of planning, and separately argue that this role does not need to be organised in this way (Klosterman, 1985; Evans, 1993) and that planners’ activities and modes of operation do not equate to professionalism (Reade, 1987; Evans, 1993), nevertheless planning and planners retain the right and duty to plan, and planning’s justification for its intervention in development reflects similar rationales to its claims to professional status. This chapter presents research that was carried out in order to question the extent to which today’s planners and planning experts fulfil a key role that was at the root of public planning expertise since modern times of public-​led planning services: the role of ‘assisting in the protection of disadvantaged and marginalised groups’ (Parker and Doak, 2012: 19). According to the literature on professionalism (Freidson, 1994; Johnson, 1972; Laffin, 1986), this commitment to ‘altruistic public service’ (Campbell and Marshall, 2005: 192) is one of the four identifying characteristics of professions, which is also a defining principle of ‘selflessness’ set out in the Nolan Committee’s (1997) principles of public office, whereby ‘holders of public office should take decisions solely in terms of the public interest’ presented in Rydin’s (1998: 171) discussion of planning professionalism.

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While discussing these professional principles, the chapter questions the extent to which contemporary planning expertise is increasingly internalising neoliberal logics of interventions. Recent planning literature (Clifford and Tewdwr-​Jones, 2013; Knieling and Othengrafen, 2009) highlights that planning, alongside other state activities, is increasingly underpinned by a neoliberal rationalising of provision (Harvey, 2005) and has tracked the shift in planning’s thinking from a progressive agenda to a more neoliberal one (Reimer et  al, 2014; Waterhout et al, 2013). Instigated by a centralist government, the planning reforms in the UK (England in particular) have led this trend, focusing on delivery issues (Clifford and Tewdwr-​Jones, 2013) and more marketised logics of provision: performance targets (Clifford and Tewdwr Jones, 2013), client-​orientated (Harris and Thomas, 2011), marketised modes of operating (Raco, 2013b). These reforms have not engaged in discussions of planning professionalism, accepting the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) as a lobby group alongside, but not ahead of, others as it comments on its own discipline and profession. There has been less discussion of the professional ethics and values underpinning planning’s claim to operate. This chapter starts by presenting examples of how planning is currently being provided in councils to highlight how the planning service has become more commercialised through increasingly technocratic practices; it subsequently reflects what this means for planning’s professional credentials and right to intervene, to conclude that planning is becoming increasingly commodified. However, planning practitioners are not questioning their professionalism or their profession’s status. When set against the planning and professional academic literature’s concern for altruistic public service provision (Campbell and Marshall, 2005), this appears to be a narrowing down of planning’s and professionalism’s understanding of social concern that creates disquiet for those observing the direction of travel (Davoudi, 2016).

Examples of provision from practice This research at the base of this chapter, undertaken in 2016–​17 through interviewing public-​and private-​sector planners, identified a number of ways that public-​sector planning provision is being diversified (Table 10.1). These examples are not mutually exclusive. It is possible, and indeed likely, for a local authority (LA) to be commissioning out their own expertise while at the same time procuring consultancy or other

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Planning professionalism in the face of technocracy Table 10.1: Examples of public–​private provision of local authority planning service from practice (Anonymised for confidentiality purposes, but based on real practice gained through interviews with planning practitioners 2016–​17) Types of delivery arrangement

Description

Council service provided by commercial service provider

• A council decision to set up an agreement between local authority (client) and service provider (company) for the company to take over the whole service provision utilising local authority staff and augmenting it with its own • Entire planning service, but just one part of the whole service provision the council offers • Contractual agreement usually for about 20 years –​spells out service undertakings, delivery targets and working arrangements • Staff are drafted into commercial service provider’s workforce through Transfer of Undertakings Protection of Employment (TUPE) regulations • Staff work on council work and are available for consultancy work; company can martial workforce from elsewhere in company to work on aspects of council work

Consultancy planners seconded to local authority

• Junior consultant planner seconded to local authority to work on/​reduce DM backlog –​local authority gained some expertise through consultancy line-​management oversight; junior planner gained knowledge of council working though experience (Gunn and Vigar, 2012) • Senior consultancy planner seconded into local authority two days/​week to help manage production of the then-​new core strategy • This practice appears to be relatively rare and possibly time specific (2004–​10) • Possibly moved away from this model due to austerity, local authorities bring work in-​house, and exploring other options listed here, for exsample, sharing expertise

Zero-​hours agency working

• Similar model to supply-​teaching • Councils and/​or private sector can acquire suitable trained agency staff for planning work • Agents have planners on books as contract staff who can be made available for planning work –​to help with backlogs, assist on policy work, over the holiday period, to cover maternity leave and so on

Private sector acting as ‘critical friend’

Use of consultancy planners • to project manage delivery of local plans, ‘make things happen’ –​determining timelines, editing tasks –​to gain efficiencies, to challenge existing ‘prosaic’ culture, to encourage staff doing a good job in difficult circumstances • for quality assurance purposes –​for example, to assess independently the evidence ahead of submission to Inspectorate; CIL advice –​to ensure sufficiently robust/​ defensible

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Planning and Knowledge Table 10.1: (continued) Types of delivery arrangement

Description

Commissioned expert

• Particular pieces of work are routinely commissioned out, for example, Strategic Housing Market Assessment (to support plan’s housing policy) • Other projects, reports, discrete pieces of work –​ commissioned as one-​offs –​but public sector emphasised need for justification for expenditure • Commissioned experts to gain independent voice, different perspective to defend position at the point of challenge

Local authority keeping planning in-​house

• Local authorities where they could, would keep work in-​ house, not commission out • One interviewee thought that ‘the private sector was better [than the public sector] was a myth’ and damaging to staff and had taken initiatives to build staff confidence through award ceremonies and had recently won an RTPI award for an initiative • Public sector clear that they needed to be more commercial in their outlook: a number referred to zero-​cost/​cost neutral service provision in the current climate of austerity • A different interviewee commented she could ‘get DM to pay for itself all day, but could not find a way to make plan-​making cost effective’

Local authority planning section selling their own expertise

• Learning from the private sector, and the commercial service provider to the public sector, some local authorities are now exploring how they might sell their expertise • Local authorities are also seeking to employ a specialist (for example, EIA, design, conservation officer) part paid by commissioning out to neighbouring authorities • Some raised the possibility of selling services to consultancies as public sector service cost rates tend to be lower than private sector ones • One public sector planner saw value-​added gains for both the client and the LA in that reports would be to standard, not inadequate due to the commissioning of an expensive consultant for too short a time to do the work sufficiently well • This raises issues of ethical propriety –​circumnavigated through the suggested idea of LA employing two officers –​ one to be commissioned out; the other to do the council DM work/​application approvals

Public sector charging for service provision

• Charging fees to process applications is not new –​but there is a growth in reflecting on what other services can be charged and how returns can be increased • Pre-​application charging is increasingly common with one officer claiming ‘charging does away with the time-​wasters’ • Same planning service reviewed its ‘customer service’ in recent years to discover the shortcomings of their service from the multiple applicants’ perspective. One finding was ‘the difference in helpfulness of the advice’

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Planning professionalism in the face of technocracy Table 10.1: (continued) Types of delivery arrangement

Description • One-​stop shop style meetings –​with those responsible for different aspects of application (highways, environment and so on) all present to facilitate the applicant to a smooth application process –​both public and consultancy planners commended practice • Fast tracking: whereby authorities will allow customer to pay a premium to fast track their application through the system

Private sector taking the moral high ground

• One consultancy planner working primarily for housing and commercial developers to assist them in navigating the system commented on other consultancies’ practice of working for both ‘[He did] not know how other planning consultancies can provide the two-​faced service or working for both the private and public sector clients –​there must be overlap, leakage –​you can’t not know what you know’ –​though he did understand the principle of ‘Chinese walls’ • Different consultancy planner operated a small ‘ethical’ consultancy ‘interested in people, places then profit’ –​ • too small for public sector work and procurement procedures too arduous • smaller, more advocacy or issues-​based commissions Emphasised: sustainability, quality of places, wider social issues –​with ‘need’ being as ‘important as ‘demand’ Was a volunteer for Planning Aid and sometimes chose not to charge full rates

public-​sector assistance for a different piece of work, or working as a critical friend on something specific; or, commissioning-​in help to reduce development management (DM) workloads at a point where these need addressing.

General context of public-​sector planning activity The UK public sector is currently hard pressed in these austere times. LAs have already cut their budgets by about a third and are being required to cut them by a further third in the next few years. The current government believes that LAs, along with other service providers, need to operate more commercially, and is sanctioning a more business-​like attitude to service provision (DCLG, 2017b). Planning authorities are part of this wider service provision; in this instance, planning is not the target, just part of the crossfire. Public-​ sector planners are making difficult decisions; they need to justify their

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value to the organisation to repel cuts. Reductions in service are likely to have detrimental effects on the public they serve, and for managers, this equates quite literally to maintaining and protecting staff –​their colleagues –​to whom they feel an affinity and obligation. Finding more commercial ways of operating, it staves off cuts in service and staffing that are unquestionably being accepted by many professional planners. Planning service has emerged as an asset that can be commodified and sold, and this turn has provided planning with a potential market within which to sell its assets.

What does this mean for planning professionalism? None of those interviewed challenged the need for planning. However, their definitions of what it had become, with the exception of the small ethical consultancy planner, tended to focus on delivery –​of plans, DM, and of development itself.1 Some did identify strategic perceptions of planning for the wider borough and wider concerns of providing for future situations, and some tactical manoeuvring to gain development to achieve what planning gain was available through Section 106 agreements and the CIL (the UK’s two main mechanisms for securing betterment value gains) for the benefit of wider communities. Despite the emphasis focused on service provision for the benefit of business, there was little discussion about social equity or environmental custodianship. Second, despite criticising the professional body itself, none of the professional planners interviewed questioned the importance of planning’s professional standing or status as an activity or discipline. That said, there was a widespread perception that LAs’ attempts to defray the cost of planners’ membership fees by requiring them to pay them themselves was disincentivising planners from joining the professional body; and in so doing, these planners were almost accidentally not becoming ‘professional’, which, by extension, potentially deprofessionalises public-​ sector planning. Nevertheless, personal membership was thought to be important, not just for career advancement purposes, but also in relation to operating autonomously and expertly within planning’s situated judgement space (Campbell and Marshall, 2002), and with a certain level of expectation that the planner would operate and behave in a professional, ethical way –​honestly, transparently, with propriety, in the clients’ interest. So, the examples of current practice outlined in this chapter demonstrate a growing acceptance of operating practices that utilise increasingly commercialised technocratic modes of activity to safeguard some provision of service for the wider public.

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A tension, however, is emerging between the best interests of the public that councils are bound to serve, wider societal concerns including the environment and social wellbeing, and the interests of a business client who has paid, possibly at a premium, for an efficient, effective service. The business sector has led the criticisms of planning, generating the continuing planning system reforms, framing their concerns economically (CBI, 2015; HBF, 2017). Responding in kind, the RTPI has sought to demonstrate planning’s economic value (Lord et al, 2015), challenged by Davoudi (2016) on the wisdom of framing planning’s worth economically when much of it lies in the qualitative fuzziness and intangible benefits of improved societal and environmental wellbeing, not reflected in its economic value. Moreover, within the business sector, companies do not necessarily accept the notion that they should provide additional benefits alongside their product. One consultancy planner working primarily for housebuilders suggested that their provision of market housing served the public interest; and that, while council planners might be identifying a need for bungalows for an ageing population in their plan evidence and policy preference, it was not currently commercially viable (sufficiently profitable) for housebuilders to build these; when it became so, housebuilders would provide them. This illustrates the narrowing space for mediating positive outcomes even when development interest has proactively been achieved, created through this commodification of delivery. These examples also appear to diminish planning’s ability, and indeed desire, to operate according to academic planning literature’s prevailing emphasis on benign intervention processes, interactions and outcomes mediated through enlightened, informed progressive planners highlighted by this literature to justify planning’s intervention (Bruton, 1984; Hall, 2013b; Forester, 1999; Friedmann, 2000; Healey, 1997), and to underpin its claims of professionalism (Rydin, 1998; Campbell and Marshall, 2005). They reflect a utilitarian acceptance of the inevitable, both in the understanding of service delivery and in what is achievable. They accept working with inequitable power, which has probably always been evident (Klosterman, 1985; Flyberg and Richardson, 2002), as a given, retaining the status quo to the primary gain of the already established. Inevitably, this further marginalises the already disadvantaged and disenfranchised. So, the new emphasis of technocratic commercialism, performance and delivery further diminishes the space for creative dissent, identified by many as necessary to reduce regressive planning (Yiftachel, 1998; Healey and Hillier, 1995; Sandercock, 2000).

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To protect service provision, including planning, councils are adopting new profitable practices which become increasingly self-​serving in their outlook, in contravention of the Nolan Committee’s (1997) principle of selflessness and Campbell and Marshall’s (2002) altruistic public service. The examples demonstrate a growing concern about the profitability of service provision; how and where officers could potentially maximise return, where they might gain assets through the quick turnaround of permissions, perhaps with less regard for the quality of decision-​ making. However, among the planners interviewed, most saw this as a way of retaining expertise and strengthening their service provision, not diminishing it. That said, one planner was very conscious of the potential profitability of DM over plan-​production, and was not entirely accepting of plan-​ production’s inability to self-​fund. While not evident in this council’s arrangements, if planning or aspects thereof can be made profitable, then it can support other services, and the emphasis could shift from what is desirable in public-​service terms to what is profitable and/​or necessary in commercial terms. The pressure is on these services to be zero-​cost, with a new emphasis on commissioning-​out expertise. Potentially, this will benefit profitable elements of the service through increased recruitment, while other less profitable parts may have to manage with the constrained personnel they have. I am not aware of a case where this is actually happening among the examples I explored. In the commercial service-​provider–​council example, the emphasis has already shifted to what is profitable and selling out services; first, for the benefit of the company, second, for that of the client (that is, the council), and third, for that of the public that the council serves –​ although the contractual agreement between the company and the council represents service provision to that public. The service-​delivery model has shifted from one of meeting the public’s needs as its primary role to meeting their needs as an important by-​product of service provision. In the social-​care world, this has resulted in minimised house-​visits, task-​orientated delivery of the service achieved within tight timeframes that reduce the ability of the carer to engage with the recipient, provided by agency workers often only paid for the time they are attending, not for the time between visits. We have yet to discover what it means for planning, although the recent Grenfell Tower disaster may be instructive here (Rawlinson and Summers, 2017). Planning’s justification for intervention and professionalism also rests on its ethical standing. Much of the academic literature attaches planning’s professional ethics to the discussion of social and

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environmental concerns:  Campbell (2002); Campbell and Marshall (2002) with regard to planners’ situated judgement reflecting their wider professional values; Howe (1980; 1994) in relation to the ethical choices which planners make through the roles they adopt; and Hendler (2005) on more inclusive professional codes of practice. However, the examples and the interviews have largely reduced ethics to issues of propriety, honesty, transparency and client interest. In relation to client interest, one of the planners was very clear that he represented his client’s development interests and it was up to him to navigate the client through the planning system and to represent his client’s concerns robustly to achieve the best development outcome he could. This was primarily in relation to profitability, although he acknowledged the importance of a quality development, noting it was in his client’s reputational interest to deliver a high-​quality development. However, he did not acknowledge wider concerns for public interest as part of his or his client’s remit, challenging the premise that developers should be in any way responsible for wider societal goods than those relating specifically to its development. The concern of ‘conflict of interest’ emerged repeatedly as planners contended with the issues of propriety in relation to the commissioning of expertise. This was originally a concern for consultancies but, with more technocratic approaches to service on offer, it is also becoming a public-​sector issue. One consultant not working with the public sector wondered how others ‘could not know what they knew’. For those providing these services, most adopted law firms’ ethical rationales and operating models to ensure propriety designed to keep opposing parties apart; though this may be easier to administer effectively in law firms than in planning departments and consultancies. Most interviewees discussed ‘Chinese walls’, which were effectively protocols to ensure separation between potentially interested parties. One private-​sector planner’s firm would not work on any other cases in a council area if he was working for the council. Another was willing to determine what evidence was needed, who could provide it, evaluate the quality of it, but drew the line at policy-​ writing –​which he saw as writing the plan. As the public sector enters the realms of commissioning-​out, they too are needing to address issues of propriety, and here one planner surmised that they would need to employ two experts, one to work for the council, the other for the client; he talked of having a trust company to deliver this service to make a clear distinction between council and commissioned work. However, as the public sector becomes more

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immersed in commissioned work, I  can imagine the challenges to contain conflicts of interest are likely to become more complicated.

Conclusion This chapter showed how planning is adopting new understandings of planning professionalism, discussing the implication of a commercialised planning service for a technocratic logic. Neoliberalism introduced marketised provision; NPM focused on delivery. The current context of austere times and emphasis on ‘cost-​neutral’ services requires providers to become increasingly commercially savvy, and technocratic modes of operating and practice appear to be the answer. Planning practitioners accept their professional status as a given, but are enacting this understanding in narrower, more commercialised terms, by reducing the ethical remit to ones of propriety, transparency, honesty and client interest, coincidentally reducing the space to engage with issues of environmental concern or social equity. In doing so, they are unintentionally undermining their profession’s claim to benefit the marginalised and disadvantaged, argued as a fundamental characteristic of planning and professionalism in the literature.2 If true, this raises questions about whether operating practices are becoming unprofessional, and whether the nature of the profession itself is structurally changing, conveying new values of professionalism. Currently, there is a growing sense of social malaise and disenfranchisement within society. Planning is a potential leveller  –​a space where more equitably advantageous outcomes might be brokered. However, if it too shifts to more technocratic understandings of provision, then it is likely that situations that could have been alleviated will be exacerbated. Planning is for the long term; we are currently building the places of tomorrow, derived from today’s preoccupations and operating methods. If planning provision becomes overly commodified, we are in danger of creating marketable development for those who can afford it, at the expense of wider societal benefits for those that need it. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Mike Raco and Federico Savini for including me in this project, and the symposium delegates for comments on an early draft. I would also like to thank Ben Clifford, Andy Inch, Malcolm Tate and Geoff Vigar who assisted in formulating these ideas.

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Notes 1 This research focused on service delivery, rather than substantive matters, and this was the focus of my questioning, which was explained at the outset as part of my research interest; but I did ask questions about their understanding of ‘planning’ and ‘professionalism’ early to try to prevent the responses from being too directed by the orientation of the other questions posed. 2 The RTPI are very clear about the importance of their ethical remit to uphold ‘the public interest’.

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PART IV

Private consultants and the delivery of public policy

11

Professional lobbying in urban planning: depoliticisation or REpoliticisation? Aino Hirvola and Raine Mäntysalo

Introduction Lobbying has become a widespread international phenomenon affecting urban policymaking. It is becoming increasingly privatised and professionalised, a service at the disposal of stakeholders who can afford it. As we exemplify in this chapter, the role of lobbying has become crucial even for counter-movements, in order for them to have an impact on public development policies. This chapter argues that professional lobbying is turning out to be an important factor in the de- and re-politicisation processes of urban development. We describe the phenomenon of professional lobbying in urban planning in general terms. We draw on public affairs studies, outlining the broad spectrum of tasks of the lobbyist and identifying certain strategies and tactics of lobbying. To question the technocratic logics of contemporary urban governance, we ask:  what does the professionalisation of lobbying mean, and how does it affect the planning process and the related decision-​making process? We focus empirically on the Finnish context and especially on Helsinki. The empirical research, semi-​structured interviews with five politicians (members of the Helsinki city council) and six public affairs consultants, was conducted during 2017. The interviewees represented a range of political backgrounds. The case concerns the initiative to establish the Guggenheim Museum in Helsinki, promoted by a public affairs agency. Thereafter, we examine the potential of professional lobbying to politicise the urban planning process. Politicisation has become a central theme in the theoretical planning discussion following the rise of an agonistic approach, in which ‘making political’ is considered a source of legitimacy for public planning (see for example, Hillier, 2003; Mouat

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et  al, 2013; Mäntysalo et  al, 2011; Pløger, 2004, see also Mouffe, 2005; 2013; Rancière, 2010.) In this chapter, we reflect on the possible implications of professional lobbying to the broad political processes of making decisions on specific plans. There are a variety of ways in which planning can become politicised, and we try to highlight several of them. This is imperative, since –​as we argue in the concluding section  –​politicisation does not necessarily make decision-​making more legitimate, nor is it some sort of an end point. Rather, identifying politicisation and the variety of forms it may take represents a starting point.

Professional lobbying Lobbying itself is not a new phenomenon: anyone seeking to influence political decision-​makers can be considered a lobbyist. Indeed, lobbying is in essence about persuading, convincing someone of a certain point of view –​with the intention of changing their mind, if necessary –​by providing arguments relevant to the desired outcome. While anyone can lobby, Godwin et  al (2013) reserve the term ‘lobbyist’ for those non-​government actors who earn their living by attempting to influence public policy. Jaatinen (1999:  17–​22) defines lobbying as the act of influencing political decision-​making by communicating with the political decision-​makers and officials, competitors, the mass media, citizens and stakeholders; generally, all the groups relevant to the political process of a certain issue. In the urban planning context, Hillier (2000) recognises the efficiency of influencing through informal networks, often interpersonal contacts with key decision-​makers. She anticipates the formal ‘reasoned’ public participation processes to be followed only by those with no or low capacities of informal influence over decision-​makers, whereas those with resources and capacities are likely to turn to informal means of influencing (Hillier, 2000: 38–44). The efficiency of informal influencing is widely recognised. In fact, it is so expedient that it has become a blossoming industry. Professional lobbying in this context refers to public affairs consultancy with a focus on political advocacy services. Public affairs agencies provide their services on a contract basis to companies, associations, or other possible clients in order to help them monitor and alter the political-​legal environment in which they operate. A public affairs consultant –​a contract lobbyist  –​helps the client to create favourable framework conditions. Thus, the public affairs consultant is an expert when it comes to political processes, communications and influence (Jaatinen,

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1999). They have often well-​established personal networks based on their former careers in politics (Kantola and Lounasmeri, 2014). This was also the case with most lobbyists interviewed in this study. These links to the media and across the political party spectrum are highly valued within the industry (Kantola and Lounasmeri, 2014: 9; Kantola, 2016: 37, 43). Lobbying is a process of constantly mapping the given political situation and proceeding systematically towards the objective, as well as reacting and responding to unexpected situations. The UK Lobbying Register states that ‘modern lobbyists help their clients and employers understand legislative and political processes and create ethical and achievable objectives’.1 Consequently, lobbying is very much about explaining the procedure and the system to the client. It is also about delivering information:  the lobbyist can facilitate a two-​way flow of information between the policymakers and the business actors. However, it is important to emphasise here that professional lobbying is a for-​profit activity: the professional lobbyists earn their income by establishing influence on behalf of their clients, or rather –​and this characterises Finnish professional lobbying –​the business is to help the clients themselves promote their own issues. As one of these agencies explained, ‘we help our clients make their voices heard by the people who need to hear them’.2 Drutman (2015), who has investigated corporate lobbying at the national level in the US, has identified a wide range of tactics and approaches utilised by the lobbyists. The circumstances in Washington, DC, can hardly be compared to those in Finland –​the major difference being the scale of the lobbying phenomenon –​yet some of Drutman’s insights are applicable also in the Finnish context. According to him, some of the most common approaches include:  establishing direct contact with politicians, monitoring developments closely, identifying allies who might serve as ‘champions’ to your cause, presenting research results or technical information, and talking to members of the media (Drutman, 2015: 80–​1; see also Jaatinen, 1999). In addition, Jaatinen (1999, 120) mentions media relations as another means of moulding public opinion. While no single approach suits all situations, there is an optimal mix of tactics for each case (Drutman, 2015: 81). Jaatinen, who has developed a model of effective lobbying, focuses on these varying situations when identifying different lobbying strategies. According to Jaatinen, the strategy depends primarily on the circumstances: the stance of the decision-​makers on the issue at hand, the opinions of the media and the citizens, and the possible competing views and the political resources behind them. These contingency

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factors, as Jaatinen calls them, determine the strategy and eventually the tactics. The strategy may aim at, for example, strengthening and maintaining current support among politicians. If the decision-​maker remains neutral towards the issue, an appeal to a positive citizen opinion may prove necessary. If public opinion appears to be negative, the lobbyist may refrain from introducing the issue to the public at large. These are just examples, but the situations in reality often tend to be more complex (Jaatinen, 1999: 110–​33). Some strategies and tactics may lead inevitably to politicisation. For example, appealing to public opinion or the opinions of the constituents, while referring to their democratic right to decide on matters concerning them, may spark a political debate. In Finland, during the past 15 years, the industry has expanded from an ancillary service of communications agencies to an independent industry. Its significance has increased, following the previous development in other Western European countries and the United States. The number of professionals in the industry has grown remarkably in Finland (Kantola and Lounasmeri, 2014: 4–​5; Kantola, 2016: 37). The scale of the business is still rather small, consisting of 50–​100 professionals, depending on the calculation method. Some professionals work in agencies operating purely in the field of political advocacy; some operate in public affairs units in communications, advertising and PR agencies; and some are self-​employed entrepreneurs. As such, this relatively young industry sector is constantly evolving (Kantola and Lounasmeri, 2014: 5–​6). Traditionally, in Finland, lobbying has been conducted most actively and extensively by employers’ and employees’ trade organisations, business interest groups and non-​governmental organisations (NGOs). Thus, the term professional lobbyist is often utilised when referring to those working directly for these organisations. The categorisation of lobbyists by their employer provides clarity in this respect: those working directly for the organisation they represent are internal (or in-​house) lobbyists, whereas those who work for a lobbying firm can be called external (or contract) lobbyists (Godwin et al, 2013: see also Drutman, 2015). In-​house lobbying is not the focus of this chapter. However, reviewing the tradition of this form of lobbying is helpful in understanding the new field of public affairs in Finland and subsequent attitudes towards it. Kantola (2016) also mentions trade unions and business interest groups as those with a privileged access to policy advocacy through authoritative boards, committees and councils. However, today this channel to political advocacy has lost some of its relevance, allowing new forms of policy advocacy and lobbying

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to emerge (Kantola, 2016). In addition, our empirical data indicates that the lobbying business is driven by the differentiation of lobbying needs: different actors have different needs with organisations finding fewer and fewer shared interests to be promoted. Moreover, Kantola and Lounasmeri (2014: 14) identify this as a key factor leading to the practice of hired lobbyists. In Finland, this long tradition of lobbying –​with its advantages and disadvantages –​has contributed to shaping the present Finnish culture of professional lobbying, in which political advocacy, negotiation, delivering information and influencing are central. In her research, Kantola describes the creation and legitimisation of the new profession, which is more or less related to ‘the dark politics of the past’, the period during the 1960s and 1970s when Finland was rapidly urbanising and –​some say –​run by a small and closed circle of interconnected elites (Kantola, 2016:  38–​9). In the field of urban planning and development, major property development and construction companies as well as financial institutions developed closed, corporatist relations with both the local and national governments. Consequently, mutual agreements via handshakes and shadowy deals in backrooms outside of standard parliamentary procedure were not alien entities in zoning and the authorisation procedure related to it (see for example, Klami, 1982; Hankonen, 1994; Laine and Peltonen, 2003; Mäntysalo, 2008). Conditions have since improved due to changes in legislation and the introduction of EU directives on public procurement after Finland’s entry into the EU in 1995, but also due to certain corruption scandals being revealed and brought to court (for example, Laine and Peltonen, 2003:  428; Mäntysalo, 2008). According to Laine and Peltonen (2003:  428–​9), the most influential catalyst for this change was the media becoming more independent and politically autonomous. Internationally, the professionalisation of lobbying and the related increase in its regulation has led to the tightening up of these practices. The industry’s self-​regulation appears to be working: lobbying agencies are undergoing various transparency, data protection, quality management and legal and financial compliance audits (Joos, 2016: 106–​7). In Finland, however, zoning decisions and the authorisation procedure related to it are still considered to be one of the corruption-​ prone areas in the interaction between local government and the business community (Salminen et al, 2012: 181; Peurala and Muttilainen, 2015: 29, 34–37). The land use planning system in Finland is formally planning-​led, with municipalities having a so-​ called planning monopoly within their administrative boundaries.

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Nevertheless, the Finnish Land Use and Building Act (1999/​132) still provides certain legal instruments for development-​led planning practices, such as public–​private land use agreement and the potential for private land-​owners to apply for deviation from ratified plans (Valtonen et  al, 2017). These legal instruments enable planning processes that are formally authorised by local governments but are still, in practice, led by certain powerful developers, often large property development and construction companies and their consortia with other investors. Development-​led planning is common especially in small municipalities where planning resources are scarce (Puustinen et al, 2013), the municipal economy is faltering, and local politicians have close relations with the major land-​owners; however, it is also present in cities that lack municipally owned land property and proper land policy. Such planning is often conducted by making land use agreements on a handshake basis (Julkisen ja yksityisen…, 2008) with certain selected private landowner-​developers, to offer a framework of planning and development goals for the later municipality-​led detailed planning procedures with participatory measures (Mäntysalo and Saglie, 2010). Moreover, privately initiated deviations on detailed plans have become increasingly common (Staffans et al, 2015). Since the risk of structural corruption is linked to the construction industry and zoning, urban planning-​related lobbying makes people cautious. The illegal means of influencing in past years along with those current practices at the margins of legality have cast a shadow over lobbying in planning today. However, history provides not only some concern but also justification for the development of the public affairs profession: the dialogue between business and politics has thinned, and therefore a new (corruption-​free) platform for dialogue is necessary. A central customer group of professional lobbying are thus business managers who, by means of focusing on their core business, have become more distanced from politics. (Kantola, 2016:  41; Kantola and Lounasmeri, 2014: 13). This observation is supported by one of our interviewees: The circulation from business world to politics and vice versa has decreased. The career paths of politicians and business managers are stuck in silos. This has to do with the economic situation and outsourcing too: the enterprises don’t have money to hire ex-​politicians for communications managers or directors of public affairs or such, to work as in-​house lobbyists. (Interview:  Public affairs consultant, 21 June 2017)

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In addition, there is an increasing number of international companies entering local markets, and they are not familiar with the local planning decision-​making process. They need advisory services. Moreover, compared to earlier decades, the focus in planning is increasingly on densification and in-​fill development. This means greater competition over available building sites. The neutrality associated with the ethos of the planner profession –​ public planner as a defender of the public interest (see for example, Puustinen, 2006: 165, 168) –​makes it difficult to form a conceptual link between lobbying and planning. According to Puustinen, the assumption of a planner’s neutrality is related to both his/​her role as a representative of public authority and his/​her expertise (Puustinen, 2006: 165, 168). This raises the question –​can this assumed neutrality survive lobbying? And then again, the planning process is not only an administrative, expert-​led process but also a political, democratic process. Should planning therefore be politicised more often in order to become more democratic?

Reflecting on professional lobbying in planning Next, we reflect on some possible implications of the increase in professional lobbying on urban space and the planning process. In general, the research on lobbying has faced the problem of identifying the influence of lobbying, since influence can be defined and measured in many different ways (see, for example, Bernhagen et  al, 2014; Lowery, 2013; Drutman, 2015). Whether influence occurs, goals are achieved, and lobbying can be regarded as successful depends on how influence is defined in the first place (Bernhagen et  al, 2014). For example, simply increasing the awareness of the issue among politicians can already be considered as influence. Assessing the influence of lobbying is also challenging since, as Lowery pinpoints, the research on lobbying rarely addresses what might have happened in the absence of lobbying (Lowery, 2013). Based on our empirical data, professional lobbying does occur in Helsinki municipal level politics, and planning is not free from it. In this respect, there appears to be both a direct and indirect influence on policymaking. Thus, lobbying may influence the voting behaviour of local politicians in certain cases. On the other hand, it may provide politicians with new ideas, new sources of information, or new ways of interacting. For instance, when asked if professional lobbying does have an influence, one interviewee stated:  ‘Certainly it does. Absolutely. Both on the prominent politicians in this city and those

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independent voices that are easiest to persuade’ (Interview: Politician, 15 February 2017). In turn, another interviewee observed: People think that manipulating other people is easy. That’s why they disapprove of trying it. That’s why lobbying has a rather bad reputation. Yet it’s so damn difficult to manipulate people, and therefore succeeding in lobbying is so unpredictable –​many overestimate the influence of lobbying. Rather than having much to do with manipulation, lobbying could have a lot to do with facilitating the interaction. (Interview:  Public affairs consultant, 5 June 2017) How does professional lobbying interfere with planning-​related decision-​making in general, not just in single cases? And what are the possible consequences of the phenomenon becoming more common? Drutman (2015) addresses the many ways in which lobbying activity shapes the policymaking environment. According to him, lobbying begets lobbying. When lobbying increases, the more corporate managers learn to value political engagement, and the more they are willing to spend money on lobbying. And once they start purchasing lobbying services, they rarely give up on it. This leads to a competitive lobbying environment in which all companies are seeking to promote their own narrow interest, instead of one that would be common to the whole business sector. This differentiation development is referred to in the previous section. As the lobbying industry becomes more extensive and professional, the more proactive and particularistic it gets. This change is part of the shift from in-​house lobbyism to professional (contract) lobbyism. It means that over time there will likely be more actors at the negotiating table, making it more difficult to implement any major policy change: the decisions become more complicated and incremental with more side bargains (Drutman, 2015: 166–​7, 217–​20). Considering that lobbying can escalate resulting in a more competitive environment, it seems reasonable to presume that lobbying in the future may become an essential factor in proceeding with a private planning initiative. One of our interviewees, a politician, wondered if the services of lobbying agencies are purchased only when a project gets bogged down for some reason in the authorisation procedure. He also acknowledges  –​though reluctantly  –​that every once in a while, a single private actor can give it a try and ‘goes for a fishing expedition’ on a certain development case. And, consequently, the case

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actually proceeds even if it is not totally in line with the city strategy. What really concerns him is whether this practice might become commonplace. He states: The City of Helsinki treats all the actors equally  –​this has to do with the accountability and attractiveness of the city too –​however, if this situation can now be eroded by public affairs consultancy and money, we will lose what is good and characteristically Nordic. And then other cities are much more interesting than this one. And over time, we reach the situation in which no project will proceed without public affairs consultancy. (Interview: Member of Helsinki City Council, 15 February 2017) Furthermore, when lobbying becomes more commonplace, it becomes a factor in pushing the planning-​led practice towards the developer-​led, increasingly utilising privately initiated land-​use agreements and deviations on plans. This can happen also in cities that have had firmly planning-​led policies, such as Helsinki. Thus, it is difficult to surmise how these lobbying services would even be a consideration if there were no intentions of bypassing the normal planning procedure or overriding the city master plan or detailed plan. While we have so far focused on concerns, many of our interviewees also emphasised the benefits realised by professional lobbyism. Lobbyists are able to provide politicians with new sources of information and enable politicians and developers to have a new platform for interaction. Although not free of controversy, these aspects may actually smoothen the development of the city. In addition, professional lobbying may in fact help generate more initiatives to the city’s political agenda. In general, a variety of ideas is a positive thing. More action in this regard can eventually lead to more development in the city. (Of course, one may question if more development is desirable.) Yet again, this raises the concern of whose initiatives are included and whose are excluded from the agenda. Not all the actors have the same resources to make their voices heard. Although there seems to be no statistically significant correlation between political resources and the likelihood of success in lobbying, this does not mean that lobbying is without influence. Rather, it implies that the influence is unpredictable (Drutman, 2015: 219). In a competitive lobbying environment, which may eventually come to Helsinki as well, no one wants to risk being excluded, yet this may be

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the fate of those with few or no resources. As Hillier (2000: 38–​44) anticipates, they will have to settle for the formal public participation processes in order to influence policymakers.

The initiative to build a Guggenheim museum in Helsinki One example of a high-​profile development project, where the services of a professional lobbying agency were employed, was the initiative to build a Guggenheim museum in Helsinki’s South Harbour. The Guggenheim Helsinki project had been a subject of intense scrutiny since the proposal was made in 2011. The City of Helsinki had commissioned the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to undertake a feasibility study on the possibility of building the museum in Finland. The resulting concept and development study was presented in January 2012. The Helsinki City Board, however, rejected the first development proposal by a vote of eight to seven. Thereafter, a new proposal was soon introduced, located this time at the harbour bay opposite to the earlier planned location. The revised proposal also included changes in the financial model, and it emphasised the networking with Finnish institutions and artists. In addition, the museum’s annual revenue estimations had been increased by 4 per cent while the cost estimates had decreased by nearly 10 per cent. In early 2014, the Helsinki City Board decided to reserve a site for the museum, and the Guggenheim foundation arranged an open architectural competition for it. The enthusiasm for the museum project received a boost, and establishing the Guggenheim museum was seen as a way of making Helsinki an internationally known cultural capital. The competition, which began in June 2014, generated more than 1,700 submissions from more than 77 countries, and was finally won by Moreau Kusunoki Architects. In 2016, the City of Helsinki and the Guggenheim Helsinki Supporting Foundation (established in 2014) prepared a new proposal based on the winning entry. The City Board accepted this proposal, which was further adjusted with regard to the financing. However, in November 2016, after a five-​hour debate, the 85-​member City Council voted down the proposal by a vote of 53 to 32  –​with no abstentions. The controversial development proposal was thus rejected –​at least for the time being.3 The museum proposal generated intense public debates among the local politicians but also among cultural activists and citizens. The relevance of a foreign foundation in the Helsinki art scene was much discussed and the funding of the project certainly caused debate. However, there were also some objections to the role of the public

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affairs agency, which was responsible for building close relationships with key local politicians and policymakers, systematic public image building, and the active use of media. In spring 2013, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation had appointed a Finnish public affairs agency, the Miltton Group, as its communications partner in Finland, with the assignment to cover corporate, media and public affairs communications.4 With input from the Miltton Group, the revised proposal in 2014 included a plan to arrange a series of discussions, called ‘Guggenheim Helsinki Live’, to be held to engage the public. Closer interaction with the public was pursued through forums that included, for example, a panel discussion and an on-​site presence from the Guggenheim Foundation for one-​on-​one conversations and workshops. It was emphasised in the proposal that all sectors of Finnish society should be heard.5 These additions to the plan proposal reflect the strategies and tactics of lobbying described by, for example, Jaatinen (1999: 110–​31). The museum proposal also stimulated counter proposals by artists and their associations. Another contemporary art organisation, Checkpoint Helsinki, was established in 2013 by Helsinki-​based artists, curators and cultural workers. The idea of this organisation originates from the public debate over the Guggenheim museum, and the associated, exceptionally large, investment in art that the city of Helsinki was about to make. Money –​although hypothetical –​created a framework for visioning, and the argument on the necessity of Guggenheim in building an international reputation for Helsinki worked as a provocation and mobilised the Helsinki art scene. Tellervo Kalleinen, artist and a board member of Checkpoint Helsinki, recalls: ‘Checkpoint Helsinki was born in a moment where the political imagination was open to envisioning the economic and cultural benefits of making a grand investment in the arts.’6 Checkpoint Helsinki sought to build an alternative model. It aimed to provide different visions for the art scene and to distinguish itself from Guggenheim in several ways: the organisation emphasised the collaboration with local organisations such as galleries, schools and libraries. The alternative nature of Checkpoint Helsinki was underlined by stating that no fixed venue was needed for art productions but that they would rather use spaces like streets or the internet.6 The organisation also arranged an international competition ‘Next Helsinki’ in 2014 and invited architects, urbanists, artists and environmentalists to imagine how Helsinki and particularly the proposed Guggenheim museum site could best benefit residents and visitors. The project stated that it was launched as an alternative to the Guggenheim Helsinki project.7

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Both the campaigning for and the resistance to the Guggenheim museum was so strong that many different alternatives were examined, concerning, as mentioned, the financing of the museum, the site, and alternative uses for the proposed site. Both the supporters and the opponents undertook extensive campaigns in order to achieve their goal. The supporters’ arguments, adopted largely by Finnish business groups, referred to, for example, global visibility –​the Bilbao-​effect –​ while the opponents were concerned with the cost in the midst of an economic recession and criticised the fact that the initiative was made by an American foundation instead of a Finnish body. The public debate, accelerated by the lobbying, became highly politicised, and the arguments raised were echoed by a number of local councillors in the City Council meeting where the final debate and voting took place.

Reflecting on lobbying and politicisation Professional lobbying today influences political processes in many and often contradicting ways. Some lobbying actions are very clearly oriented to ‘sell’ strategies of urban development to public actors, while others may instead ambiguously operate to advocate for a more diverse set of interests in spatial policies. The extent to which lobbying perpetuates a technocratic logic of public decision-​making depends on factors that affect the political legitimacy of planning decisions. A planning case can become politicised for many reasons. First, planning decisions are political by nature: a political decision by the city council is needed in most cases. Second, the media engender public discussion. As previously noted, managing publicity, whether aiming at increasing it or avoiding it, can be part of the lobbying strategy. Lobbying can purposefully aim at politicising the planning case via publicity, if politicisation serves the goal of lobbying (Jaatinen, 1999: 110–​33). Sometimes, politicisation may occur unintentionally, damaging the ultimate goal of lobbying. The media is inherently unpredictable. It may take a position in favour of a certain idea, project, or solution, and promote it via public opinion formation. However, the independent media may also take a neutral or opposing position. Although media publicity may be unpredictable, the use of media is far from random. Messages are carefully crafted to ensure that the media, and consequently others, see the issue at hand from a particular point of view. This spinning is part of lobbying. Whether it succeeds or not, public discussion can be expected. Although professional lobbying may help generate more initiatives, this may not automatically contribute to politicisation. An actor who

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purchases lobbying services potentially purchases access to a variety of connections as well as ideas and solutions of several experts (Drutman, 2015: 164). No matter which strategy the lobbyist chooses with regards to publicity, good ideas and interesting plans tend to draw attention. The politics in Helsinki is characterised by a limited number of political representatives actively participating in decision-​making. Most decisions on local plans do not arouse political passions. Sometimes, however, a certain issue does mobilise citizens and politicians: Suddenly the whole City Council wakes up. And all the members of the [city planning] committee, they are all –​ as it’s typical of politics –​flattered: ‘I am in the middle of something that is on everyone’s lips. Something that the media takes a strong interest in, as well as colleagues and other associates.’ However, the media and the citizens’ interest may give too much weight to the issue, overstating its importance. (Interview:  Member of Helsinki City Council, 15 February 2017) Hectic media publicity and public debates in various forums on the planning issue may receive a decisive role in shaping the minds of the local politicians. The situation may increase the local politicians’ awareness and deliberation on the issue. However, it may also serve as a backdrop for their opportunistic self-​profiling in the media spotlight. This kind of populism increases unpredictability and decreases accountability in planning politics. Then again, there is a possibility that politicisation leads to debates over values when making decisions on planning issues. However, in equal measure, the debates may become extremely simplified and devoid of meaning. Sometimes the political debate may become totally unattached to the planning issue and the decision at hand. The planning case then becomes a tool in a political game of seeking ‘quick wins’. This kind of shallow mirroring between political adversaries might eventually fragment the very foundation of political activity (Luhmann, 1990: 43; Mäntysalo, 2000: 253, 267). In addition, the normalisation of deviation applications from ratified plans seems to create a market niche for lobbying. With initiating deviations on plans in particular, ‘making political’ may mean repoliticising earlier planning decisions that have been arrived at through due political and legitimate processes. ‘Making political’ would then mean making the politics of planning more ad hoc, reversing decisions, which indeed is a legitimacy problem, too. Political life has an inherent tendency towards short-​sightedness that follows from the rhythm of

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elections and from its dependency on the publicity of the moody masses and social media (see Luhmann, 1990; Möttönen, 1997). Professional lobbyists may powerfully tap into this dependency by mobilising publicity on the project proposals that they advance. However, if the politics of planning were to openly give in to political struggles on every proposal to deviate from its earlier decisions, it would lose its legitimacy, since such politics would appear as incapable of advancing any long-​term political goals. In the Guggenheim museum initiative, there were different sorts of politicisation in just one planning case. A brief review of the case demonstrates at least the following:  the repoliticisation of earlier planning decisions by reopening the development case again and again, media mobilisation, heated public discussion, populism and value debates. In addition to these, the Guggenheim case, with the changing project proposals, heavy lobbying and public debates, stimulated several counter proposals, such as Checkpoint Helsinki. Passionate actors, dedicated to their issue, tend to attract opponents, and this tension is likely to generate counter-​proposals. From this particular case it appears that professional lobbying, when incorporated into a democratic planning process may enhance a kind of politicisation that stimulates an intensive search for and careful examination of completely new planning alternatives. On the other hand, it is important to consider the implications that a professionalised and privatised lobbying practice may have for the institutionalisation of technocratic logics of policymaking. Professional lobbying may symptomise a competitive approach to decision-​making that is prone to power structures and economic inequalities, where only knowledge that can be ‘lobbied for’ gets transmitted to public policymaking processes. Nonetheless, neither professional lobbying nor the politicisation it may generate invariably enhances democracy and legitimacy. It is instead the way processes of public and private hearings, consultations and public–​private partnerships are arranged that need to be taken into account. Through professional lobbying issues may be ‘made political’, but then we need to ask what kind of ‘political’ and whose interests are thereby promoted. Notes 1 Professional Lobbying –​Introducing the UK Lobbying Register. Available at the UK Lobbying register website: www.lobbying-​register.uk/​. 2 The website of public affairs agency Tekir: http://​tekir.fi/​en/​. 3 Helsinki City Board meeting minutes 23 April 2012 and the attachment no.1: Concept and development study; Helsinki City Board meeting minutes 13

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4

5

6

7

January 2014 and the attachment no.1: Revised proposal; Helsinki City Board meeting minutes 21 November 2016 and several attachments including, for example, memorandum of understanding, architecture narrative, budget, financial impact and private donors; Helsinki City Council meeting minutes 30 November 2016 and the same attachments as in the Board meeting; The Guggenheim case reviewed in the official website of the city of Helsinki: www.hel.fi/​helsinki/​en/​ culture/​culture/​exhibitions/​guggenheim-​study-​2014; Helsinki Guggenheim website: www.guggenheimhki.fi/​en/​. Miltton’s website news section on 5 May 2013:  www.miltton.fi/​solomon-​r-​ guggenheim-​foundation-​to-​start-​cooperation-​with-​miltton-​group/​. The revised proposal 2013, an attachment of Helsinki City Council meeting minutes 13 January 2014. The website of the contemporary art organisation Checkpoint Helsinki: www. checkpointhelsinki.org/​en/​. The website of Next Helsinki: www.nexthelsinki.org/​.

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Advocates, advisors and scrutineers: the technocracies of private sector planning in England Gavin Parker, Emma Street and Matthew Wargent

Introduction Reforming planning has been a familiar trope in UK politics for over a generation. Following the antipathy displayed under the Thatcher/​Major administrations (1979–​97), a rhetoric of reform and modernisation dominated the New Labour period (1997–​2010), further calls for systemic reform to the planning system were apparent in the run-​up to the 2010 election (Conservative Party, 2009; 2010a) and subsequently informed the Liberal Democrat–​Conservative Coalition government’s approach to planning (2010–​15). Appetite for delivering ‘system change’ shows little sign of abating, with various policy changes and legislative amendments undertaken by the Conservative governments after 2015. The aim of successive governments has been to ‘speed-​up’ planning, making it ‘fit for purpose’ and more proactive. These ‘upstream’ rationales for reform witnessed since 2010, have been entwined with the austerity agenda and public sector cutbacks, with central government inviting a greater role for the private and third sectors in planning. This has continued a process of privatisation in planning functions set in train 30 or so years ago (Higgins and Allmendinger, 1999; Lord and Tewdwr-​Jones, 2014; MacDonald et al, 2014). One illustration of this has been a change in the composition of planning practitioners; while there has been no formal research on this to date, the Royal Town Planning Institute’s (RTPI) membership survey provides some indication of the scale of the shift towards the private sector in recent years, with around half of all chartered planners in the UK working outside of the public sector as of 2013 (RTPI, 2014). While far from comprehensive, the RTPI’s directory of planning consultants showed 465 registered planning consultancy firms, ranging in type from ‘sole

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trader’ practitioners, many of who are often ex-​local authority planners, to large planning teams in multi-​sector global consultancy firms with multi-​billion dollar turnovers. Planning consultants are typically employed in two main ways, either as ‘advocates’ for development sites on behalf of a developer client, or as evidence providers (that is, ‘advisors’) for local planning authority (LPA) clients. The latter role involves consultants drawing upon specialist knowledge to make a number of technical, evidence-​ based inputs to the planning system. As Table 12.1 shows, this might involve servicing particular niches or entail much more strategic inputs, with some private firms now running core planning services (see Capita, 2013). A  third role has also emerged, as ‘scrutineer’, because internal markets in planning have been created –​notably in neighbourhood planning (Parker et al, 2016). Here, consultants acting under contract to LPAs are not only providing inputs to the planning system in the form of evidence, but are also acting to validate particular forms of planning knowledge in certain circumstances, a role previously exercised by state actors. Taken together the various roles now serviced by consultants allow private actors to manage knowledge both in the form of more or less concrete inputs, but also in the legitimation and verification of knowledge. This warrants particular investigation, not least because of concerns expressed in the literature reviewed in this chapter, about how consultants navigate client versus public interest, and whether existing accountability mechanisms are fit for purpose. The remainder of the chapter is divided into three sections. First, we set out the recent political context that has precipitated the rise Table 12.1: Typology of tasks undertaken by private planning consultants in the English planning system Private sector role

Upstream rationalities

Examples of private sector activity

Advocacy

Growth imperative (that ism ‘development means growth’ as per the NPPF)

Masterplanning, development management or control, planning appeals

Advisor

Independence, speed and ‘efficiency’ of the planning system

Assorted assessments (for example, environmental, viability, gypsy and traveller site, retail), sustainability appraisals

Scrutineer

Quality and confidence in the planning system, ‘Blackbox’ model

Development viability studies, local plan reviews, neighbourhood plan examinations

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of the ‘consultocracy’ (McCann, 2011) across public services and planning in particular. Second, we outline how the use of consultants has become ‘naturalized’ (Prince, 2012) as part of the multi-​change planning environment that now characterises English planning. Third, we introduce interview data concerning Local Plan-​making to show the scope of consultant involvement and the importance of uncovering how such knowledge is claimed and deployed. In concluding, we reflect on the feedback loop between the state of ‘perma-​reform’ in English planning and the expansion of consultant inputs to the system, and conclude by considering what this relationship means for our understanding of planning expertise as a social construction and political tool in a co-​produced system.

Technocratic planning and the role of private consultants in a contested policy domain Unease about experts’ control of knowledge and its impact on the democratic process have been expressed since at least the 1950s (Linovski, 2015; Larson, 1977; Irwin, 1995). Recently, experts have been widely derided during the UK’s 2016 EU referendum and Donald Trump’s campaign for the US Presidency. Planners specifically have been the subject of public criticism for decades:  derided as out-​of-​touch technocrats in the post-​war rational planning boom, and more recently more likely to be viewed as a hindrance to growth or complicit in abetting an avaricious development industry (Adams and Watkins, 2014). Whatever the veracity or otherwise of these characterisations, they reveal an underlying assumption that professional planners are employed only by central and local government. In fact, since the 1980s, in the UK context at least, the planning profession has been evolving into a far more fluid mix of actors whereby those completing many planning tasks work for private sector (consultancy) firms. This reflects a wider process of hybridisation across (post) public services, precipitating a renewed interest in the mechanisms of co-​production (Watson, 2014; Mitlin, 2008) and raising questions about how to ensure effective governance in systems that have often lagged behind the pace of change. While the scale and scope of public service provision has accelerated in recent decades, much of the literature focusing on planning has considered how the ‘technocracy’ of the early decades of public planning had ‘dethroned’ the politician (Meynaud, 1964; Clarence, 2002), raising attendant questions about appropriate divisions of power, and ultimately, democratic governance. In planning, the gap between ‘expert cultures’ and their focus on servicing the technical elements

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of planning on the one hand, and the needs and competencies of the general public on the other, have been recognised as hinging on questions of transparency and comprehension (for example, Rydin, 2007; Friedmann, 1993), as well as the incompatibility of various knowledge forms. Indeed, as has been long established, experts can shape the very parameters of what is deemed to be legitimate or possible and highlight the identification and validation of truth claims as social constructs (Habermas, 1984; 1987). Thus, planning consultants, in undertaking commissioned tasks on behalf of developers or LPA clients, are also acting to frame agendas and delimit the boundaries of legitimate inquiry. Like all stakeholders involved in planning, they are operating in and through a particular set of epistemic assumptions that may or may not be apparent to others (Dunlop, 2014). Such issues were recognised by Turner who highlighted both the ambiguity of experts’ knowledge, and the dangers of their authoritative status being unquestioned: if experts are the source of the public’s knowledge, and this knowledge is not essentially superior to unaided public opinion, not genuinely expert, the public itself is presently not merely less competent than the experts but is more or less under the cultural or intellectual control of the experts. (Turner, 2001: 125) This highlights how the quality and basis of the knowledge managed by ‘experts’ may be important factors in the legitimacy of planning and planning policy, as well as the means to verify or account for it. For Rydin (2007), the basis of planners’ power is their ability to command expert knowledge –​but such knowledge must, to some degree, be socially and politically legitimate. This leads to questions about when and on what basis knowledge may be shaped or manipulated to fit audiences  –​that is, to be translated or, more crudely, selected. In later work, Turner (2014: 280) returned to the issue of who has the authority to decide, or determine the ‘competency of competency’ question. This relates specifically to how policy questions are framed, asked and assessed –​and by whom. It is therefore the socio-​cultural standing of a particular expert-​knowledge assemblage –​as much as the actual (technical) knowledge or resources required to effectively mobilise this –​that may decide its ultimate applicability. Discussion of epistemic communities highlights how groups of experts enable influence by developing common sets of practices, models and standards which are self-​validated by that community

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(Dunlop, 2014). These are then presented as authoritative and competent to external audiences. This can be seen in the ways that planning consultants market themselves and the services they offer. The language frequently used is that of offering ‘solutions’ (Raco et al, 2016); of course, these are solutions that are tailored to fit the problem presented by the commissioning client. In this sense, expert knowledge is a social construct, and draws power if its contingency (or motives) remains hidden: culture and lifeworld are controlled or ‘steered’ by experts whose doings are beyond public comprehension (and therefore beyond intelligent public discussion), but whose ‘expert’ knowledge is nothing but ideology, ideology made more powerful by virtue of the fact that its character is concealed. This concealment is the central legacy of liberalism. The public indeed, is its pitiful and ineffective victim. (Turner, 2001: 127) Whether it is consultant or LPA officers in the role of expert, the planning knowledge produced should not exist beyond the realm of public comprehension as this sets up the conditions for unaccountable behaviour. Whether consultant inputs to planning are a priori ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is not our concern here, rather we choose to emphasise the importance of understanding how private sector consultants and their knowledge is commissioned, prepared, managed and deployed. This is critical in understanding how planning processes actually work, and what knowledges are being mobilised and ‘organised’ in the service of contemporary planning. Here Fordham’s (1990) analysis of planning and the private sector role remains pertinent. He argued that by depending on a consultant’s advice, LPAs were abdicating significant responsibility for decisions made on behalf of the public, however since ‘there is in many cases no possibility of avoiding such delegation: the question is not whether but how to do it’ (Fordham, 1990: 244, our emphasis). Fordham’s words have proved prescient and today private consultant use is frequently presented as ‘an inevitable outcome of the growing complexity and pace of our world’ (Prince, 2012: 196). Such a view precludes how the roles and actions performed by consultants may be re-​orienting the way that expectations and assumptions about planning are constructed and understood. As such, it is more important than ever to understand ‘at what level and by whom’ planning takes place (Andersson and Moroni, 2014); a task to which we now turn.

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Planning in a multi-​change environment: the ‘perma-​reform’ of fragmentary English planning Alongside the discourses of speeding up, streamlining and modernising planning, an ‘extensification’ of English planning’s ambit has taken place in recent decades. Operationally this has led to the compartmentalisation of planning into a series of discrete tasks (Raco et  al, 2016; Raco, 2016) which has in turn necessitated new inputs and different forms and sources of knowledge to service these. Hence the contemporary planning system in England can be characterised as fragmentary –​a term we use to denote the parcelling-​up and sharing out of planning activity across tasks, sectors, spaces and interests. Moreover, as Allmendinger and Haughton (2015: 29) have argued, top-​down reform is now with us on a ‘near permanent basis, as incoming political administrations seek to modernise, reform or “deregulate” planning’: the result is that such fragmentation is in a state of continual flux exacerbated by the uncertain and highly complex operational environment that has amplified pre-​ existing concerns about the legitimacy and accountability of planning. This ongoing process has also further weakened planners’ status in the public sector. We term this state of flux ‘perma-​reform’ to denote the recursive multi-​change environment that loops back to create further change and uncertainty (see Figure 12.1). By employing this concept, we are not seeking to underplay the impact of significant legislation or changes in policy trajectory, but to recognise the outcomes of change, fragmentation and uncertainty created by the increasing frequency of such ‘moments’ of reform (Parker et al, 2018). In sum, recent history has left the planning system lacking appropriate governance structures, given: 1. the continuing importance of planning and outcomes associated to managing development; 2. (new) expectations and requirements placed on the planning system; 3. fragmentation and diversification of those shaping the planning system, as well as those operating it (that is, the co-​management, co-​production turn); and 4. diverse knowledge forms and claims circulating; linked in part to 5. the emergence of public involvement in planning as a more than tokenistic element of otherwise predominantly top-​down ‘rational’ planning. Successive reforms aimed at speeding-​up and simplifying the planning system while devolving power have made little substantive impact from

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the perspective of either the general public or the development and property investment industry. The multiple and varied drivers that have acted to impede the intentions of central government are too various to recount here, but taken together, the resultant system requirements have transformed planning practice into a ‘multi-​change’ environment in which consultants are operating. These changes have necessitated a widening of input types and sources, not least given resource constraints and capacity gaps within local government. In effect, these become market opportunities to exploit (Raco, 2014) and with a ready supply of specialist knowledge, planning consultants have been well-​placed to service these new system requirements placed upon LPAs. Consultants have also benefited from the uncertainty that a continual cycle of reforms creates, using legal loopholes and partially implemented policy changes to lobby for positive outcomes for their developer clients. Concerns over the use of evidence-​based policymaking and inclusive credentials have raised ethical concerns when set against a politicised planning process where pressure to conform to targets, deadlines and other performance measures can easily undermine social considerations and the views of minority voices (Matthews et al, 2015). Political pressure to reform, a popular mistrust of ‘planning’ and the system-​ requirements associated with the extensification of planning have therefore precipitated an unresolved search for new modes of planning (notably collaborative forms) and have also reworked professional Figure 12.1: How consultants are operating in a multi-​change planning environment Uncertainty and political conflict over forecasts and solutions (Consultants lobby and advise)

New skills and knowledges required (Consultants provide evidence and advise)

Planning for Change

Changed System

Changed Inputs

Changed Policies

Source: Authors

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Uncertainty over process and requirements (Consultants scrutinise and advise)

New policies created and fed into system (Consultants respond and advocate)

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identities and skill sets (Davoudi and Pendlebury, 2010; MacDonald et al, 2014; RTPI, 2015b).

Consultant roles in Local Plan-​making: knowledge, relations and audiences This section draws on indicatively qualitative interviews conducted with LPA officers and private planning consultants involved in Local Plan-​making in Southern England. Local Plans perform a central role in planning in England and remain powerful receptacles of knowledge, setting out a framework of strategic priorities for development. Ostensibly developed by the LPA, a Local Plan covers a large range of issues including: housing (both public and private); education, health, police and community facilities; commercial development (such as retail and leisure); infrastructure (including transport, minerals, waste, energy, water supply and so on); and the protection of the natural and historic environment. Consultants have increasingly been drawn into the production of these plans. As we have seen, consultants are regarded as reservoirs of flexible, knowledge-​intensive inputs, and in addition to capacity  –​ reflecting pervasive wider narratives –​able to add efficiency and value for money. This is particularly so in a context of internal public sector resource constraints where staff levels are reduced but skill requirements continue to rise (Loh and Norton, 2013; Egan, 2004). The planning officers we interviewed referred to the multiple challenges facing public sector planning, including time pressures derived from meeting centrally-​imposed targets and the uncertainties associated with perma-​reform. The latter being a consideration noted by consultants themselves, who noted the ‘never ending changes to the planning system’, although some consultants did argue that at times their advice on reacting to such reform was not heeded by LPAs themselves. One upshot of the changing planning environment and the increasing involvement of the private sector has begun to challenge the ‘taken-​ for-​g ranted place of planning in local government’ (Davoudi and Pendlebury, 2010: 632). For others, the private sector has even begun to sustain the discipline ‘despite the ambiguous nature of its knowledge base’ (Brown et al, 2003: 339). One reason for this is a capacity deficit in LPAs as the number of people employed in local government has continued to fall to record lows and planning departments themselves have been subject to over 40 per cent funding cuts to their budgets under austerity cutbacks implemented since 2010 (RTPI, 2015a). This has created an asymmetry of capacity at a time when the planning

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system has continued to develop in complexity with related specialisms and system requirements having expanded. It is therefore not surprising that the scale of consultant involvement in Local Plan-​making in our sample was extensive. We contacted 16 LPAs in Southern England who had been preparing their Local Plan since 2012: they referred to 22 different consultancy firms who had contributed to the process, with some having used as many as 17 separate planning consultants to service a range of tasks from specialist studies, critical friend roles and core evidence gathering. The mean number of consultants used was nine separate firms. How the LPA orchestrates Local Plan formulation therefore becomes a critical juncture, as does the way in which this process between the officers and the politicians is managed. Extricating any one of these roles is increasingly difficult, while situating the public interest within this process can no longer be assumed. This is not least the case because consultants themselves, while conscious of potential conflicts of interest (and keen not to be seen as both ‘gamekeeper and poacher’), recognise that the changing environment of contemporary planning has re-​framed traditional working relationships. For example, when working for both a LPA and a private developer in the same region, the consultants we interviewed were careful to explain the ‘conscious’ way in which they proceeded, installing ‘Chinese walls’, and securing agreement from all parties. While such cases were undertaken ‘on merit’, one consultant went on to argue that such examples provide ‘benefits to both sides…both financial and [in terms of] timescale and all sorts of things in terms of actually working together’. While LPA planners retain a clear commissioning role, albeit conditioned by the frequently changing demands of central government policy, they can dictate the terms of the relationship with consultants. Consequently, it is important to keep in mind that subsequent inputs from consultants will have been framed by the commissioning process –​ although it should be noted similar impositions of scope and approach are also possible when work is undertaken in house. LPA interviewees described how consultant inputs were, to varying degrees, not simply received but consciously ‘filtered’ by officers before being passed on to elected politicians. That is to say, before processes of deliberation where plan inputs were considered by politicians, the knowledge(s) contained in private sector work was first subject to officer scrutiny according to a range of (somewhat ambiguous) criteria. This included filtering along the lines of palatability, or ‘what is acceptable to elected members’, while it was argued that the independence of consultants can be ‘helpful in reporting to politicians

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on sensitive issues’, suggesting that LPA officers could also draw on co-​constructed expertise. Perhaps more fundamentally, decisions were made at this stage about how to combine inputs received with other information, how and if it should be edited, and the relative weight that should be awarded to different inputs. These and indeed prior stages such as the knowledge generation stage itself are critical in that they determine the likely trajectory and final content of the accepted knowledge. Such processes indicate that a new type or formulation of planning has emerged where the supply of private inputs made directly into plan making are normalised as an attendant feature of professional fragmentation, system neoliberalisation and rolling change. This also presages a more overtly bricolage system of planning where multiple pieces are to form a whole, in this case the plan itself.

Conclusion: the relations of co-​production This review of consultant involvement in planning activity in England has outlined the context and practice of a fragmented and co-​produced planning system. Given the aforementioned state of perma-​reform, it is not surprising that the issue of resourcing looms large: this is not only in the sense of requisite capacity, that is, the number of in-​house planning staff required to meet the variegated demands of local planning processes such as plan-​making, but is indicative of a more significant systemic trend. The inter-​relations of planning practice have shifted away from a clear divide between public and private sector inputs to a situation whereby public sector planners are being required to collate and distil diverse inputs and mediate between other actors, rather than themselves carry out the technical and evidence gathering activity that informs the Local Plan. The attitudes and exigencies of the variety of private planning organisations involved are an important element in seeking to understand the implications of new forms of relations, knowledge flows and governance within the profession. This is critical since, as Klenk and Lieberherr (2014) point out, there are potentially conflicting principles underpinning different accountability forms, such as public and market-​based accountability. More widely, it is also about determining how, in a multi-​change environment where private market actors are increasingly prominent, planning is actually being undertaken. As part of this, there is a need to develop greater understanding of the control, motives and experiences of the public sector actors who contract consultants, as well as how consultants themselves perform a range of different tasks and roles.

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This involves scrutinising the way in which planning tasks are presented by clients to potential contractors, and how these (selectively) reflect the ‘needs’ of clients. As Loh and Norton (2013; 2015) found in the US, in most cases consultants tend to respond to the client interest, for example by providing the ‘solution’ to the problem as set out in a commissioning brief, rather than necessarily addressing the wider ‘public interest’ (see Gow, 1991). This tension is one that is mirrored in much longer running critiques of planning, politics and the risk of capture of the future by powerful interests. In relation to Local Plan-​making, ultimately the clients are local politicians, with the issue of how they exert control over the use of evidence and knowledge a critical point for further investigation. As Flyvbjerg’s (1998) work reveals, the political nature of planning is such that inputs may be selectively re-​rationalised by powerful actors with the result that power, not rationality, defines reality. As we have seen, expert knowledge is a central source of power for planning professionals (Rydin, 2007). In the past, this has been misused. Our research indicates that the field of those creating, enacting and filtering that knowledge has widened to include a cadre of private sector providers. Meanwhile the changes wrought in the English planning system represent a significant shifting of roles between and among actors –​and, given the scale of public sector retrenchment, it may be that the balance has shifted irreversibly away from public sector planning. The radical nature of these shifts is a cause for concern if such a fragmented planning system is to retain (or arguably develop) legitimacy and credibility. In short, where such co-​produced forms of planning exist, more clarity and transparency over the models employed, processes followed, and the substantive aims adopted is required. This necessitates a more critical perspective about what might be termed the operational realities of co-​production –​in other words, consideration of the new technocracies emerging in planning cannot only be about the consultants –​it is more fundamentally about the ecology of the policy environment, the relationships and democratic model needed to sustain it, and the basis of the interactions –​what might be termed the ‘relations of co-​production’.

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Localism and the reconfiguration of planning’s publics in the landscapes of technocracy Sue Brownill

Introduction This chapter explores the role of planning’s publics within the emergent technocratic landscapes of planning. This is of particular importance given the widely acknowledged fragmentation of contemporary planning and urban governance. On the one hand there are the moves towards greater centralisation, technocratisation and privatisation where community voices and knowledge are excluded; arguably the spaces on which much of the research on technocracies has been focused. On the other are experiments in localism and aspirations for the decentralisation of power to neighbourhoods and citizens (Brownill and Bradley, 2017):  initiatives which touch on debates about the possibilities and limitations of challenging ‘expert’ planning through insurgent and transformative knowledge and practices (Friedmann, 1987; Sandercock, 1998; Miraftab, 2009) and through co-​production (Albrechts, 2013). However, these latter spaces are relatively unexplored in relation to debates on technocratisation. This chapter therefore asks the question: what emerges in terms of our understandings of the ‘new technocracy’ when we explore such spaces and the roles the public is asked to perform in them? It does so by drawing on ongoing research into the localism agenda in England and in particular on neighbourhood planning (NP), introduced in 2011 as a ‘community right’ to draw up a statutory land-​use plan (Smith, 2015). The aim is to shift the gaze of research by considering whether, how and to what extent elements of the modes of governance associated with the ‘new technocracy’ and also outlined in this volume introduction (see also Raco and Street, 2013) are present in such spaces and the practices and relations which may be emerging within them. It therefore explores the extent to which technical and

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‘expert’ knowledge and the power of public and private planners is being challenged or displaced by the knowledge, emotions and actions of citizen planners. As such the chapter shows that technocratisation is a more varied and complex process than previously thought and that these seeming spaces of de-​regulation are not immune to forms of re-​regulation which seek to re-​create local knowledge to align with technocratic language and purposes. Localism as a form of statecraft (Wills, 2016) is therefore reconfiguring the relationship between communities, the private sector (developers and consultants) and the local and central state rather than representing ‘power to the people’. However, it also shows that ‘technocratisation’ is an uneven process and that spaces for counter-​narratives to technocratic and centralised forms of planning can emerge, revealing as Inch (2015) argues the ‘ambiguous political potential that is opened up in the fields of power where citizens are called to meet state planning functions’ (p 405). In the following sections the chapter first addresses arguments and literature about the role of the public in the new technocratic landscapes of planning. It then goes on to place localism and NP within these debates and to explore them in action.

Publics in the new technocracy It is widely accepted that the governance and policy landscapes of planning are changing and fragmenting. One way of understanding this, which is the focus of this book, has focused on the rise of a ‘new technocracy’. As outlined elsewhere in this volume (see Chapter 1), this depicts the rise of governance as a managerial process based on ‘expert’ knowledge and involving new forms of contractual and judicialised government and new networks of private experts. While the focus of this work is often on the relationship of the state with the private sector the implications of such modes of governance for its relationship with its citizens are significant. Where publics fit or, more to the point how publics are being shaped to fit into these spaces, is an important empirical question. There is potential for the role of the public to be excluded, marginalised or as Raco and Street (2013) argue, for democratic engagement to become a risk factor to be managed, increasingly by private sector consultants. Publics are required to engage in debates which are ‘rendered technical’ (Li, 2007) rather than political and given the rise of judicial processes access can be restricted to those with particular technical and financial resources. In turn this may mean the predominance of particular types of ‘expert’ knowledge and interests in planning decisions.

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In relation to planning, much research in this area has often focused on those areas of policy and development where policy makers and elite private sector contractors come together, for example, by exploring the urban transformations that accompany mega-​events or major regeneration projects (Raco and Street, 2013). These are often spaces of exclusion where the role and rights of the public are limited or non-​existent. But as noted earlier the landscapes of planning are fragmenting and we should avoid painting too monolithic a picture of technocratisation. One way of doing this is to shift the gaze to other forms of planning: the attempts to decentralise decision-​making and empower publics that are an increasing part of many western planning regimes (Gallant and Robinson, 2012). Within these spaces of ‘engagement’ possibilities are held out for the ‘co-​production’ of policy and plans, for involving a wide range of knowledge and expertise and for re-​drawing the boundary between the state and its citizens. At first sight such initiatives are the direct antithesis to those technocratic spaces of exclusion; or are they? There are opposing views within the planning literature on whether such initiatives introduce different planning knowledges to challenge the prerogative of ‘expert’ planners or merely represent new forms of co-​option. Many critiques see these initiatives not as empowerment but new forms of governance through community (Rose, 1996; Davoudi and Mandanipour, 2015; Brownill and Bradley, 2017). Further work has focused on how localism is seeking to create spaces oriented to a variety of uses, particularly that of promoting growth (Clarke and Cochrane, 2013; Tait and Inch, 2016), remaking the role of the public along the way. But others suggest the possibilities of a ‘progressive localism’ and ‘working the spaces of power’ (Newman, 2012) to shape alternative planning ideas and practices. However, such spaces have not been explored in depth from the perspective of whether or not such spaces are in reality immune to the processes of technocratisation, whether the same processes are visible or whether their experience indicates that we need to consider that technocratisation is a more varied and complex process than previously thought. This chapter aims to fill this gap by looking at one such space of engagement: the localism agenda and NP in England.

Localism, neighbourhood planning and technocracies of planning The coalition government will revolutionise the planning process by taking power away from officials and putting

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it into the hands of those who know most about their neighbourhood –​local people themselves. (DCLG, 2010) By problematising expert planning and seeing the solution in opening up decisions to those with ‘real’ as opposed to technical or professional knowledge, the Localism Agenda in England appears to be swimming against the tides of technocratisation. As Eric Pickles, the minister who introduced localism said, ‘we believe the folks know best’. Contained within the 2011 Localism Act were a wide range of initiatives for a ‘fairer, more democratic and more effective’ planning system (DCLG, 2011: 11). Central to these was the provision for communities to draw up their own neighbourhood plans, which form the focus of this chapter (HM Government, 2011: Section 116 and Schedules 9, 10 and 11; Table 1; see also Brownill and Bradley, 2017 for further details). A Neighbourhood Development Plan (NDP) is a statutory plan drawn up by an approved local group setting out land use policies which ‘can guide and shape development in a particular area’ (Smith, 2015). This means that unlike previous, advisory participatory initiatives, such as Parish Plans or Planning for Real, NDPs turn community voices into legal planning documents thus, in theory, giving greater control. At the time of writing, over 2,000 groups were engaged in NDPs in England with around 250 adopted plans; an indication of its popularity as a participatory initiative. NDPs are an expression of the wider discourses of localism from the 2010–​15 Coalition government’s espousal of the Big Society and continuing through the Conservative administrations from 2015 onwards, which stressed the deficiencies of ‘big government’ and the merits of active citizenship, decentralisation and for May the ‘sharing society’. Critical accounts of localism (see for example Brownill and Bradley, 2017; Clarke and Cochrane, 2013; Davoudi and Mandanipour, 2015; Tait and Inch, 2016) point to how its apparent ‘freedoms’ are constrained and far from being empowering are used to create spaces and publics ‘oriented to a variety of ends’; including the promotion of a growth oriented planning agenda. Such critiques therefore suggest that these spaces of apparent de-​ regulation and withdrawal of the state are witness to forms of re-​ regulation which are steering actions in particular ways; what Rose (1996) refers to as government through community. This is true of NDPS which have to go through a lengthy and technical process (see Figure  13.1) heavily regulated by statutory procedures (HM Government, 2012). This starts with the approval of a responsible group to lead the process,1 followed by the designation of an area, establishing

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Figure 13.1: Neighbourhood planning stages

Neighbourhood area Determine the neighbourhood area. Submit neighbourhood area proposal. LPA consults.* LPA approve.

Building the evidence base Review existing evidence. Identify gaps in evidence. Compile new evidence. Analysis of evidence.

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Neighbourhood forum Put together prospective neighbourhood forum. Submit forum proposal. LPA consults.* LPA determines area.

Writing the plan Policies, proposals, site allocations. Consider sustainability, diversity, equality, delivery.

Submission Submit to LPA. LPA publicises.* Independent examination LPA appoints examiner. Examination takes place. Examiner’s report.

Consultation Consultation on plan.* Amend plan.

Themes, aims, vision, options Identify key issues and themes. Prioritise issues and themes. Develop key aims. Look at options.

Community engagement and involvement Publicity. Engage local partners. Initial community engagement (broad issues). Provide feedback. Ongoing community engagements (aims, content, detail).

The plan is made

* Minimum time – 6 weeks ** Minimum time – 25 working days

Source: Locality

Referendum Publicise referendum.** Referendum.

Localism and the reconfiguration of planning’s publics…

Getting started Clarify why a plan is needed. Publicise the intention to produce a plan. Identify and contact key local partners. Dialogue with the local planning authority. Product a project plan with costings.

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an evidence base, consultation with the community and producing a plan. In addition a ‘light touch’ inspection is required to ensure that the plan meets the ‘basic conditions’, which crucially includes being in conformity with existing plans. Finally the plan has to receive over half the votes cast in a local referendum before it is then used by the local planning authority to guide decisions on planning. The folks may well know best but this knowledge may be regulated and ‘re-​scripted’ (Parker et al, 2015) and so conform to particular purposes. Davoudi and Mandanipour (2015) refer to such practices as technologies of agency. Nevertheless this is not a risk-​free process and possibilities for different, even insurgent, forms of knowledge to come through may be opened up. It is also worth exploring what kind of ‘knowing’ is being called on here. Neighbourhood plans had been prefaced by a pre-​election policy paper, Open Source Planning (Conservative Party, 2010b). The idea of ‘open source’ is that, as with computer programming, planning can be done (better) by non-​planners if they are given access to the right language and skills. It is depicted as a technical, not a political, process carried out by citizen planners who are ‘nudged’ into using the knowledge and tools on offer, that is, the existing planning agenda. As such it also represents a further attack on the public planner and the hollowing-​out of state planning activities. This sits uncomfortably alongside more radical ideas of neighbourhood ways of knowing (Sandercock, 1998) and raises questions about whether the experience and emotions of citizen planners (Inch, 2015) have potential to counter these technical, de-​politicised purposes of localism. Finally, although the assumption behind NP is that local people are the ‘real experts’ the restructuring of the role of the state in the locality need not inevitably result in devolution to the community alone. Raco (2013a) considers localism to be undermined by forms of privatised governance that complicate the implied transition from ‘big government’. Other contradictions include the simultaneous cutting back of other capacities and budgets. Therefore, it is clear that a range of spaces of planning and landscapes of power and knowledge are emerging as part of or alongside the ‘new technocracy’. In what follows, two main dimensions of knowledge and planning practices associated with NP are explored. These are how knowledge is represented and the nature of expertise, particularly the relations between the public, private and non-​expert citizen planners. The account is based on interviews with actors engaged in NP, participant observation and engagement with neighbourhood plans over the last five years.2

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Whose knowledge and expertise? Public, private and citizen planners Empowering ‘the people who know best’ implies that there is a direct input of community knowledge into planning. Over the early years of NP activity a number of issues have emerged. First, there is the question of ‘whose knowledge’. The invited space of NP means that it is often those groups with capacity, motivation and skills that engage, with a concentration of NP groups in affluent parts of the country under development pressure (Turley, 2014.) Many community planners are also professionals in their day jobs, resulting in unequal engagement, spatial injustice and partial knowledge. Despite financial and technical support (up to £9,000 pa for each group) being made available from government the scale of the task of preparing a neighbourhood plan should not be underestimated. As respondents in the research said: ‘It’s the hardest job I’ve ever done ever done.’ ‘They shouldn’t ask us to do this. It is wrong and too much to ask a community to do.’ Government seemed to think that ‘planning camps’ and ‘good practice’ provided through a host of guides, websites and organisations (in line with the ideal of open source planning) would be enough to enable groups to plan. One response to this situation is to turn to consultants. Parker et al (2016) suggest that 60 per cent of NDP groups have used consultants, showing in reality different forms of expertise are enmeshed in a variety of ways, shifting the boundaries between public, private and citizen expertise in ways more complex than the professionalisation implied by the new technocracy or the community empowerment envisaged by localism. Thame Town Council (TCC) for example, spent c £100k employing the major consultancy Tibbalds to produce a plan with 64 policies which is in effect a local plan in all but name. This relationship mediated the way local knowledge was translated into the final plan. The council who had never employed consultants before felt that they had ‘the wool pulled over their eyes’ in a number of ways concerning costs and the final recommendations. Tibbalds used their Thame experience to go on to do more NPs, picking up awards in the process. Interestingly in their good practice guide on creating a deliverable local plan, recommendation number two is ‘get professional planners involved’ (2015). As well as large consultancies there is a vast number of niche or lone consultants specialising in NP work operating to take advantage of the £9,000 grants NP groups can claim. In Oxford, for example, the same individual consultant has been employed by all three NP groups and his wife has done the sustainability appraisals. This quote from one such

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niche consultant highlights the discourse of the failures of public planning which also run behind NP and its replacement, not by community power, but by turning the practice of NP into a task to be managed. We started the business 4  years ago when we came out of a larger company anticipating that there would be opportunities through the Localism Act…We’ve just started our 61st NDP…at one time we were responsible for 1 in 4 of the plans that had been made. It is so glaringly obvious sometimes that the policies in the local plan are inadequate. Almost all of our projects are challenging; no local plan, no 5 year land supply, developers all over the place…An NDP is designed to achieve a specific purpose in terms of managing planning risk. Other ways in which the private sector is involved include first the provision for ‘business-​led’ NPs with regulations allowing for neighbourhood forums to include or be led by the private sector and for referendums to allow businesses and not just residents to vote. In practice this has, to date, only led to one completed plan in Central Milton Keynes, interestingly led, not by local retailers, but by planning and urban design consultancy David Lock. Mid-​Cherwell NP in rural Oxfordshire shows there are more subtle ways in which the private sector is involved. This NP involves a number of villages around a former airbase in Upper Heyford designated for housing development. The forum is led by the developer and owner of the air-​base, Dorchester Group. Originally given permission to develop 700 homes, Dorchester used the fact that the local council was allocating more housing sites to suggest a NP on the basis that more homes on the base would mean fewer for the villages. The plan process has been led by Dorchester, they’ve paid for consultants and there are now 1,200 homes agreed on their site. However, the community liaison officer at Dorchester articulates it this way And yes, there has to be something for us in order for us to get involved, it’s not just pure charity the money but it’s definitely about empowering our community and giving people what they want as well as we have the benefit of our brownfield site being prioritised ahead of any greenfield site –​it’s not that unusual to want to promote that. Even the technical aid offered to groups was itself opened up to a range of private and voluntary providers having been previously largely

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supplied by a more community-​based NGO (RTPI Planning Aid) in the previous planning regime under New Labour. In parallel to technocratisation, localism and its associated planning reforms can also be seen as leading to the erosion or hollowing-​out of the expertise of the public planner labelled, as we have seen, as ineffective, out of touch and thereby blocking growth. Local planning authorities (LPAs) also have a legal ‘duty to support’ NP groups, but is given limited financial support from central government to carry out this role. Brownill (2017) refers to this as central government reaching into the neighbourhood to ‘empower’ communities against LPAs, indicating that the erosion of the power of the public planner can be achieved in ways other than direct contractualisation or privatisation. The folks: citizens, nimbies or project managers? From the perspective of the ‘model’ of technocratic government, enabling communities to plan their own area would appear to be a high-​r isk strategy. Defining NP as a technical process is one way of limiting this risk as are the constraints whereby plans have to be in conformity with existing plans. In effect this is about turning ‘nimbies’ into citizen planners; as a chair of a residents’ association in Thame said, ‘We are all nimbies but we can’t be so we have to get on with it.’ We have already seen how through the use of good practice in the techniques of planning through private consultants NP has been ‘rendered technical’ and the role of the ordinary citizen proscribed and supplemented. Another response is to turn a neighbourhood plan in to a project to be managed. A plethora of ‘road maps’ exist drawn up by local groups and government guidance. In Woodcote, a village in South Oxfordshire, a detailed spreadsheet drawn up by the Chair who in his working life was a senior IT project manager became a template for many other groups in the area. The ideal of NP is about inclusivity, local knowledge and seemingly the opposite of managerialism, but in practice it can be technocratic. This need not be a problem if, as Newman (2012) argues, it is possible to ‘work the spaces of power’; that citizens and others can occupy these spaces to challenge the status quo and use and mobilise ‘insurgent’ knowledge. A potential example of this is provided by the Somers Town Neighbourhood Plan. Somers Town is a community sandwiched between Kings Cross and Euston stations on the fringes of central London. It consists predominantly of social housing but has been subject to redevelopment including the Crick Institute and

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will also be affected by HS2. The Somers Town plan was started in 2012 with the aims to ‘avoid being squeezed out and get a slice of the action’ (STNF, 2016). Policies called for the retention and extension of social housing and ensuring that planning gain from any developments would go to supporting community demands. This is a very different rationale to the pro-​g rowth agenda of the government. Unlike many similar areas Somers Town had support from Voluntary Action Camden, a local NGO. They too hired a consultant, a veteran community ‘advocacy’ planner who had been involved in Kings Cross and Spitalfields popular plans and set up London Planning Aid. They involved local people through a number of community planning weekends, community mapping, working groups and local walks. They also ran a number of seminar sessions on key issues bringing in planners and academics to share knowledge. So it was that Oxford Brookes University did a session on viability assessments, Westminster University on affordable housing, and others were run on community land trusts and planning policies. Planning students from UCL and Westminster lent further support. While it may not totally equate with insurgent planning, this plan entailed a different approach to production of knowledge from the technical ways of the consultants outlined earlier. Such different outcomes and processes suggest a variety of landscapes of knowledge and a variety of relations between the community and private sectors are emerging.

Re-​representing knowledge The idea of NP is that ‘the folks that know best’ use their knowledge as the basis of a plan but there are many ways in which this knowledge is regulated, re-​represented and ‘re-​scripted’ to fit into the government’s agenda. The use of ‘experts’ is one way in which this is achieved. The consultants at Thame for example said, ‘TCC wanted to tell us what’s in the plan but we said we were offering our planning advice and expertise. Some things TCC couldn’t see why it was needed and why it should be more important than residents’ views.’ Such consultancies were accused by one respondent of producing ‘flat-​pack Ikea’ neighbourhood plans, transporting policies and ideas from one area to the next rather than creating plans rooted in local knowledge and experience. As another consultant said ‘We use a standard process, everyone who works with us uses our process…This is counterintuitive to the community planning brigade. We started their way because we thought that was what was expected and it was

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clear after a year that it was causing a huge amount of frustration.’ The £7m per year for technical support for NPs is a significant amount of money, potentially fuelling this industry which arguably is restructuring support away from the ‘community planning brigade’, that is other organisations, such as Planning Aid, who adopt a more ‘bottom-​up’ approach. This process of rendering local knowledge technical is particularly acute at the stage when local demands are translated into land use policies which have to conform to planning language and other plans. A period of negotiation on draft policies with the LPA is part of the regulations during which some demands can be excluded and others ‘re-​scripted’ to conform. At Headington in Oxford: After considerable discussion and consultation, the Headington Neighbourhood Forum wished to propose a policy that would put a greater emphasis on the development of key worker 3 housing…However, in discussions with the City Planning Department it became clear that they would reject any such policy since, in their words, it would ‘not conform with the strategic policies in Oxford’s Local Plan’. (Headington Neighbourhood Forum, 2016: 30) The inspector made them cut this sentence from the completed plan. In Sommers Town the plan came up against austerity local government in the shape of Camden’s Community Investment Programme, a scheme aimed at realising the value of council assets to invest in public services. This resulted in a plan from the council to cross-​subsidise the rebuilding of a primary school with a 25-​storey residential tower on land owned by the council but designated in the draft NP as open space. The proposal undermined the plan and therefore put in question whether it would be adopted at all. The group sought a judicial review to challenge this, but lost. Another way in which technical and judicial processes enter NP is through the examination process. Although this is ‘light touch’, many examiners suggest changes to plans, in part so that they could withstand a legal challenge, but the net effect is to exclude or to change local demands. One such plan in Swanick was changed so much that the community voted against it at the referendum. Other plans such as Wantage have failed the examination on the basis that there was insufficient evidence to support the policies proposed, that is, the community had not gone through the correct

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‘technical’ process. Many plans have been legally challenged by private developers. These challenges have not always been successful but the threat intensifies the need to present local knowledge in ways which can withstand them. As Bradley (2017) says ‘there is a danger that a professional planning orthodoxy may be imposed on neighbourhood plans as a response to developers’ litigation, to the detriment of local knowledge’.

Conclusions The case of NP underlines the importance of looking at the variety of governance spaces within the evolving landscape of planning. Exploring the spaces of localism has revealed a subtle and complex interplay between the state, the private sector and planning’s publics which go beyond simple typifications of technocratisation, privatisation or empowerment. Localism may not follow the ‘model’ of technocratic governance but it is also not immune to some of its influences; local knowledge may be represented as the expertise on which planning decisions should be based, but it is then re-​represented in order to secure particular outcomes. Nevertheless, the possibility that alternative forms of knowledge and power can emerge in such spaces to challenge technocratisation has also been revealed. However, NP is maybe not the initiative within which insurgent knowledge or even the ideal of transformatory co-​production can thrive. What are therefore emerging in these spaces are new relations between the community, state and private sectors, new dynamics and practices of knowledge and new topologies and assemblages of power (Brownill, 2017). These require new forms of statecraft to manage them (Wills, 2016). To understand this we need to move away from monolithic ideas of technocracy with a uni-​directional journey of travel, to seeing it as fragmented and open to challenge and to appreciate the role of planning’s publics as important actors in and challengers of the processes of technocracy. Notes Either a town or parish council (the lowest level of local government in England) or, where none exists (largely in urban areas), a newly formed neighbourhood forum consisting of 21 individuals can be approved by the local authority. 2 The author would like to acknowledge grants from the British Academy and ESRC. 3 This is affordable housing prioritised for nurses, teachers and so on. 1

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14

The politics of new urban professions: the case of urban development engineers Jonathan Metzger and Sherif Zakhour

Introduction Against the backdrop of one the most difficult housing crises in Stockholm’s history, the City Council recently promised the delivery of 140,000 more dwellings before 2030 –​the equivalent of building a third of the city in 15  years. Given the scale of these ambitions, it is interesting to ask what considerations will guide these planned developments, and who are those that will have influence over how they are realised. Since about 70–​80 per cent of all housing currently produced in the city actually takes place on land owned and managed by the municipality itself (City of Stockholm, 2016), one set of key actors in this process are those public officials who have as their task allocating the use of publicly owned land. In Stockholm, this work primarily falls within the ambit of the somewhat newfangled professional category of ‘development engineers’ –​which has risen to prominence as a key player in the Swedish urban development process in recent decades. Based on these premises and the overarching topic of this book, this chapter will aim at exploring four interrelated questions regarding the role of the development engineers in the urban development process in Stockholm: 1. What is the influence of development engineers on the urban development process in Stockholm? 2. What is this influenced premised upon? 3. What are the effects of this influence? 4. Could the influence of the development engineers be thought of as part of a ‘new urban technocracy’?

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In answering these four questions we draw upon our ongoing qualitative research which investigates recent shifts in the balance of power between various professional groups that participate in the urban development process in the City of Stockholm. Our findings suggest that the rise to prominence of the professional category of development engineer has led to the institutionalisation of a narrowly conceived and short-​termist economic optimisation rationality which to a large extent has come to steer urban development considerations in the City of Stockholm. This rationality, which is institutionally solidified in legally binding agreements between the city and property developers, comes to set a very rigid frame for any additional considerations regarding, for example, social justice or balanced urban development that other professional groups may try to introduce further downstream in the urban development process. We conclude that while it might be expected that public land ownership would allow public authorities to promote a more ‘progressive’ and mindful urban development, the development engineers who are presently in the proverbial driving seat of the management of public land do not see the pursuit of such goals to be part of their professional responsibility. As a consequence, from having historically aimed at actively buffeting and counteracting market forces, the administration has now in itself become a profit-​seeking agent in the property market, complete with acquisition strategies and profit stipulations which frame close to all development projects in relation to net present value. By narrowly focusing on optimising the city’s performance as a profit-​and output-​maximising market actor the practice of the development engineers thus fits neatly into the frame of practice that has been lambasted as ‘post-​political techno-​ managerialism’ by, for example, Erik Swyngedouw (2009). However, the question remains of who is to be burdened with the responsibility of allowing this arrangement to persist.

The role of the development engineer in Swedish public land management In Sweden, municipal land ownership has long been used to promote and control urban development. The overarching logic that has historically underpinned public landownership in Stockholm, and in Sweden more generally, was that by controlling the availability of land, speculation would be kept to a minimum which in turn could pave the way for good housing at affordable levels irrespective of market conditions. Only secondly was it considered an instrument for securing increments in land value (du Rietz, 1973).

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But from the 1990s onwards much changed in the management and organisation around public land. As state-​backing of active municipal land policies wavered in hand with the weak economic climate, the city’s land acquisitions significantly slowed down (Bodström, 1994). And while land was still leased to developers for new rental apartments, from the 2000s onwards public land that is contracted for owneroccupied housing development has primarily been sold according to ‘market value’. While the shift was presumably underpinned by the longstanding conviction that appreciation of public land should fall on the city and not the property owners, Tonell (2016) has reasoned that it also represented an ideological shift away from the unanimous understanding that the city is rich if it owns land towards the notion that it becomes rich when selling. The public officials who are vested with the task of organising the sale of municipally owned land are the project managers at the City Administration’s Development Office, who are colloquially titled ‘development engineers’ (exploateringsingenjörer). They are the ones who carry the main responsibility for negotiating and drawing up the contractual arrangements derived from the cities’ position as landowners rather than public authorities, and whose role therefore also has become increasingly important in urban development projects in Stockholm in recent years. Even though development engineers are officially considered a subcategory of land surveyors, there is no absolute demand that those working within this professional role actually have a degree in land surveying. Further, even though designated as ‘engineers’, there is also no demand that they possess a degree in engineering. Job adverts for development engineers often ask for applicants with a land surveying and/​or engineering degree ‘or equivalent competence and educational background’; often also mentioning individuals with, for example, a law degree specialising in property law as also being formally qualified for the job. As there is no given educational background for development engineers, and no dedicated professional body either, one can ask whether it is really correct to define it as a ‘profession’, per se. Rather, it is perhaps more productively understood as a professional role, that can be filled by people from a number of professional backgrounds, although it seems that many of the practitioners in this role nonetheless do come from a background in engineering and land surveying. What is important to keep in mind is that due to the lack of formalisation of this professional role, there is no established Code of Conduct or similar document guiding the professional practice of the development engineer. Rather, the only formal loyalty of the development engineer

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is towards her/​his employer and the fulfilment of the goals of the employing organisation. This is also important to keep in mind, seeing that the careers of development engineers often include switching employment repeatedly between public bodies (generally municipalities) and private enterprises (often development companies or consultancies). Thus, the parties to the type of negotiations that development engineers are involved in often have a deep knowledge and understanding of the bargaining position of those on ‘the other side of the table’.

The work of development engineers in the City of Stockholm In Stockholm, it seems that the move towards a more market-​ led and contract-​oriented urban development process, and the subsequent rise to prominence of the development engineers, took place simultaneously with other substantial changes surrounding the management of public land. In the recession of the 1990s, the City introduced what is referred to as the ‘Stockholm Model’. According to the interviewed development engineers the idea was, and still is, to provide developers with incentives for finding unique and innovative solutions to areas that have been difficult to fully develop, where being granted the land serves as the ‘reward’ for coming up with an innovative development proposal. The legal contracts that are subsequently negotiated between the prospective developer and the city are primarily manifested in the form of land allocation agreements (markanvisningsavtal): options which give developers the right to exclusive negotiations with the city for a period of time regarding the sale or tenure of public land once a development permit has been officially confirmed by a local development plan. The introduction of these agreements has served to substantially reconfigure the design of the Swedish development process (Caesar, 2016). Where a land allocation used to be an extension of the development permit only granted following the conception of a local development plan, it is now to the contrary often the first formalised document relating to a planned development, so that the local plan and development permit instead come to be based on the agreements reached in the land allocation process. An idealised version of the current urban development process is shown in Figure 14.1. On public land, developers are to find suitable locations, by their own accord conceive of a competitive enough idea that aligns with the comprehensive plan and, if the land is

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publicly owned, apply for the granting of a land allocation from the Development Committee.1 While the application document has no formal requirements regarding content or format, it should nonetheless provide some substantial specifications about the project, such as the volume, form of tenure, accompanying commercial activities, preschools and so on. Following a first assessment by one of the development engineers, an early joint assessment is made with one of the planners from the City Planning Office regarding the design of the project. For projects where the land will be sold, an appraiser from the Development Office is brought in to determine its market value, a sum determined by estimating what the buildings will be worth by Figure 14.1: The urban development process for projects initiated by developers on public land

Development Office

Project initiative from developer

City Planning Office

Land allocation application

Early joint assessment

Appraisal of land Decision to start a Plan proposal

Decision on Land allocation and Agreement

Plan proposal Consultations and reviewing Decision on Development agreement

Decision to adopt plan

Implementation

Decision to grant building permit

Source: Authors

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gross floor area (GFA) on the open market once they are complete. After subtracting the developer’s construction costs, interest expenses and expected profits the number is weighed against the market adjusted prices for comparable previous public land sales. The land allocation agreement is then drawn up between the city and the developer which details the negotiated prices and other obligations pertaining to the project. Once the Office’s board of representatives has signed off on the agreement –​a fairly uncomplicated procedure according to our interviewees –​the Development Office, not the developers themselves, applies for the drawing up of a new local development plan for the land in question from the City Planning Office, whereby the formally designated planning process proper is initiated. Only when the new plan is approved and the building permit granted is the land officially transferred to the developer, thus starting the implementation stage whereby the Development Office again becomes the main responsible party for the project. Between what is stated in the official documentation and what can be garnered from our interviews it seems that the overarching purpose of managing public land according to procedure is primarily guided by two strongly emphasised goals which to some degree feed into each other: the promotion of development for housing and the generation of revenue for the city’s coffers. Due to the current strongly formulated quantitative goal for an increase in the housing stock, one of the first aspects that the development engineer evaluates in any given project before moving forward is its potential for housing. At the same time, this might be inconsequential if the project doesn’t conform to the second purpose of generating revenue. As one of the engineers notes, beyond promoting development their responsibilities also include ‘representing the land owner, that is, the tax payers’. The practice of selling public land, which sometimes generates up to six times more in returns per apartment than leases (which on the other hand lets the municipality retain long-​term control of the land) is also legitimised by this responsibility: ‘It is simply better that the taxpayers get their share of the market price, so to speak, than that the developer gets an even higher profit, right?’ Indeed, between the leases and the land sales the Development Office generates roughly one tenth of the overall yearly income of the municipality (including taxes) (City of Stockholm, 2017) making it, as another engineer notes ‘one of the engines of Stockholm’s economy’, and by far the biggest ‘earner’ among the city administration’s different departments. While the revenue from tenures and land sales go straight to the city treasury, however, the city’s yearly investment budget for the

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administration’s various projects is still partly calculated according to its aggregate incomes (City of Stockholm, 2017). In other words, the costs associated with urban development are not framed as ‘investments’ which could be balanced with future returns from an expanded tax base or a surrounding land appreciation, but capital costs which should be balanced directly with the present value inherent in the land on which the project will stand. Or put differently, the development administration is organised in such a way that for urban development to continue without municipal spending, each project should produce a short-​term profit. Thus, a somewhat informal stipulation that seems to have grown organically from within the Development Office is that 95 per cent of projects initiated on public land must be profitable in and of themselves. But according to some of the officials in the Development Office it seems that in practice this number doesn’t mean more than that all projects should by default be profitable or, at the very least, break even: ‘What we feel to our bones, and know, is that our projects should not take a loss.’ Many of our interviewees, primarily those from the City Planning Office, highlight a number of worrying implications pertaining to the Development Office’s’ explicit concern for the citizen-​as-​tax payer. For instance, since the revenue generated from a high-​profit project cannot be balanced with a project with little or no profit, it means that land considered attractive to developers and where the exchange value is high is likely to receive a higher amount of investment by the Development Office in amenities and surrounding infrastructure than areas that are deemed unattractive. As a Senior Advisor from the City Planning Office notes, if you still want to develop on the latter ‘you must try to forgo something else, so to say; you don’t invest in developing the park, or you can save on something else so that you can still walk on both sides of the street.’ Generally, it seems that the dominant attitude among the development engineers is that it is not within their professional responsibility or right to take into account the city’s social aspirations within their professional practice, such as for instance the officially stated goals of staving off spatial segregation or enabling development in impoverished areas (see also Tonell, 2016). And while the land allocation agreements are used to make housing more energy-​efficient, they are not used to make it more affordable –​the reasoning being that due to the Swedish utility rent system and market forces more generally stipulations regarding rent levels or housing costs would only benefit the first renter/​buyer. Thus, it seems that the practical approach towards providing more affordable housing is to simply build

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more housing, tout court, no matter whether affordable or not, since –​as one development engineer puts it: ‘if we can handle the quantitative target, then it should of course be a better balance in the market. That is what one can hope, in a sense.’ Another worrying implication of the administration’s commitment towards the citizen-​as-​taxpayer is the conflicting role ascriptions this engenders. On private land, one can imagine that the interests among actors are relatively clear:  developers want high development to generate high profits whereas it is the city’s responsibility to weigh its commitment to other public interests, including those of local residents. But on public-​owned land both developers and the Development Office have an economic interest in pursuing higher development, whereby the responsibility of pursuing long-​term municipal commitments is placed solely on the formal plan-​making department within the city, the City Planning Office. And given all the contractual commitments that have been made, all the resources and time spent on the project up until the initiation of the formal planning process, it is relevant to ask whether the legally stipulated public consultations that then ensue are likely to have any impact whatsoever. While the interviewees from both the Development and City Planning administration argue that such activities can and do result in changes to projects on public land, only rarely are these changes substantial enough to warrant the renegotiation of the land allocation agreement with the developer. As the chairman of the Development Committee notes, what is subject for change is not the actual project, its purpose, nor its location but ‘more about if all the buildings there are going to be built, or in this way, this high, or whatever it could be’. Indeed, some of the interviewees state that from their own experiences the public consultations that can sometimes garner significant decreases in scale are generally offset by instead increasing the scale of the development in another area within the same project –​sometimes, one committee member notes, in areas where the demographic configuration makes the project less likely to be contested by the locals.

How do the urban development engineers influence Stockholm’s development, and why? We have now in turn examined the current design of the urban development process in Stockholm, the role of development engineers within this and finally the wider ramifications of this arrangement. In the following discussion we will revisit the four questions posed in

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the introduction and try to answer them on the basis of the material presented in the preceding sections. What is the influence of urban development engineers on the urban development process in Stockholm? With the introduction of the ‘Stockholm Model’ of urban development in the 1990s’ recession it came to fall within the ambit of the Development Office to set the fundamental framework for urban development projects in the city. There are in fact numerous professional categories represented at the Development Office, including, for example, ecologists and urban planners. However, our investigations evince that they for a large part find themselves frustratingly sidelined in the internal work processes. Those who really occupy the proverbial driving seat within the office are the project managers, also known as development engineers. These, in turn, consider their professional expertise and role to be that of maximising revenues for the city as well as the quantity of housing produced. As a consequence, these issues are those that are focused upon within their daily work practice, and all other considerations are given secondary priority. Thus, the development engineers’ sphere of influence over the development process could to some degree be productively grasped through the lens of Lukes’ (1974) second dimension of power, wherein certain issues are mobilised out of the decision-​making process. With the engineers having the capacity to set the agenda of the development process, issues which do not pertain to ‘hard facts’ (understood as purely technical issues, see also Tamm Hallström, 2015) or market logics lose their relevance. What the development engineers thus in practice effectuate is the rendering-​technical of potentially contentious political issues. Questions regarding which values and goals should have priority in urban development politics become resolved by a seemingly self-​ given focus on profit and quantity maximisation, enacted as issues pertaining to technical optimisation, and are thus removed from the ambit of political debate and contestation (see further, for example, Barry, 2001; Berman and Hirschman, 2014). As a consequence, crucial questions regarding the values that should guide the urban development in the city –​that is, political issues of ‘right and left’ –​ are, in the spaces of negotiations where the fundamental agreements regarding the scope of format of urban development are drawn up, instead transformed into technical questions of ‘right and wrong’;

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not asking if profit and quantity maximisation should be the all-​ encompassing goals of such negotiations, but only how this can be achieved (Baeten, 2009). What is this influence premised upon? It should be noted that the power seemingly vested with the engineers is not something that is inherent in their nature, that is, as managers and owners of land, as economists, or as land surveyors and so on  –​but rather something that has developed through processes and relationships located outside their professions, for instance: the recession and the rollback of state interventions; the reconfiguration of the development process and introduction of the aforementioned Stockholm Model; the engineers close relationships and mutual interests with external agents which thus allows them to build coalitions. Nevertheless, we can’t ignore the way in which their positions are legitimised by their standings as managers of property and the particular knowledge claims this is part of (Flyvbjerg, 2002). They are seemingly in possession of ‘hard’ knowledge which is translatable into quantifiable measures and which therefore gains an upper hand early on in the formative stages of the urban development process and becomes prioritised before other types of ‘softer’ knowledge which is understood as value-​laden and more difficult to account for (Tamm Hallström, 2015). This is particularly noticeable in the contemporary context of market liberalism wherein knowledge claims which are not based on profit-​maximisation have difficulty in sustaining their worth (Lamont, 2012). Our research, however, indicates that to a large extent this ‘hard knowledge’, for example, the mastery of procedures of property valuation, is not as technically advanced as one might imagine. Somewhat to the contrary, we would like to suggest that a large part of the power of the development engineers lies in their ‘strategic ignorance’ (see, for example, McGoey, 2012) of other aspects and goals pertaining to the urban development process in addition to profit and quantity maximisation, which in themselves rarely conflict. Having such a clearly formulated goal frame, and quite simple quantitative metrics of their achievement makes it much easier to prioritise among projects and the desirability of various options, than for instance the planners in the City Planning Office, who see their professional role as a much vaguer weighing of various incommensurable and difficult-​to-​ measure goals and values against each other, such as those pertaining to, for example, ecological and social sustainability.

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What are the consequences of this influence? As evinced in the previous section, the resultant narrow focus on profit and quantity maximisation that is the upshot of the development engineers’ practice leads to a practical side-​lining and marginalisation of other political goals, such as those pertaining to social equality and ecological balanced developments. These goals, when (or even if) introduced further downstream in the development process, can only be addressed on the premises set by the previously negotiated agreements that solely aim at maximising the city’s revenue and number of housing units. Of course, formally, the democratic political process according to Swedish administrative law allows for numerous backstops and opportunities for revising or cancelling the agreed upon plans and the legal contracts between the municipality and the developers that underpin them. However, given that there are large amounts of time, money and goodwill invested in such negotiations by both sides to the deals, these agreements –​and their resultant plans –​appear to be only very rarely backtracked upon. The extent of such overturns and substantial revisions of initial agreements are methodologically challenging to reliably estimate, although our interviews with both elected officials and public servants also tentatively suggest that this therefore almost never occurs. To the extent that substantial revisions are introduced further downstream in the process, this generally appears to amount to the shifting of some part of the development to another local site, rather than the complete dismissal or reorientation of plans. Finally, at the ‘end of pipeline’, the production of a materially manifest urban environment with specific characteristics, the narrow focus on profitability has led to a radical driving up of property prices in Stockholm. From initially having been introduced as a political means of providing cheap land access for the development of affordable housing for all, in the 1990s the public landownership in Stockholm was reimagined as a potential major source of direct incomes for the city’s budget. The subsequent shift from a focus on long-​running ground leases for rental housing, which in effect retained public long-​ term control of the land, the priority is now to sell off land for the development of owner-​occupied condominiums.2 Due to the market pricing of such owner-​occupied housing, in contrast to the level of rents which is controlled, this means that many economically weak groups are excluded from the segments of the housing market that are currently being expanded. With the failure of imagined ‘filtering’ mechanisms to materialise, this shift is by many commentators being

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seen as one of the main factors behind the present housing crisis in Stockholm, in which particularly economically and socially less privileged groups today are experiencing difficulties in finding any form of permanent residence within the Stockholm area. Further, when housing is nonetheless constructed in less privileged areas, the profit demand leads to the construction of substandard surrounding public urban environments, according to the logic that when the revenues from land sales are lower, the local budget for investments in public amenities must correspond to this fact, so as not to incur a financial loss for the city on a per-​project basis. Could the influence of the urban development engineers be thought of as part of a ‘new urban technocracy’? To answer this question, an important definition pertains to how we understand the ‘old’ urban technocracy. Somewhat crudely put, the image of the traditional urban technocrat has historically focused on the planner-​architect, whose influence was based upon claims to privileged expert knowledge regarding the functioning of integrated urban systems (even though it repeatedly turned out that these knowledge claims were perhaps somewhat spurious and inflated). Similar to the technocratic planner-​architects of yesteryear, the emerging professional category of development engineers also appear to have their basis of influence to some degree founded upon claims of access to an expert body of knowledge. However, this body of knowledge does not pertain to the supposed optimisation of the functionality of urban environments, but rather relates to the optimisation of financial gains from land ownership and urban development. So while the urban development engineers today occupy a central position of influence in the urban development process which, just like the traditional planner-​architect, is founded upon and legitimised by claims to expert knowledge, their role is not imagined to be that of optimiser of the performance of urban systems, but rather of economic profitability. Another interesting question relates to whether urban development engineers could at all be considered an ‘expert profession’ in the same sense of, for example, the traditional architect-​planner. Although many development engineers appear to come from a background in engineering more generally and land surveying specifically, this is not an absolute demand. Further, the lack of a professional organisation, accreditation and any form of code of conduct suggests that the development engineer is perhaps best understood as a professional role rather than a fully-​fledged profession per se. This in turn implies that

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the formal loyalty of development engineer lies completely with her or his employer rather than with some (however vaguely understood) ‘public interest’. A slight complication, however, emerges with the insight that development engineers often transition back and forth between the public and private sector in their professional careers, for example, between working for municipalities on the one hand, and on the other hand with the development companies that sit ‘across the table’ in negotiations with perhaps the same municipalities in relation to specific urban development projects. Relating to this, one can –​perhaps somewhat speculatively –​ask to what degree development engineers participating in negotiations with developers on behalf of municipalities also sometimes may harbour a personal interest in maintaining good personal relations with their supposed adversaries, with a view to facilitating future employment opportunities. Further, it is interesting that it appears as if municipally employed development engineers participating in negotiations with private developers may, due to their professional background and focus, actually hold an intuitively deeper understanding of the goals and priorities of their supposed adversaries than they do for their colleagues from other professions who are active within the municipal administration. In theory, understanding the motifs and logic of one’s opponent is of course crucial for success in negotiations, however one may also wonder to what degree such liminal positions may also generate situations in which development engineers come to act as corporate ‘Trojan horses’ within the municipal administrations, either by choice or by circumstance. This suspicion is, however, difficult to substantiate, and would need much more research before constituting anything other than pure speculation.

Conclusions To round off: while it might be expected that public land ownership would allow public authorities to promote a more ‘progressive’ and mindful urban development agenda than that which a more unrestrained property market would produce, our investigations have evinced that the category of public officials presently in the proverbial driving seat of the management of public land do not seem to harbour such aspirations. To the contrary, by treating the exchange value of land as the basis for investment distribution across the city, the Development Office has in effect personified any other profit-​seeking agent on the property market. To some degree, what the Stockholm case (yet again) evinces are signs of a neoliberal politics of urban development, performed

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through the ‘technification’ of admittedly contentious political issues. Thus, by merely focusing on optimising the city’s performance as a profit-​and output-​maximising market actor, aiming at maximising the returns of the ‘owners’ of the municipality imagined as citizens-​ as-​taxpayers, the practice of the development engineers fits neatly into the frame of practice that has been lambasted as ‘post-​political techno-​ managerialism’ (see, for example, Swyngedouw, 2009). Nonetheless, we also feel that it is important not to take such a development for granted or necessary, but to also ask how this has come to be. Is it a historical necessity or the result of a conscious strategy? Our research shows that none of these sets of explanations appear to provide a completely satisfactory answer. Rather, our findings point towards the role of a series of historical contingencies and conveniences that come together in the formation of the present arrangements. The introduction of the market-​led model of urban development named the ‘Stockholm Model’ made good political sense even from a ‘progressive’ perspective when introduced by the Social Democrats in City Hall in the mid-​1990s. This administrative innovation set the development engineers in a central gatekeeper position with regards to what projects actually came to make its way through the urban development process, and in what format; also further setting the premises of engagement for all those other professional groups with their specific matters of concern that came to be involved in the process further downstream. So who is to be blamed for the now increasingly apparent lacunae and adverse effects of this administrative arrangement? The development engineers themselves? We would suggest otherwise. Of course, any professional must take responsibility for their own individual actions –​ but we believe that it is further of crucial importance not to see the emerging power of the development engineers as the fundamental cause of the direction that urban development has taken in Stockholm, but rather as a symptom of an emerging entrepreneurial public land management regime. Perhaps those who are ultimately responsible for this modus of operation are those who would have the formal power to forcefully contest this, but nonetheless choose to make themselves comfortable with the current arrangement –​that is, the political majority and opposition in City Hall. It is in our eyes given that it is with them that the primary political responsibility rests to again remake the purpose of public landownership in Stockholm into a political rather than a narrowly technical question. It also appears as if the present political majority in City Hall has cautiously begun to recognise these problems, and are currently manoeuvering to attempt to generate the bureaucratic leeway to do something about this, by

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exploring new ways to more directly place centre-​stage questions of, for example, ‘social sustainability’ and housing affordability in the urban development process, also at an early stage. However, it remains to be seen how much effort and prestige they are prepared to really invest in forcing through such a fundamental change, and if so, to what degree they are successful in this ambition. Acknowledgements We wish to thank the Higher Seminar at the KTH Division of Urban and Regional Studies  –​and particularly Andy Karvonen, Patrik Tornberg and Sabina Edelman  –​for their comments on an earlier version of this draft. As always –​the plethora of mistakes and omissions that this chapter undoubtedly contains is to be considered the sole responsibility of the authors. Notes 1 With the shift in political majority in Stockholm City Hall in 2014, the new governing coalition is presently trying to develop new administrative routines that aim towards introducing a more proactive planning approach. This new ‘area planning’ approach contrasts with the ‘Stockholm Model’ in that planners are to develop a common, holistic understanding of the development needs and limits of larger geographic areas before the city proceeds into discussions with developers. While there is currently a lot of discussion surrounding this shift, these routines have at present not reached the Development Office’s organisation and it seems that the ‘Stockholm Model’ still constitutes the default development procedure, and is also expected to remain so in the majority of cases in the near future. 2 These are formally generally administered according the Swedish law of housing cooperatives, but in effect generally function as private condominiums.

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PART V

New constellations of actors and the management and governance of contemporary cities

15

Smart cities, algorithmic technocracy and new urban technocrats Rob Kitchin, Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans, Liam Heaphy and Darach Mac Donncha

Introduction Over the past decade, many cities have adopted policies and rolled out programmes and projects designed to transform them into a ‘smart city’. It is clear from the plethora of initiatives underway globally that the idea and ideals of smart cities are quite broadly conceived, with enterprises ranging from those: aimed at changing the nature of urban regulation and governance through the use of data-​driven systems that make the city knowable and controllable in new, dynamic, reactive ways; to digital systems that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of city services, increase the economic productivity, competitiveness and innovation of businesses, and drive economic growth and urban development; to ICT-​enabled schemes that enhance environmental sustainability and urban resilience; to technology-​led approaches that improve quality of life and promotes a citizen-​centric model of development which fosters social innovation, civic engagement and social justice (Townsend, 2013; Kitchin, 2014). In all these cases, digital technologies are front-​and-​centre as a vital ingredient for addressing the major issues facing city managers, urban citizens and industry leaders. Digital technologies are seen as a key means of providing solutions to urban problems (see Table 15.1), both in terms of instrumental issues such making traffic flow more freely or increasing the efficiency of service delivery, but also wider substantive issues such as increasing resilience, sustainability, civic participation and innovation. Indeed, whatever the challenge, technology is increasingly being positioned and deployed as the optimum means to resolve that challenge, rather than through specific or wider policy initiatives and programmes, politics and deliberative democracy,  or  citizen

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Planning and Knowledge Table 15.1: Smart city technologies Domain

Example technologies

Government

E-​government systems; city operating systems; performance management systems; urban dashboards

Security and emergency services

Centralised control rooms; digital surveillance; predictive policing; coordinated emergency response

Transport

Intelligent transport systems; integrated ticketing; smart travel cards; bikeshare; real-​time passenger information; smart parking; logistics management; transport apps

Energy

Smart grids; smart meters; energy usage apps; smart lighting

Waste

Compactor bins and dynamic routing/​collection

Environment

Sensor networks (for example, pollution, noise, weather; land movement; flood management)

Buildings

Building management systems; sensor networks

Homes

Smart meters; app controlled smart appliances

Civic

Various apps; open data; volunteered data/​hacks

Source: Kitchin, 2016b

interventions. In other words, a technocratic, ‘solutionist’ approach to running cities is widely being adopted (Greenfield, 2013; Kitchin, 2014). The adoption of smart city technologies, across a range of urban domains, are then, we argue in this chapter, at the vanguard of producing a new urban technocracy. Accompanying and facilitating the creation of smart cities and its technocratic ethos and approach is the rise of a new set of urban technocrats (for example, chief innovation/​technology/​data officers, project managers, consultants, designers, engineers, change-​management civil servants and academics), supported by a range of stakeholders (for example, private industry, lobby groups, philanthropists, politicians, civic tech bodies), and events (for example, various smart city expos, workshops, hackathons) and governance arrangements (for example, smart city advisory boards). In this chapter, we examine the technocracy of smart cities and the set of urban technocrats that promote and implement their use. We first set out the new technocracy at work and the forms of technocratic governance and governmentality it enacts. We then detail how this technocracy is supported by a new smart city epistemic community of technocrats that is aligned with a wider set of smart city interest groups to form a powerful ‘advocacy coalition’ (Sabatier and Jenkins-​Smith, 1993) that works at different scales. In the final section, we consider the translation of the ideas and practices of this advocacy coalition into the

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policies and work of city administrations. In particular, we consider the reasons why smart city initiatives and its associated technocracy are yet to become fully mainstreamed and the smart city mission successfully realised in cities across the globe.

An algorithmic technocracy As detailed in the opening chapter of this volume, technocracy is government-led and performed by ‘competent’, knowledgeable experts, in contrast to democracy in which elected officials make decisions based on experience and politics (Savini and Raco, Chapter  1, this volume). In essence, technical experts gain power to control how governance is organised and performed, replacing politicians and directing the activities of generalist civil servants. In turn, governance becomes more technocratic in nature, underpinned by scientific principles and expert knowledge and enacted through technical measures, methods and specialist technologies (Liu, 2015). Within a technocracy there are moves to align competences and expert experience with the management of society and the delivery of services, and to develop and institutionalise technical and administrative systems that will successfully encapsulate expert knowledge to deliver desired outcomes. For Savini and Raco (Chapter 1, this volume) the creation and maintenance of a technocracy is achieved through three analytic pillars:  ways to tackle urban issues are abstracted and codified into knowledge that become institutionalised within programmes of action; particular technocratic logics for tackling specific issues are positioned as the legitimate approach to be deployed by generalists; instrumental knowledge and forms of action are imposed on the normative processes of politics so that they define public interest with a goal-​orientated rationality that subverts democratic governance. Smart city initiatives are all about introducing and embedding a particular form of urban technocracy designed to fundamentally shift the nature of urban governance to a highly technocratic and prescriptive approach  –​ what Dodge and Kitchin (2007) term ‘automated management’. That is, governance is ceded to software systems which administer governance in an ‘automated, automatic, autonomous’ means, with systems directly regulating service delivery and citizen behaviour. Here, following Savini and Raco’s terms, expert knowledge is abstracted and codified into algorithms that are amalgamated to create smart city technologies (see Table 15.1); these technologies can be slotted into the usual practices and programmes of existing city departments and used by generalists; and the instrumental

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rationality of the technologies are promoted and sold as the most effective means to tackle urban issues (such as congestion, crime, energy-​use, public service delivery). In effect, the smart city is one underpinned by a form of algorithmic technocracy that implements new forms of algorithmic governance. There are two key transitions at work. The first is the degree to which governance becomes automated and autonomous and the role of people in enacting technocratic systems. Technocracy has always been accompanied by technical and technological systems through which governance is enacted, but these systems have consisted of human-​ in-​the-​loop enterprises; that is, people perform the key decision-​ making role. With new forms of automated management algorithms identify patterns and relationships and enact regulation, with systems becoming human-​on-the-​loop (the system is automated, but under the oversight of a human operator who can actively intervene) or human-​off-​the-​loop (algorithms work autonomously without human oversight) in nature. The second is the emergence of a new form of governmentality  –​what Vanolo (2014) terms ‘smartmentality’. As we have argued elsewhere, this form of governmentality seeks to use ubiquitous computing to shift the governmental logic of regulatory systems from surveillance and discipline to capture and control (Kitchin et al, 2017). In other words, through automated management urban governmentality is shifting from subjectification –​moulding subjects and restricting action –​to modulating affects, desires and opinions, and inducing action within prescribed comportments. Here, computational systems, such as automated traffic control, nudge behaviour implicitly and explicitly through the sequencing of traffic lights, rather than inducing (self)discipline (Braun, 2014; Krivỳ, 2016). From this perspective, the city increasingly becomes a system of technologically-​ mediated and automated technocratic systems. This shift to algorithmic technocracy has also been accompanied by a shift from a social contract between the state and citizens to corporate contract wherein city services are delivered through public–​private partnerships or private entities only (Kitchin, 2014; Sadowski and Pasquale, 2015). Smart city rhetoric and initiatives promote intensive collaborations between public sector bodies and other stakeholders, such as industry, NGOs and academia, and actively build on neoliberal arguments concerning the limitations of public sector competencies, inefficiencies in service delivery, and the need for marketisation of state services and infrastructures (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Greenfield, 2013; Kitchin, 2014).

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Public authorities, it is argued, lack the core skills, knowledges and capacities to address pressing urban issues and maintain critical services and infrastructures, which are becoming more socially and technically complex and require multi-​tiered specialist interventions (that is, technocratic solutions). Instead, they need to draw on the competencies held within industry in particular that possess sufficient expertise to guide city administrators and can deliver better city services through public–​private partnerships, leasing, deregulation and market competition, or outright privatisation. The logic of a reliable, low-​cost, universal government provision in the public interest is supplemented or replaced by provision through the market, driven in part or substantively by private interests (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Collier et al, 2016).

Smart city technocrats, an epistemic community and advocacy coalitions A decade ago, there were few professionals in any stakeholder group (city administrations, industry, academia) who would prefix their title with the words ‘smart city’ (for example, ‘smart city project manager’). Moreover, within city administrations there would have been hardly any CIOs (Chief Information Officer  –​a senior executive officer responsible for IT, including operations and strategy), CTOs (Chief Technology Officer  –​a senior executive focused on technological developments in an organisation, including research and development), or CDOs (Chief Data Officer –​an executive position responsible for the governance and use of data across an organisation); posts that are presently strongly aligned to the smart city mission in those cities that have appointed them. Over the past ten years, the situation has changed in many cities, with city administrations employing new technical, operational and policy staff aligned to a smart city agenda, including data coordinators/​managers, data scientists, designers, policy specialists, software engineers and IT project managers. Many of these new technocrats are recruited from industry or academia, seeking to bring specialist knowledge and skills into an organisation, and act as new ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ (Wejs, 2014), driving internal change in how city administrations work. Beyond city administrations there has been a very large growth in consultancies offering specialist smart city services, employing a raft of new smart city ‘experts’. Similarly, tech companies have created new smart city units/​divisions and universities have founded smart city research centres.

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This rapidly growing set of smart city professionals within city administrations, governments (local, national, supranational), NGOs, industry and academia suggest that a new smart cities epistemic community has been formed over the past decade. In his seminal work, Peter Haas (1992: 2) defined an epistemic community as a ‘network of professionals with recognised expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-​area’. Such a community of knowledge-​based experts help decision-​makers identify and define the problems they face along with possible policy solutions, and also to assess policy outcomes –​in this sense, they are key to promoting and sustaining technocracies. Haas (1992) details that epistemic communities share a set of knowledge, normative and casual beliefs, and practices, and work in common action to forward a particular vision and policy response. They seek to provide contextual framing, advice and social learning to navigate a complex and uncertain social-​economic political landscape (Dunlop, 2013), and exercise influence through their claims to insightful and authoritative knowledge that has high utility for decision-​and policymakers who maybe lacking sufficient expertise to make informed choices (Haas, 2001). If successful, the community’s ideas and practices become institutionalised over time, continuing to shape how problems and solutions are identified and tackled. What is important Haas (1992) argues is that epistemic communities differ from interest groups or policy networks through their claim to authoritative expertise. That said, epistemic communities are not necessarily composed of technical and theoretical knowledge experts: they can also emerge from communities of practice which connect experience and practical knowledge, such as in the case of ‘expert amateurs’ and communities engaged in ‘citizen sensing’ and peer-​to-​peer collaboration (Gabrys, 2014; Tironi and Criado, 2015). Given that in general terms smart city professionals claim and are often given authoritative voice, share a set of knowledge, beliefs, practices and aim to craft a particular vision and policy response to urban issues, it thus seems fair to conclude that they constitute an epistemic community. That said, it is also the case that there is a blurred line between a smart city epistemic community and smart city vested interest groups. The two overlap with respect to how they think urban issues should be addressed through technocratic technological solutions, and they work in concert to form an ‘advocacy coalition’ –​that is, a coalition of ‘people from a variety of positions (elected and agency officials, interest group leaders, researchers) who share a particular belief system’ and ‘who show a non-​trivial degree of

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coordinated activity over time’ (Sabatier and Jenkins-​Smith, 1993: 25). However, while theoretically an epistemic community does not have direct pecuniary incentives to seek to shape the policy landscape, being driven by normative beliefs, some elements of advocacy coalitions are also motivated by a desire to provide solutions and generate profit. In the latter case, not only are substantive policy advice (means) and policy proposals (ends) being proffered (usually for a hefty fee), but a pathway to a particular solution is usually provided by private enterprise (Dunlop, 2013). As such, the kinds of advice given by a tech/​consultancy company such as IBM is far from impartial and not simply rooted in authoritative knowledge expertise, a particular technical approach, and a belief in the power of technology as the most effective way to run cities and fix urban problems. With respect to the smart city, an epistemic community and advocacy coalition is evident at four scales: global, supra-​national, national and local. In just a handful of years, a number of sizable global smart city consortia have been formed consisting of aligned actors who share a common vision with regards to how cities should be managed and urban issues addressed. Each consortium makes claims to provide city administrations with authoritative, neutral, expert advice, resources and partnerships that can cut through the complexities of managing cities to provide guidance on how to use digital technologies to solve difficult issues/​problems. For example, the ‘Smart City Council’ (SCC) is a coalition of partners strongly advocating for the adoption of smart city policy and interventions. The SCC consists of 21 ‘Lead Partners’ (including IBM, Cisco, SAS, Schneider Electric, Deloitte, Oracle; Microsoft), 21 ‘Associate Partners’ (including Intel, Huawei, Siemens, Panasonic), and 70 ‘Advisors’ (including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), International Telecommunication Union (ITU), World Bank Urban Advisory Unit, and a number of university research centres). Collectively, the SCC provides a number of resources, events and task forces designed to promote smart city ideas and create social learning. Working somewhat in parallel with the global networks/​coalitions, which are primarily driven by business interests, are supra-​national, governmental-​led policy and programmatic initiatives. This is particularly the case in the European Union where a number of institutional networks and high-​level programmes have been driving the smart cities agenda through a set of institutional arrangements, funding schemes, networking events, and conferences and workshops. These networks and programmes, and their strategies and mechanisms, are

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overseen through management boards and scientific advisory boards primarily staffed by a mix of academic and public sector actors who act as an epistemic community. For example, ‘The European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities’ (EIP-​SCC) seeks to bring together ‘together cities, industry, SMEs, banks, research and other smart city actors’1 in order ‘to improve urban life through more sustainable integrated solutions’.2 By 2015 the EIP-​SCC documented 370 commitments (which it defines as measurable and concrete smart city engagements/​actions) with 4,000 public and private partners from 31 countries. These commitments have received hundreds of millions of euros in investment to embed smart city doctrine in city administrations and implement on-​the-​g round smart city initiatives. While the global and supra-​national scales provide a transnational means for the knowledge of epistemic communities and advocacy coalitions to circulate and propagate, it is at the national and local level that the grounding of their ideas takes place through their embedding in institutional structures, appointment of personnel at different scales of government (for example, national-​level departments and agencies, and regional and local/​municipal authorities), and the development of specific policies and deployments. In the Irish context, there are a number of well-​funded interdisciplinary research institutes and centres that specialise in smart cities research that actively partner with numerous industry collaborators and work with Irish cities, including extensive testbedding and trialling. In addition, the recently launched (Dec 2016) ‘All Ireland Smart Cities Forum’ brings together representatives from seven Irish cities, five from the South (Cork, Dublin, Limerick, Galway, Waterford) and two from the North (Belfast and Derry) to share insights, support collaborative research, and work with stakeholders on collective city priorities. More locally, Smart Dublin and Cork Smart Gateway are local authority initiatives that seek to guide smart city projects within LA departments and work with ‘smart technology providers, researchers and citizens to solve city challenges and improve city life’.3

Bridging the ‘last mile’ problem Over the past decade the drive to create smart cities has emerged as a potent agenda, with many cities adopting smart city initiatives and rolling out smart city programmes. The smart cities movement is explicitly an exercise in technocracy: of transforming urban governance and governmentality into an algorithmically mediated enterprise, underpinned and supported by expert knowledge, an associated

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epistemic community, and advocacy coalition that operates across scales to produce policy mobility and a global enterprise. However, while smart city policy and programmes are being implemented in many cities, it is clear that they are fragmented in nature and the smart city vision is only partially embedded within city administrations at present. Consequently, the ideas, policies and technologies of the smart city movement have so far only gained partial traction in driving how city bureaucracies manage and govern their jurisdictions and approach tackling urban issues. Moreover, they are being greeted with apathy or resistance by some staff. In other words, it seems that promoters and technocrats of the smart city vision are having difficulty ‘bridging the last mile’ from theory and vision to fully mainstreamed policies and adoption across organisations. Here, we want to consider the reasons for these ‘last mile’ difficulties in ameliorating the work of epistemic communities and advocacy coalitions. City administrations are to a large degree like an oil tanker. They are large, complex organisations consisting of many departments, with entrenched structures, ways of working and established legacy systems that create a high degree of embedded path dependency. They are also full of internal politics, fiefdoms and competing interests. As such, they are not easy to reorientate with respect to shifting how units and staff think about and undertake their work, especially when they directly challenge the paradigmatic training and ideals of professionals schooled to think and act in certain ways (for example, planners, engineers, architects, educators, social workers, community development workers). A  smart city approach promises to create a more nimble, flexible, data-​driven, efficient, horizontal organisation, cutting across departmental silos and enabling joined-​up responses to urban issues. They thus promise to disrupt the status quo and radically change working conditions, including leading to redundancies. Smart city ideas and policy thus run into internal inertia and resistance by both managers and workers. In addition, they can run into external critique from academics, NGOs, community groups and politicians (especially on the Left), who hold different views as to the supposed benefits and underlying ideology of the smart city agenda. Part of the critique of the smart city epistemic community is that while they claim to be able to tackle perceived problems, they have a limited perspective shaped by their disciplinary expertise and lack sufficient grounded domain knowledge of an issue (Cullen, 2016; Kitchin, 2016b), often treating the city as a technical system as opposed to a multifaceted place. The result is a form of technological solutionism in which digital technologies are positioned as the answer to all issues, regardless of

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context and history. Consequently, there has been a marked push-​back against the ideas and ideals of the smart city in recent years, especially concerning the role of citizens, the technocratic nature of governance and its instrumental rationality, and the marketisation of public services (Greenfield, 2013; Kitchin, 2014; Datta, 2015). Fuelling resistance and doubts is a sense that the majority of smart city technology is not yet mature and unsuitable for mainstreaming. Technologies are still being developed and tested. This is borne out by the large number of pilot projects and what has been termed ‘experimental’ or ‘testbed’ urbanism or ‘living labs’. Practically all EU-​ funded smart city projects have this status, being initiatives to scope out, produce and implement proof-​of-​concepts, and share knowledge about efforts, rather than being market-​ready and proven to work in practice. As such, while there is a general consensus on the utility of digital technologies for tackling urban issues, there is no universal agreement on the form of technical solution or related factors such as the role of citizens in shaping how issues are tackled (Townsend, 2013). In other words, smart city ideas and technology are still very much in development phase and investing in them poses a risk for city administrations charged with providing stability, certainty and reliability in the delivery of city services. Fostering scepticism is a lack of trust among many city administrators as to whether a smart city approach will work in practice. Cities have a long history of purchasing technologies that are costly and do not always deliver on their promises. This includes the first wave of smart city products sold to them that bound them into unfavourable contracts and supplied technical solutions that did not deliver on their promises. An additional concern relates to financing and the amount of perceived value for money spent and the return on investment. Many smart city solutions are expensive to procure and service, yet it is not always clear what the return on investment will be beyond promises that a service will improve or an issue be ameliorated in some way. Moreover, it is clear that the same technology will be cheaper and better –​in terms of spec, functionality, performance –​in a few years, so it is difficult to know when to make the initial investment. Many cities are currently operating in a condition of austerity, so finances for new investments are constrained. As such, although some technologies could save the city money over the long term, the city still must find the initial investment capital. This is why so much effort is now being expended on new business models for smart city investments. Another issue is competing demands for finance with a limited budget. Many services are statutory obligations and unless the smart city technology

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can address these critical issues, they will have trouble competing for attention and resources. In addition, the epistemic communities and advocacy coalitions coalescing around the field of smart cities, in true technocratic fashion, seem to little appreciate the need for democracy, openness and public consultation in city management:  mostly, executive decisions are made outside of democratic process and city managers green-​light smart city projects with little political, media or public oversight or feedback. In the case of Dublin, local politicians and the public have been ignored almost entirely in the formulation of Smart Dublin and the development and rollout of smart city initiatives. Indeed, nearly all decisions for selecting and implementing smart city initiatives seem to have bypassed public consultation and political debate. As such, the focus of the epistemic community and advocacy has been exclusively at the city bureaucracy. This is perhaps no surprise given that the city has no mayor and is largely run by the CEOs of the four local authorities.

Conclusion We have argued in this chapter that over the past decade there has been a turn to smart city initiatives by city administrations. These initiatives strengthen technocratic approaches to governing city life and delivering urban services by tasking their implementation to technical systems designed by knowledgeable experts and run by a new suite of urban technocrats. These systems appear to operate beyond policymaking processes. They have an autonomous position built through automated mechanisms of information processing that end up having an impact on democratic processes. These systems heavily input public policymaking through the production and transmission of information, processed through unknown and unaccountable algorithms that policymakers actively mobilise as legitimate knowledge in order to build political justifications of their policies. Moreover, the reliance of smart city systems on ubiquitous computing and the generation and processing of urban big data has produced a new form algorithmic technocracy that enables a shift in governmentality from regimes focused on discipline to that of control. Algorithmic technocracy is highly prescriptive and technocratic, exercising forms of automated management in which people are increasingly removed from mediating the practices of governance and delivery of services with power ceded to algorithms to control domains and make decisions. The creation, and often the operation of smart city initiatives, is predominately undertaken by private enterprises,

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meaning that algorithmic technocracy is market-​led and there is a creeping corporatisation and privatisation of urban governance. The rollout of algorithmic technocracy has been accompanied and facilitated by a new wave of urban technocrats and a powerful new advocacy coalition that works across scales to promote adoption. In a short space of time a new cadre of smart city technocrats –​CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, data scientists, designers, policy specialists, software engineers and project managers  –​have been appointed to roles in city administrations, and organisational structures have been re-​jigged to accommodate them. These technocrats are working with, and supported by, a panoply of external professionals within institutional bodies, academia and companies, who provide a range of services and enact social learning through consultancy, professional development training, conferences and workshops, cooperation in project work, and hackathons. While there are communities of scholars and ‘expert amateurs’ who forward an alternative vision of smart cities, particularly a version that is more citizen-​focused, -​engaged or -​run, the dominant paradigm of smart cities is still rooted in a technocratic formulation, albeit one that now acknowledges the need for citizen participation, though very much from a civic paternalist or stewardship perspective (Shelton and Lodato, 2016). Collectively the smart city epistemic community and advocacy coalition is starting to reshape urban policy, how funding is distributed and spent, and how city government works. However, due to a number of issues –​not least of which is the relative immaturity of the policy and technical solutions being offered, along with institutional inertia –​ smart city ideas and ideals have only become partially embedded in city administrations. In effect, while the smart city movement has captured some of the bureaucratic and political terrain at local, national and supra-​national scales (for example, some mayors, government departments, EU bodies) it has a ‘last mile’ problem in many cities. The challenge then for smart city advocates is to bridge this ‘last mile’, persuading key decision-​makers that the smart city approach to managing cities and tackling urban issues through algorithmic technocracy will radically improve the lives of citizens and help businesses thrive. Such a drive seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future as the smart city epistemic community and advocacy coalition show few signs of abating. Rather, they are continuing to grow as ever more technical and scientific academics and companies turn their attention to urban issues and cities further embrace technological solutions to urban management and governance. Nonetheless, the last mile issues we detail will not dissipate in the short term. How this will

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ultimately play out is difficult to pre-​determine, but it is fair to say that the new technocrats are unlikely to be leaving city government any time soon, many ICT solutions already deployed are embedded in city governance (for example, intelligent transport systems) and unlikely to be decommissioned, and large investment is being ploughed into developing and trialling new technology for deployment across domains (for example, transport, energy, economy, environment, homes). As such, algorithmic technocracy and its associated governmentality is set to be a growing feature of our everyday urban lives. Acknowledgements This chapter draws upon a paper ‘Smart cities, epistemic communities, advocacy coalitions and the ‘last mile’ problem’ published in the journal ‘it –​Information Technology’. The research funding for this paper was provided by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award, ‘The Programmable City’ (ERC-​2012-​AdG-​323636). Notes https://​eu-​smartcities.eu/​about 2 http://​ec.europa.eu/​eip/​smartcities/​ 3 http://​smartdublin.ie/​about/​ 1

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Planning by numbers: affordable housing and viability in England1 Antonia Layard

Few modern planning practices illustrate the growing quantitative technocracy in the English planning system as clearly as viability assessments for affordable housing. The numerical hegemony in calculating for planning gain in general, and affordable housing in particular, is changing the nature of the decision being made. No longer do questions about the site, the planning context and the overall viability of the project prevail, instead, there is a singular calculation of whether there is sufficient profit in the development or not. This is the decision-​making lens of the developer, using numbers that are neither neutral nor objective. In housebuilding as elsewhere, concerns about the apparently apolitical character of technocratic modes of thought and action have emerged as critical social questions. In February 2017, an agreement was reached between the Labour run London Borough of Haringey and Far East Consortium International (FEC), a Hong Kong based developer, for the redevelopment of Hornsey Town Hall in Haringey, North London. The redevelopment is to restore the building and create a new arts centre, with community access and café/​restaurants as well as improvements to the Town Hall Square with continued public use. To pay for this, the redevelopment is to include a boutique hotel (aparthotels) and luxury flats yet the redevelopment of Hornsey Town Hall was not, initially, to include any social or affordable housing as part of the proposed 146 home development. This was despite the London Borough of Haringey having a planning policy that targets 40 per cent affordable housing in new developments (which would give at least 59 new affordable homes) (Haringey, 2017b). Following the release of the viability statement, and its unredacting by campaigners thanks to faulty document production, three councillors wrote an open letter to FEC (including the Chair

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of the Planning Sub Committee) stating that they ‘think it would be completely unacceptable for the development not to have any affordable housing and will not support the application unless this is addressed’ (Crouch End Labour Party, 2017). Negotiations are on-​going at the time of writing (late 2017) and it seems that a little affordable housing  –​ perhaps 11 apartments  –​ will be provided through the scheme (Haringey LBC, 2017b). How –​in London, the most expensive place to live in England –​ could a new development, with luxury housing, initially come forward without any affordable housing? The answer to this question lies in the use of viability assessment, a calculative procedure used to determine whether a development is viable (essentially, profitable) if it contributes affordable housing. To determine this question of profitability, viability assessors (generally private consultants instructed by developers and local authorities) add the costs of a development (including build cost, professional fees, finance, community infrastructure levy, contingency funds and other unilateral commitments) plus around 20 per cent profit of the gross development value of the project and subtract this from the ‘residual land value’. If this residual site value is higher than the threshold land value (essentially ‘an estimate of the value at which a landowner would be prepared to sell’ (Wyatt and McAllister, 2013: 2)) then the policy target (often, as in Haringey, affordable housing) is considered viable. If the residual value is calculated as lower than the threshold value then there is no requirement to produce any affordable housing as part of the development. The number says ‘no’. This calculative approach to viability illustrates the technocracy currently so prevalent in the English planning system. A reliance on numbers runs throughout the framework: in objective assessments of housing need (OANs), efficiency targets for local planning authorities, governance by statistics and annual reports. To use Hacking’s words:  ‘the avalanche of numbers…is not merely a quantitative fact but a change in our feeling about the sort of world in which we live’ (1982: 282). It is viability assessments, however, that are so dominated by commercial calculative practices, particularly profit and loss. These techniques are not there by chance, for as Bevir and Rhodes observe: ‘policies are sites of struggles not just between strategic elites, but between all kinds of actors with different views and ideals, against the background of different traditions’ (2016: 12). Different elites have been able to incorporate ‘their’ preferred ways

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of decision-​making deep into the technicality of planning practice, in this case, housing developers. While Haringey could have insisted on a proportion of affordable housing when it contracted to sell the land at Hornsey Town Hall to FEC International, once the council had moved from vendor to local planning authority, however, they had to engage on calculative terms. Such outcomes are becoming more conventional in a housebuilding landscape increasingly dominated by economics, particularly a micro-​economic, site-​by-​site calculative analysis. Nationally, there is a clear ideological commitment to market provision of housing (in 2016–​1 7 approximately 17 per cent of new homes were constructed by housing associations and around 1.2 per cent by local authorities, with the remaining 82 per cent provided by the private developers (DCLG, 2017c)). One consequence of this is that volume housebuilders have significant influence in policy formation and the introduction of the quantitative formulation of viability in the 2012 National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) was a change many commercial developers favoured. This often leaves local authorities in a difficult position, since affordable housing disputes rest with them in the absence of any national requirement on developers to build a set proportion of affordable units. While the recent White Paper (tellingly entitled Fixing the Broken Housing Market), proposes a minimum of 10 per cent ‘affordable home ownership products’ (however defined) on sites over 0.5 hectares or 10 units (DCLG, 2017a, para A. 126), this has yet to be legally implemented. Until a national requirement emerges, each local authority must draft its own supplementary planning guidance and do its best to negotiate as many affordable properties from developers as possible. Of course, what is ‘affordable’ can be chimerical, if it is tied to the formula of 80 per cent average rent. Viability assessments are governed by planning and housing policies, particularly provisions in the 2012 NPPF. They rest on ‘trans-​economic’ questions, enabling the calculation to operate as a developer’s defence but providing no space to debate key conventions (How much profit? How is land value calculated?) with numbers governed by the market rather than by public institutions. This lack of governance is itself, of course, a regulatory choice. For ideological reasons national governments have preferred housing to be built on market terms, both on the ground and, increasingly, within the planning regime. The calculative rationality that underpins the decision-​making is also an ideological choice.

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Calculative practices and affordable housing Viability calculations rest on the practice of securing planning obligations (currently embodied in s106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990). Combining planning permission with agreements has been a marked feature of English planning law and practice since the 1909 Housing, Town Planning &c. Act, particularly before the introduction of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. The 1947 Act replaced an emphasis on plan-​making with retrospective effect on developers, with possible claims of compensation, to nationalising development rights permitting them (broadly) in accordance with plans, thereby bringing the ‘development control child in from the cold’ (Crow, 1996). Very broadly, planning obligations are said to perform two functions, first, to internalise the social cost of development (making it ‘acceptable in planning terms’) and second, to reflect the uplift in value to the landowner and/​or developer (since betterment taxes are not now collected). Once legislatively permitted, the range of obligations was outlined by successive planning policies, including in 2005 using financial information confidentially if there were disputes (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Circular 05/​05) and using viability assessments strategically for local authorities (DCLG, 2011). In 2010, the rules for planning obligations have been legislatively codified, stating that a local authority can agree a s106 agreement if ‘the obligation is –​(a) necessary to make the development acceptable in planning terms; (b) directly related to the development; and (c) fairly and reasonably related in scale and kind to the development’ (paragraph 122, Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010/​948). Since 2012, viability has been formally included as a material consideration in paragraph 173 of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which states that To ensure viability, the costs of any requirements likely to be applied to development, such as requirements for affordable housing, standards, infrastructure contributions or other requirements should, when taking account of the normal cost of development and mitigation, provide competitive returns to a willing landowner and willing developer to enable the development to be deliverable. This paragraph means that a developer can resist a request for a planning obligation agreement on the basis that it would make the development ‘unviable’. If permission is refused, the developer (but no one in the

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local community) can appeal (s78 TCPA 1990). A planning inspector (or the Secretary of State if he ‘recovers’ the appeal) can assess the viability of any proposed affordable housing, and can grant permission without a contribution. This structure of applying permission, appeals and the possibility of a planning obligation, is longstanding and has changed little from the introduction of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which first nationalised development rights in land. What has changed is the power relationship between a local authority and a developer. It is the local authority who, in times of austerity and sharp cuts in planning budgets and staff, is more likely to be ‘over a barrel’ in the duel of the spreadsheets. And while causation is incredibly difficult to pinpoint, this appears to be one reason for the continuing decline in the provision of affordable housing via s106 agreements. The annual number of new affordable homes declined by 2015/​16 to 16,452 new affordable homes, compared with almost double that number, 32,286, in 2008–​09 (for discussion see Brownill et al, 2017).

Technocracy and quantification Neither qualitative nor quantitative planning decision-​making operate in a vacuum. These limits to technocratic thinking were famously demonstrated by Alvin Weinberg in 1972, a nuclear physicist and Director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) at the time of the Manhattan Project (and long after). Weinberg coined the term ‘trans-​scientific’ to identify those ‘issues which arise in the course of the interaction between science or technology and society –​for example, the deleterious side effects of technology, or the attempts to deal with social problems through the procedures of science –​[which] hang on the answers to questions which can be asked of science and yet which cannot be answered by science’ (Weinberg, 1974: 209). Trans-​calculative questions require both calculative and non-​calculative answers as Weinberg explains: The strictly scientific issues –​whether, say, a rocket engine with enough thrust to support a manned moon shot can be built –​can in principle be settled by the usual institutional mechanisms of science, such as debate among the experts and critical review by peers. But what about the issues which go beyond science, on which the scientist has opinions which, however, do not carry the same weight as do his opinions where these are based on rigorous scientific evidence? (1974: 213)

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This insight is also crucial in order to understand viability calculations. Courts and planning inspectors rarely intervene in the fine-​g rain of disputed viability assessments, particularly the ‘market assumptions’ of accepted practice (generally around 20 per cent of profit on gross development value (GDV), borrowing rates (around 6–​7 per cent), contingency funds and timeframes (Crosby et al, 2013)). These private sector norms have become accepted in what are ostensibly decisions about planning obligations (and in earlier times might have been cast as betterment, the profit acquired from the uplift in land value as a consequence of a grant of planning permission). Once calculated, the assumptions are obscured in the calculation (whether or not the calculation is made public, as it often is not). And yet the assumptions at the heart of viability calculations –​How much borrowing? What rate of interest? Why include advisors’ fees? Why profit as 20 per cent of turnover? –​are, to draw on Weinberg’s phrase, ‘trans-​calculative’ or ‘trans-​economic’. They are, profoundly political and ideological in content, even if they are not labelled as such. Such ‘trans-​economic’ questions illustrate one of the main critiques of technocratic thinking, as knowledge practices that inherently face their own limits (Riles, 2004). Such limits to decision-​making have been clearly identified in fields as diverse as regulatory toxicology, pharmaceutical testing, banking and rating frameworks as well as nuclear governance. According to Demortain it is the ‘the cultural legitimacy of scientific knowledge in contemporary societies, the pervasiveness of the norms that define the nature of credible knowledge as well as the fields of practice from which these norms emerge’ as central to the way in which regulatory science trades on the virtues of ‘conventional science’ while making (often quite obscure) assumptions about exposure, uncertainty or indeterminacy (Demortain, 2017, 140). Scholars in science and technology studies emphasise that science contains undetermined and indeterminate questions (Jasanoff, 1990; Wynne, 1992) and uses boundary devices (Shackley and Wynne, 1996), to keep some questions off the agenda. Similarly, in viability assessments, so dependent on economics (‘the dismal science’), assumptions and caveats are rarely explicitly justified other than by reference to ‘commercial practice’. Asking why a developer should be entitled to around 20 per cent profit of the entire spend, is literally beyond debate.

Calculating viability The recent origins of viability in England are attributed to planning consultancies and entrepreneurial local civil servants in the early

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2000s (McAllister, 2017) before being introduced into the NPPF in 2012. There was innovation here. Yet generic calculative practices and questions about valuation were also at the heart of the Uthwatt Expert Committee on Compensation and Betterment, which reported in 1942. This war-​time committee (consisting of a judge, a barrister and a past and future president of the Institute of Chartered Surveyors) was imbued with a recognition that any postwar reconstruction and development should be to the ‘best national advantage’. The Committee was emphatic that planning ‘is not an end in itself; it is the instrument by which to secure that the best use is made of the available land in the interests of the community as a whole…It must advance with the condition of society it is designed to serve’ (p 12). From the 1940s until today, one central question has been identifying the correct value of land. The influential Harman Commission (Harman, 2012) suggested that it is the price paid for land that underpins whether a development is viable or not, yet this leads to affordable housing frequently being declared unviable if the price of land was simply too high (since local authorities have their affordable housing policy targets clearly published and displayed on their websites). Local authorities have been increasingly frustrated that it is the public sector who must take the brunt of ‘unviable’ projects, if affordable housing is refused on the basis of viability rather than the landowner or the developer (Islington Council, 2016), bearing the costs of any over-​payment. The price of land is the central number in viability calculations, incorporating inside it all the vagaries of valuation. In the absence of any government guidance on how to calculate viability (though the 2017 White Paper suggested this could be forthcoming (DCLG, 2017a)), the most popular current approach is for local authorities to use ‘existing use value + premium’ (EUV+) rather than market price as the basis for threshold land value. Existing use value alone (the approach proposed in 1942 by the Uthwatt Committee as a basis for proposed annual taxation) is unlikely to incentivise a landowner to sell. Market price alone can lead to gains for landowners and developers, without meeting the affordable housing policies set out by local authorities. The EUV+ compromise reflects the incentive required for the landowner to sell rather than hold onto the land and is increasingly influential in planning policy-​and decision-​making (for example, the Parkhurst Road Planning Appeal (Boniface, 2017)). The 2017 Greater London Authority Supplementary Planning Guidance, is also, for example, ‘explicit about the Mayor’s preference for using Existing Use Value Plus as the comparable Benchmark Land Value when assessing the viability of a proposal. The premium above Existing

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Use Value will be based on site specific justification reflecting the circumstances that apply’ (para 18). This models a qualitative –​trans-​ economic –​policy process that other local authorities can follow. It is, however, fighting numbers with numbers. This calculative complexity also obscures the question of why private developers should contribute affordable housing at all. For while infrastructure costs can be framed as the social costs of construction (new roads, schools or waste facilities for example) and are now covered by the Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010, affordable housing is harder to fit into the justification of internalising social costs. It remains discretionary, to be negotiated for. We appear to have lost the pre-​1947 broad commitment to collective and national interest from the planning system: that landowners and developers should make a contribution to reflect the uplift in land value as a consequence of planning permission is increasingly lost. Even though in this sense, s106 payments are a form of development tax, much of the detail is lacking as Wyatt and McAllister (2013, 8) note: ‘the percentage uplift from current use value to residual value is a form of development land value taxation and the proportion of completed scheme value would seem to be a simple heuristic rather than a logically based threshold value’. In other words, the calculations might be accurate but why are we doing them at all? The starting premise post-​2012 is that the development has to be viable for a developer, rather than the 1947 (and onwards) assumption that there should be some (financial) representation of the uplift gained by the landowner, land agent or developer as a result of the planning permission. Should the profit, which we accept developers should gain, come only from the housebuilding or can it also accrue from any increases in land prices as a consequence of planning permission? These questions currently remain unanswered. Yet to incentivise land speculation through viability calculations is a profoundly ideological move.

Transparency One of the longstanding ways in which experts have excluded participation is to blackbox decision-​making, arguing that the material is too complicated for non-​experts to understand and assess. This is an old debate, long-​established in environmental protection and pollution control. As Fischer writes: Scientists tend to draw a distinction between informed and rational science, on the one hand, and the far less

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informed and often emotional public on the other. In this respect, scientists have stood behind the customary understanding of science’s role in public affairs  –​that of disinterested and objective investigators gathering knowledge for the public benefit. Because public issues were often technical, scientists were called on to determine the facts on the grounds that they were disinterested parties to the particular outcome of inquiry and hence would be above controversy. Because science is ‘objective,’ it is seen to hold out the possibility of unifying contending sectors of society and politics, following the technocratic formula. (2004: 104) This is the same argument we see in viability –​while a figure may appear objective –​valuing land or determining appropriate profit are subjective and trans-​economic decisions. These arguments become even more contentious when there is a lack of transparency and, consequently, participation, in the decision-​ making process. Government guidance states that ‘[w]‌herever possible, applicants should provide viability evidence through an open book approach to improve the review of evidence submitted and for transparency’ (DCLG, 2017a: para 2.30). However, private developers –​ and local authorities –​frequently keep these calculations secret, arguing that they are commercially confidential, so that campaigners who have tried to require the publication of viability figures have struggled. While again the government said in the 2017 Housing White Paper that there would be further consultation on standardised open book s106 agreements, this has not yet emerged. At Hornsey Town Hall, the viability document submitted to Haringey LBC asserted that it was not viable to include any affordable housing in the development. In line with current commercial practices, many of the calculations were redacted (blocked out) on the basis that the figures were commercially sensitive. However, the viability assessment submitted by ULL Property acting for a shell company, Crouch End (FEC) Limited, created as a vehicle for FEC International, was ‘unredacted’ by campaigners, simply by cutting and pasting the document into a word processing file. This revealed the estimated costs, profits and residual land value. At Hornsey Town Hall, the viability assessment deemed that providing affordable housing would not be viable. This computer glitch was fortunate for the affordable housing campaigners. It was significant since, broadly, the courts have been

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resistant to the call of transparency, insisting on the importance of commercial confidentiality in large development projects. In R. (on the application of Perry) v Hackney LBC [2014] EWHC 3499 (Admin), for example, Paterson J.  rejected any claim that local councillors acted illegally by not consulting the viability information directly and by not requiring it to be made publicly available. Often, as Dehon (2015) notes, there is a practice of ‘double confidentiality’ here. ‘Local authorities take the view that viability assessments are so commercially confidential that they should not ordinarily be provided to Councillors, but instead sent to independent property consultants or chartered surveyors, who evaluate them on a confidential basis… Councillors and the public are given only headline versions of this evidence in officer reports’ (2015, 9). Since this is a matter of practice, with no legal requirement to keep such assessments private, some councillors are becoming more assertive but cultural practices are often deeply embedded. Rather than relying on judicial review remedies to compel publication by local authorities, the First Tier Tribunal of the Information Commissioner has taken a different tack. Since claims can be brought to the Information Commissioner under the English implementation of the 2004 Environmental Information Regulations (implementing Council Directive 2003/​4/​EC on public access to environmental information, implementing the 1998 Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-​Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters), this provides an opportunity of making a citizen’s rights to information a starting point. As a result, Information Commissioners have been able to ask broader questions than whether a claim in judicial review should be upheld against the local authority, investigating instead, whether citizens have a right to see these calculations. They have found for campaigners, making information publicly available in key disputes (Royal Borough of Greenwich vs ICO & Shane Brownie EA/​2014/​012 and RB and Clyne vs ICO & Lambeth) EA/​2016/​0012. More significantly still, since 2016, a few particularly engaged local authorities (notably, in London) are increasingly requiring developers to make their calculations publicly available (not just to the local authority but to citizens at large). The 2017 GLA Supplementary Planning Guidance on Viability states that: ‘given the importance of wider scrutiny and the direction of travel indicated by information tribunal decisions, the Mayor will treat information submitted as part of, and in support of, a viability assessment transparently’ (para 1.20). In only ‘exceptional circumstances’ will the public interest in disclosing

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the information be outweighed (para 1.22) (Mayor of London, 2017; see also Islington Council, 2016). There is a debate here about the characterisation of the information: is it planning information (conventionally transparent); or a commercial transaction (conventionally secret and protected)? In both cases there is a calculation. The difference, of course, depends on the location and identity of the questioner –​a concerned citizen, a local authority planning officer or a private developer or planning consultant, will take very different views of which category this information –​particularly numbers –​falls into. Donnay Haraway (1998: 189) famously rejected the ‘god-​trick’ of seeing everything from nowhere, a point John Law amplifies:  ‘vision always embodies specific optics, optics that vary from place to place and, for that matter, from species to species’ (Law, 2002: 41). So far, different actors and different legal regimes have taken different approaches. But for many, as long as viability assessments are not publicly released, these are ‘undemocratic numbers’ (Rose, 1991), doing secretive –​and highly ideological –​ work.

Conclusion In housebuilding as elsewhere, concerns about the apolitical character of technocratic modes of thought and action have emerged as critical social questions. At Hornsey Town Hall, the local authority has had to negotiate, under significant pressure from local campaigners, to try to compel FEC international to provide any affordable housing as part of the development. These calculative processes demonstrate how arguments about viability can impede a progressive negotiation and how important transparency is to public decision-​making (had the viability document not been ‘unredacted’, the arguments for even some affordable housing would have been almost impossible to make). Healey (2015a) identifies trends in how to do planning as well as the different intellectual contexts in which planning practices have been located. At the turn of the twentieth century, Healey notes, planning was focused on how to limit the ill-​effects of urbanisation and how to promote good urban and country living. By the 1960s and 1970s, a focus on rational planning processes and the implementation of spatial strategies became popular, before the acknowledgement of political interference and development ‘advocacy planning’ in the 1960s. Later, in the 1980s, came a bottom-​up viewpoint, embracing social constructionism, pluralism and deepening democracy. By the late 1990s this had developed into ‘consensus planning’ as well as a focus

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on complexity and network governance in planning. Today there is a push to quantification throughout planning in calculating viability for affordable housing, objectively assessed housing need numbers and efficiency targets for planning authorities. ‘Planning’ has never had a fixed experiential or intellectual content. Spatial, social and political practices have changed remarkably over time. Yet as viability assessments illustrate, quantification is not just a matter of epistemology, determining how to make an individual planning decision, but of ontology, establishing a ‘domain of objectivity’ (Rose, 1991), in this case, framing housing numbers and viability as a key determinant of decision-​making (and justification for refusal) and central to the planning framework. These practices apply scientific rationality to public policymaking even when the debates are essentially political, ideological and trans-​scientific. The calculations are correct but the numbers in them are highly contested. A calculative rationality –​framed by profitability rather than public interest  –​can obscure the trans-​ economic questions that dominate affordable housing provision today. Note This chapter represents the law as it stood in early 2017. Since then, changes to the National Planning Policy Framework in July 2018 have shifted questions of viability from the decision-making to the plan-making stage, leaving discretion for the decision-maker (NPPF, paragraph 57). In London, the Affordable Housing and Viability Supplementary Planning Guidance (SPG) was published in August 2017 and provides opportunities to avoid viability assessments at a city-wide level, aiming for a 35% affordable housing contribution to be priced into land valuation as well as transparency of viability assessments. These approaches are also taken forward in the forthcoming 2019 London Plan. At the time of writing in early 2019, we are still waiting to see whether the 2017 approach to viability explored in this chapter was a deep-water mark for affordable housing or whether profit and a lack of availability are an ongoing problem embedded into housing development. 1

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Transnational design and local implications for planning: project flights and landings1 Davide Ponzini

Introduction: technocracy, planning and iconic design The relationship between planning knowledge and policy action in the public domain may radically vary according to the paradigm one refers to (Friedmann, 1987). Technical and scientific knowledge can be seen as the main (in extreme cases, the only) source for public decision-​making, or, on the contrary, as (an eventual) confirmation of the orientations emerging from society. In all possible interpretations, this tension between technical reason and democratic self-​governance cannot be underestimated. To cut a never-​ending theoretical debate short, the conception of societal organisation and the ways in which public action is carried out is crucial in framing this tension. For example, in neoclassical liberal views of development, knowledge is diffused and due to its complexity cannot be controlled by technical experts alone or masterminds. Limited regulation is expected to enhance spontaneously emergent orders and to work better than planning (Moroni, 2007). In these liberal perspectives, technocracy has little space in theory, but perhaps it manifests itself quite extensively in the contemporary planning practices of so-​called liberal countries. On the contrary, substantial power in decision-​making and centralised control over implementation may imply that rulers and technical experts decide on the basis of what they, alone, are supposed to know. But, in reality, plans and projects are adjusted during the implementation process, according to multiple views and non-​technical knowledge. This chapter reflects on today’s logics of technical knowledge production, replication and transmission questioning the operating of international design firms in autocratic countries. It does so in order to argue that today the technocratic logics of policy making have a global profile, because they prosper and diffuse through the

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transfer of technical expertise across political and cultural contexts. If one looks at planning cultures (Sanyal, 2005), rational choice and the hope in all-​seeing and science-​based decisions were and still are relevant, both in western countries and, especially, in countries that are undergoing strong industrialisation or modernisation pushes. Of course, these are general conceptions and orientations, but we now know, at least with reference to urban planning and design, that local processes of development are more complicated in practice than in theory (Palermo and Ponzini, 2015). It is therefore important to see influential conceptions in practice and to understand the way in which planning works in real-​world processes, in rapidly transforming cities as well as in the slower western countries. In public debates, certain assumptions linking the work of architects and planners to the economic performances of given cities recur. In particular, large-​scale projects and innovative solutions are intended as an opportunity for the production (via real estate appreciation) and redistribution of wealth among citizens, in terms of new infrastructures, public facilities, employment and so on (Logan and Molotch, 1987). International architects and urban designers are considered to be crucial for creating new urban projects and more generally for growth. Indeed, transnational firms tend to provide complex packages of design and planning services that reassure investors and politicians, often by elaborating positive narratives such as the sustainable or smart city. Tim Bunnel (2015) explained how cities tend to generate policies by using antecedent cases in terms of prototypical examples, hierarchical imaginaries of other (highly-​ranked) cities, and paradigmatic and successful city models. Real estate investors tend to duplicate projects and packages of investments that have proved to be feasible and to generate adequate returns. This often includes similar building typologies, or diagrams for masterplans. Public opinion and the media seem more interested in the narratives (or the technologies, or the esthetics, or the renderings, or the persona) than the actual urban projects. In this way, solutions are increasingly often depicted as merely technical matters, de-​politicised and privatised by developers or ad hoc local planning agencies. Descending from their specialised knowledge and the charisma of their principals, transnational firms tend to provide complex packages of services. It has become increasingly common to expect world-​ famous ‘archistars’ and ‘urbanistars’ to design not only ‘iconic’ or spectacular pieces of architecture, but also to outline the masterplans for infrastructure hubs, corporate headquarters and institutional compounds or university campuses (Ponzini and Nastasi, 2016).

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Similarly, other sorts of large-​scale development projects have resorted to branding for building political consensus and media visibility. For these and other reasons, the work of architects and urban designers has been studied as part of broader processes of planning and development. According to the work of Leslie Sklair, iconic and spectacular architecture has been serving contemporary forms of globalised capitalism to proliferate and fuel the rhetoric of inter-​urban economic competition (Sklair, 2010; 2012). Ong (2011) suggests that iconic projects (so-​called hyperbuildings) tend to represent the political elite in power. While we know from history that the technical, political and institutional conditions allow quite mixed applications of planning solutions, far from their original conceptions (Ward, 2000), one should try to see in practice what it means to leave the decisions to technical experts, urban planners and designers. By investigating critical examples of one firm which now works in multiple continents (namely Foster+Partners), this chapter shows that transnational firms can operate in autocratic countries, transferring similar narratives and design solutions, eventually making use of the specificities of given urban places in rhetorical or instrumental ways. This serves pro-​growth local players as well as other transnational actors involved. However, the observation of practice helps explain that, in the end, the local context inevitably affects the process, form, outcome and meaning of projects. Despite the fact that it is not possible to generalise such behaviours, it seems nonetheless important to understand these transnational strategies and their implications for local planning in Asian countries as well as in the west.

Features and reasons for the transnational mobility of urban design and architectural projects Design service has reached unprecedented global scales. Several firms have grown into multinationals with hundreds (sometimes thousands) of employees and they work in multiple cities sharing the same technologies and, what is most important, the same libraries of solutions. Geography and urban studies literature have focused on the characteristics, strategies and the role of international architectural studios in urban matters (see, among others, the interesting work of Donald McNeill, 2009; Leslie Sklair, 2005; 2006). Star architects rely on their distinction, technical expertise and aesthetic style. Most innovative and renowned architectural firms are often linked to the personality of particular designers or to an extraordinary ability to complete special tasks.

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Despite the significant expansion of global demand for architectural design and planning services, the mechanisms of distinction are quite important with reference to the internationally most visible projects. The studios which are capable of entering the architecture star system or the circles of the rich and powerful states’ elite are in fact less vulnerable to global competition for certain types of works, such as outstanding public facilities, museums, concert halls, institutional and corporate headquarters, luxury housing and so on (Kloosterman, 2010). Architectural firms may indeed be appointed for these projects through invitation-​only calls or even directly by public and private clients. From this point of view, architectural studios benefit in the long term from their established international reputation and networks. Urban geography and planning scholars showed that multiple urban actors tend to make policies, ideas and approaches to urban planning, design and architecture travel from one place to another. McCann (2011) suggested adopting a wide interpretation of mobilities as a complex of agents, practices and performances that adapt ideas while they are circulating. The transnational mobility of ideas and technologies is not a linear process governed by a narrow fraction of designers; one can expect different local adaptations, hybridisation and assemblages with reference to the local planning systems, institutional frameworks, actors and interests involved (Guggenheim and Söderström, 2009; Healey and Upton, 2010; Harris and Moore, 2013). Faulconbridge and Grubbauer (2015), as well, maintain that in general the mobilities of architectural design firms and the circulation of their knowledge are strictly related to global market forces. Their ideas and knowledge are often packaged and marketed as effective globally, but indeed design ideas must be adapted locally in order to gain traction. The organisation and networking of such design firms have been investigated by geographers (Knox and Taylor, 2005; Faulconbrigde, 2010). They have provided insight into the rationales and localisation of these firms, though without reconnecting them to any involvement in designing given types of interventions in specific urban contexts, nor to providing a sound link with their specific urban implications.

The transnational circulation and transfer of urban projects Architectural design requires a degree of technical expertise, but this is a small part of what elites expect high profile architects to do. In general terms, the simplest explanation refers to the pervasive presence

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of transnational solutions as a reduction of uncertainty and risk, whether by using similar designs, real estate investment schemes, policy tools (for example, public-private partnerships) or other means. The review in this chapter showed the multiple meanings and facets of transnational mobilities, which might or might not be related to design, and more specifically to iconic design. Design-​related concepts can indeed only be partially derived from the literature of different disciplines. The general circulation of urban and architectural projects implies that specific design-​related aspects migrate among projects in multiple and geographically distant places. This has been recurring systematically for centuries with reference to common and generic architecture and urban design, but it seems more and more relevant once it is referred to spectacular buildings, complexes, infrastructures and urban environments that are supposed to be iconic and uniquely important for one city or place. The world-​wide circulation of building types is quite clear. King (1984; 2003; 2004) showed how circulation involved a specific history, regarding the creation and evolution of one building type, its adaptation in different contexts, and its diffusion and impact in diverse societies and cultures. The import and export of masterplans and attention-​catching architectural projects, if compared to the past, has assumed a relevant magnitude and geography, as well as an unprecedented pace in the last few decades (Nasr and Volait, 2003). A new frame of reference is available today for researching and discussing the transnational mobility of spectacular architecture, but is not fully deployed, nor systematised. Knox and Pain (2010) argued that the circulation of types and of similar buildings is part of the homogenising push of globalisation, that is, due to increasing the financialisation and de-​materialisation of the real estate market, to the competing and neoliberalising attitudes of cities, and hypermobility and indulgence of design professionals. It is important to specifically note that this circulation can be detected with reference to central facilities and urban infrastructures (for example, stadiums and museums) or clearer transfers of actual projects. Matti Siemiatycki (2013) offers a long-​term view of larger ‘waves’ of the circulation of mega-​urban projects. In particular he suggested the interest of historically and geographically tracking particular kinds of urban projects (for example, electric tramways, urban freeways, light rails) and explaining policy trends with a concrete reference to local interests and policy arrangements, public discourse and politics, and ultimately the physical environment. In my view, a second design-​related way of importing and exporting spectacular projects can be described as a specific transfer

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when substantial features of one given building or landmark, of one masterplan or of the structure of one existing area is directly translated from an original place to one or more geographically distant destinations. Of course, the transfer concept can imply direct imports and exports having different degrees of accuracy in practice (with reference to building features: height, overall surface, functions, main materials, building structure, relationship to the masterplan for the area or to infrastructure and public spaces). From the point of view of the firm, it is clearly more efficient to design one solution and apply it multiple times, eventually adapting the technologies, aesthetics and narration to the local environment. Various types of design software in use allow firms to buy or develop libraries of solutions that are shared by branches across the world: building information modelling is one example. Real estate developers (and the investors backing their project) are reassured by projects that proved to be successful elsewhere, expecting marginal adjustments to be needed to obtain the same returns. Local politicians use the architect’s name and fame to cast positive light on the projects and themselves in the media. Other auxiliary actors (service providers, academia, intellectuals and so on) can be in favour of growth in more or less general terms according to the project. In this picture, the connections between the key players in urban development are clear, though the urban implications that design transfers have over planning and its effects at the local level have been little investigated. The profile and work of one prominent transnational firm can help explore these aspects and see the relevance of technological factors in their narration, as well as in actual architectural terms, the combination of design transfer with de-​contextualisation and de-​politicisation, as well as their implications for local planning. Given that the role of expert knowledge also depends on the conception of planning in place and the institutional setting providing or impeding political and democratic control over planning decisions, it is interesting to observe situations where the role of transnational designers is likely to be magnified where limited control is exerted by the local authority and society (Molotch and Ponzini, 2019).

Foster+Partners and the transfer of the Central Market project of Abu Dhabi (UAE) to Abu Dhabi Plaza in Astana (Kazakhstan) Today Foster+Partners is a multinational firm with several branches. Their initial work during the 1960s to 1980s was mainly located

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in the UK, but rapidly reached international recognition. The major breakthrough was the completion of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters in Hong Kong in the mid-​1980s. Procurements came from Europe (for example, Germany and France) and subsequently from other continents. Since the mid-​ 2000s the firm started to work more systematically with emerging countries. The firm has been in the spotlight for several decades now and for multiple reasons, spanning from technological innovation, ecological care, architectural aesthetics, to the ability to design and implement iconic new buildings, for retrofitting existing heritage buildings and managing complex development processes. It has attracted substantial attention among architecture, urban geography and planning scholars (among others, McNeill, 2005; 2009; Poli, 2010). One of the explanations for the transnational strategies of the firm can be derived from a documentary movie dedicated to it: Foster has become placeless to quite an extraordinary extent. Bashes with bankruptcy have overshadowed many architects’ careers. So once Foster had the chance to work outside Britain, he saw that building a global practice was the key to survival. Downturns on one continent can be compensated for by booms on another. The experience of working on a world-​wide scale has transformed Foster and his work. You can see now that there is a certain level of impatience with the way old Europe does things. He wants to bring home what he has learned. (Carcas and López Amado, 2010) The firm has worked in a number of countries and different institutional arrangements, including autocratic countries (see Figures  17.1 and 17.2) (for the mapping methodology used, see Ponzini and Manfredini, 2017). Among the emerging countries where Foster works, the UAE and Kazakhstan are good illustrations of the relationship with the elite and its transnational features. The firm was involved in a number of key projects in both countries, which were important both for their practical and symbolic relevance. In particular, Foster designed the UAE pavilions for the 2010 Expo in Shanghai as well as that of 2015 in Milan, the Index in Dubai and the Masdar Institute masterplan. The latter was intended to be the first zero-​carbon eco-​city, but was only partially completed (Günel, 2016; Cugurullo, 2013).

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Figure 17.1: Localisation of completed projects by Foster+Partners (by year of inauguration)

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232 Projects by year of inauguration Before 1998 1998 - 2001 2002 - 2006 2007 - 2011 2012 - 2016

Source: Author

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Figure 17.2: Localisation of completed projects by Foster+Partners with reference to the level of freedom in each country, using the classification and data by Freedomhouse.com

number of projects

Free

140

Partially Free

10

Not Free

19

Worst

2

Source: Author’s own elaboration on original data and on Freedom House 2016 data retrieved from https://freedomhouse.org/

Transnational design and local implications for planning

233 Completed project Level of freedom

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One evident example of transfer of a Foster+Partners design can be considered. The site of Abu Dhabi’s Central Market was once the place of a lively souq of mixed-​income shop owners and users (Elsheshtawy, 2013). The new project designed by Foster+Partners –​also known as the World Trade Center Abu Dhabi –​is a mixed-​use facility including exclusive offices, luxury residences, a mall and shopping area and a hotel, promoted by the Abu-​Dhabi-​based developer Aldar (one of the largest in the region). Its design involved specific architecture and aesthetics and technological devices for thermic comfort that, according to the designers, are a contemporary reinterpretation of traditional bazaars in the region.2 The height of the main tower (Mohammed bin Rashid Tower) is also considerable not just because it is the tallest building in Abu Dhabi, but also compared with ones in the neighbourhood, which average a more medium rise. Besides the expulsion of the lower strata of shop owners and users, the place lost its souq atmosphere in favour of a spectacular impact on Abu Dhabi’s skyline. The project has a direct link to a distant place. The president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has been in office since independence from the USSR in 1990. He has planned a new capital city  –​Astana  –​leveraging the country’s booming gas economy to generate tremendous expansion (from a small village to over 800,000 people now) and international visibility (Anacker, 2004; Koch, 2010; 2013a; 2013b). Two of the most iconic buildings of the new capital were commissioned to Foster: the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation and the Khan Shatyr Entertainment Centre. One of Astana’s most notable complexes of luxury hotels, retail, office and housing space –​the Abu Dhabi Plaza –​closely followed Abu Dhabi’s Central Market development format. Norman Foster+Partners designed the masterplan for this development, which was promoted by the same UAE developer Aldar and backed by President Nazarbayev. The official press release of the design firm reports that ‘the scheme is inspired by its sister project in Abu Dhabi  –​the Central Market Redevelopment’3 for ‘creating a new landmark on Astana’s skyline’4 (Figures 17.3 and 17.4). Despite their opposite climates, Abu Dhabi and Astana (with peaks respectively of +40°C and of -​40°C), shared a similar story with regard to design and technological features since some parts of the mall were expected to draw on the traditional Kazakhstani bazaars (in the firm’s words ‘reinvention of a traditional marketplace’5) and to implement the newest technologies for maximising the gain from solar light during winter. The project is located near the monumental axis that includes most of the representative and institutional buildings of the city and the nation.

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The Abu Dhabi Plaza project in Astana derived from a special agreement between Kazakhstan and Abu Dhabi, involving the creation of a Special Economic Zone, waiving taxes for both construction and management of the compound and expecting further direct foreign investments. It is clear how the local and national government supported Aldar, despite the fact that local critics and Members of Parliament contested the fact that the municipal budget will not benefit from this operation, which is located on a prime site in the city. In particular, the political relationships between the Abu Dhabi and Astana transfer are quite personalised and generated ad hoc conditions for specific projects (Anceschi, 2014). The sub-​culture of the elite counts and can have paradoxical effects for planning and more general state policy (Jones, 2015). These were conditions that did not grant any particular planning restrictions for the project. The design solution adopted had indeed a set of references to place, though functioned as an abstract model. Its technical quality (legitimised by high-​tech narrative and scientific knowledge) has been used rhetorically for starting the process of development, and then modified in order to implement the scheme. After a grand public and international announcement, in fact, the final design was handed to HKR Architects, which describes itself as ‘an architectural consultancy for the new global economy…Our network of offices in the UK, Turkey, Russia, Kazakhstan and the UAE enables us to offer a full scope of services to our clients, delivering international experience and local knowledge to each project, regardless of location’.6 In the process, several adaptations were made, losing the innovative signature design and aesthetics of Foster (Qehaja, 2017). Construction started in 2009 and if completed the main tower (over 350m) will be the tallest building in Central Asia. In this case, the developer Aldar is presumably the only actor taking full advantage of the transnational arrangements (though no financial data is publicly available). The design firm lost the job along the way. President Nazarbayev wanted an icon on the monumental axis of the capital city and had in return a quite generic complex, designed by a lesser-​known and eventually place-​indifferent firm. The state and municipality cannot levy taxes on the new development, and eventually citizens will have a less interesting urban realm than expected. I am not sure if these are the kinds of planning processes and outcomes that cities in the west may allow or want to experience in the near future, but here is a clear point regarding the excessive expectations toward transnational designers and what they can do for cities (and the elite).

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Planning and Knowledge Figure 17.3: The Central Market in Abu Dhabi

Photo: Michele Nastasi

Conclusions: transnational design firms and local urban planning This chapter suggests that it is impossible to generalise transnational trends and expect specific urban effects locally (or in given sets of cities). Urban planning and transformation processes are highly complex and not the product of a single design firm, however famous, nor are they the simple outcome an alleged hegemonic structure. Nonetheless, one can learn from observation and past experiences and try to make sense of a broader picture of urban development trends. This is the aim of this concluding section. Star architects’ clients seem interested in the functional outcome of architectural design as well as in the exposure and returns that the figure of a renowned architect can induce through reputation. As the analysed project shows, famous architects are not hired for the expected positive urban impact only, but also for other symbolic and political reasons. International strategies of the firm we have observed highlights a quite simple rationale of following the opportunities for working, establishing new branches and relationships where opportunities are. However, one can see that the firms’ trajectories are clearly related to the international circuits and elites of the countries that look for recognition in the international scene.

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Transnational design and local implications for planning Figure 17.4: The Abu Dhabi Plaza in Astana

Photo: Petra Deidda

Repeated works depend on the designer’s quality and reliability, but also on strong relationships of the firm with the political and economic elite. Representing architectural aesthetics, technological innovation or general narratives as determinant factors does not correspond to the actual procurement processes. Despite the fact that architectural and urban design becomes a means to reassure local actors about the feasibility and innovation of projects to be more or less completely transplanted (which is efficient for the design firm), the final outcome depends on a series of entanglements and adjustments. The latter may mean the simplification (and eventual banalisation and cost-​cutting) of the original project that was delivered under different conditions. In this sense, the chapter warns about oversimplified narrations and transfers. A broader picture may derive from this analysis. Neither the economic crisis nor the Arab spring changed much in the development of large-​scale projects in the Middle East (Barthel and Vignal, 2014). The recent slowdown of the Chinese economy did not stop the rapid urbanisation process. In such countries, design firms can experiment with new solutions (among others, the previously mentioned eco-​city of Masdar in the UAE) and eventually implement them at the highest speed. The availability of money, concentration of power, absence of

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democracy, urban-​tabula-​rasa approach and other conditions facilitate a designers’ business. Owen (2009, 10) gives a clear example: ‘Foster’s Terminal 3 in Beijing was designed and completed in four years, the length of the public enquiry into Richard Rogers’ Terminal 5 at Heathrow –​a project that reportedly took a total of 20 years to complete.’ The firms’ mobility does have an impact on the way they operate (for example, a more economically efficient design process implies standardised solutions to be replicated, with incremental customisation according to the occasion) and the knowledge they carry around as they travel. At the moment, the long-​term implications related to the trajectories of important transnational actors (designers, as well as developers, investors and so on) who operate in different geographic contexts in search of favourable conditions has not yet been observed. What they eventually ‘bring back home’ after their mobilities in countries with radically different political and institutional settings and rather simplified and non-​democratic planning systems and processes may imply some problems for the democratic west and its planning culture, especially in times of crisis, when both public and private resources become scarce, when urban policymakers and planners tend to loosen regulation in order to keep the available investments flowing (Ponzini, 2016). A quote from Norman Foster summarises the designers’ point of view: ‘We now have a tremendous amount to learn from the best of those emerging economies and the way in which they are thinking big, thinking strategically, taking bold initiatives. Hmm…examples in a way almost so obvious. Thus, I wonder why it takes so long for the penny to drop’ (Carcas and López Amado, 2010). It is difficult to tell if this is a blunt call for technocracy or a more nuanced inclination toward the import of eventual planning models and solutions, large-​scale and fast-​track projects that derived from Foster’s experiences in the UAE, Kazakhstan, China and elsewhere. For sure, one can see how the same technologies, aesthetics and narratives circulate internationally making the narrations of the rent-​seeking and elite easier (Easterling, 2005; Sklair 2017), but not necessarily delivering better plans and projects for the local population. Perhaps one might realise that transnational technocrats easily taking over public decision-​making might be a symptom of a democratic control deficit and not a cause. As mentioned in the introduction, the role of technical knowledge depends on paradigmatic views of planning. Between pure technocracy and liberal self-​organisation, one can find multiple positions and see them at work, and test and assess them in planning practice (Easterly,

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2013). I tend to look to critical learning as an open-​ended perspective for democratic societal change. Typically, one expects planning practitioners to learn in place, and this chapter clearly suggests that it is time to question technocratic planning transnationally, by examining locally the lack of critical learning and reflectiveness in large-​scale and branded projects. Notes 1 This paper is based on the past and ongoing research of the author and of colleagues and collaborators, published in Ponzini (2011; 2012; 2013; 2014); Ponzini and Nastasi (2016); Ponzini et al (2016) Ponzini and Arosio (2017); Ponzini (2019). The paper reports the early findings of the ‘Transnational Architecture and Urbanism’ FARB research project of the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of Politecnico di Milano. I acknowledge Fabio Manfredini’s, Mina Akhavan’s and Anita De Franco’s research support for data collecting and mapping and Jill Diane Friedman’s kind support for English language editing. Usual caveat applies. 2 In the firm’s words:  ‘Central Market will be a reinterpretation of the traditional market place and a new civic heart for Abu Dhabi.’ Cited in Elsheshtawy 2008, www.fosterandpartners.com/ ​ n ews/ ​ a rchive/ ​ 2 006/ ​ 1 1/​ abu-​dhabi-​central-​market-​to-​be-​transformed/.​ 3 www.fosterandpartners.com/​ n ews/​ a rchive/​ 2 007/​ 1 1/​ d esigns-​ u nveiled-​ for-​a-​new-​mixed-​use-​development-​in-​astana-​kazakhstan/.​ 4 www.fosterandpartners.com/​ n ews/​ a rchive/​ 2 007/​ 1 1/​ d esigns-​ u nveiled-​ for-​a-​new-​mixed-​use-​development-​in-​astana-​kazakhstan/.​ 5 www.fosterandpartners.com/​ n ews/​ a rchive/​ 2 007/​ 1 1/​ d esigns-​ u nveiled-​ for-​a-​new-​mixed-​use-​development-​in-​astana-​kazakhstan/.​ 6 www.hkrarchitects.com/​about-​us/​ in April 2015, italics added by the author.

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Researching the best-​practice: academic knowledge production, planning and the post-​politicisation of environmental politics Samuel Mössner and Catarina Gomes de Matos

Introduction Historically, as Patsy Healey has pointed out, ‘few of the ideas about planning…in the twentieth century initially came out of academia’ (Healey, 2001: 11485). This has significantly changed, in particular with the rise of sustainability entering the urban political agenda (Béal, 2012) and the role of cities as strategic sites to address climate change and environmental issues (Rosol et al, 2017). Urban planning today relies on sophisticated techniques, models and indicators that help to identify so-​called ‘best-​practices’ of urban planning worldwide. The strong focus on best-​practices has profoundly changed the mobilisation of urban policies and the way they are implemented. This same focus, however, also changed the relationship between academia and urban policymaking. This chapter critically approaches the role of academic knowledge, which is prone to unfounded conclusions, biased evidences and ostensibly consensual solutions, but plays a crucial role in the process of development, identification and evaluation of these ‘best-​practices’. We take this focus in order to problematise the normative force that academic knowledge can have and argue that it may contribute to the post-​politicisation rather than to contest and reframe practices of urban planning. To substantiate the arguments, we draw on the city of Freiburg in Germany, that despite its severe problems and challenges related to social justice and social equality, is

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widely hailed as a best-​practice for sustainable urban development in much of the contemporary academic literature on this issue. Among academics and researchers from around the world, the city of Freiburg is famous for its efforts in eco-​planning (the two eco-​ neighbourhoods Vauban and Rieselfeld), sustainable transportation (that is, cycling and tram lines), sustainable planning, and energy efficiency that have been implemented in the city since the early 1980s. Freiburg’s reputation of sustainable urbanism is not only a result of policies and practices, but also refers to a successful city marketing campaign that aims to position Freiburg globally as a so-​ called ‘green city’. The city’s eco-​planning strategies attract researchers and academics from around the world, who come to visit Freiburg in order to better understand the city as a best-​practice. While there are no reliable official statistics of academic visitors coming to Freiburg, between 2010 and 2016 the authors have met and accompanied a significant number of academics from around the world, including countries like the US, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, France, Australia, Luxembourg and, of course, Germany, visiting and researching the ‘green city’. This exchange with academics has always been stimulating and enriched our own understanding about the city. During these visits we also learned how deeply academic knowledge intertwines with urban policymaking and strategic territorial marketing. Urban planners in Freiburg were well aware and connected to these researchers and understandably tried to promote their work and ideas in a positive way. And so it happened that sometimes academic publications afterwards uncritically repeated the green city imagination of politicians, planners, policymakers and marketing experts in this realm. In return we noticed that academic publications can thus contribute to the post-​political legitimation of urban politics. We feel the urgent need to stimulate and contribute to a discussion that highlights the connection and interdependency between two societal fields that ultimately have witnessed profound neoliberal transformations in the last decade:  academia and urban planning. We argue that both fields are closely connected and intertwined, yet rarely discussed in relation to each other. Drawing on our insights from research on sustainable urban development in Freiburg we postulate that ‘best-​practice’ research has been heavily promoted within academia in recent years and plays an important role in driving technocratic processes by contributing to the post-​politicisation of planning. Urban ‘politics is reduced to expert management, based on accountancy practices, and to the rituals and choreographies of power’

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(Swyngedouw, 2017: 58). Academic research itself exerts power over urban development by (re-​)producing ostensibly ‘objective’ or ‘true’ claims about ‘reality’. Urban politics increasingly aims to reduce socio-​political processes to technical questions and, in doing so, relies on rather simple, objective and big amounts of scientific data. With the externalisation and privatisation of research, this data is increasingly produced by positivist, standardised and uncritical research that consequentially helps to legitimise political decisions. This process of ‘stakeholder-​based governance configured as market-​driven techno-​managerial forms of management’ is a distinctive characteristic of today’s technocratic logics of governance (Swyngedouw, 2017: 57). Within this process, we are particularly concerned with the contribution of academic research, and its results, to the obscuring and obfuscation of the political nature of urban planning. Uncritical research limits the political debate and fosters homogeneity of what is possible and what is not possible to achieve and to imagine. It risks stabilising hegemonic positions in planning processes (for example, economic growth, social inequalities, proliferation of technology solutions to sustainability). We start sketching out the transformation of the relationship between research and planning in the context of environmental urban policymaking and exemplify the specific role of academic knowledge in Freiburg in the third section of this chapter. We conclude with some thoughts about the consequences for research and planning that might stimulate a broader debate for which this chapter only represents a first start.

Researching the ‘green city’ and the building of the best practice Academia (and in particular architecture, geography, social sciences and planning) interferes with urban planning and contributes to the development of new planning practices in various ways. As planners are usually trained at universities, lecturers and professors have significant power to influence and define the concepts, perspectives and interpretations of what good planning is and the aims and objectives related to it. In return, policymaking has a long tradition as a research object and stimulated the development of new theories and concepts. Hereby, universities and academia are traditionally perceived as the producers of ‘better, therefore more proved, more exact, more verified knowledge’ (Hirschauer, 2010: 210, own translation), which is distinguished from people’s everyday knowledge. The unparalleled

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mobilisation of economic resources since the 1990s has led to a dramatic shift of the ‘whole terrain of thinking about urban politics’ (Hall and Hubbard, 1996: 154) and urban neoliberalisation (Peck et al, 2009) has substantially changed the relationship between politics, as the realm of subjective political statements, and academia as the realm of ostensibly objective and true facts (Gomes de Matos, 2015). With the support and intellectual input from academic research, cities and municipalities introduced new principles, institutions, forms of organisation and territorial marketing that enable the mobilisation of new and local resources. By delivering scientifically proved concepts and models, texts or reports, academics influence planning processes, in particular by legitimising policymaking, influencing democratic decision-​making processes or facilitating the transfer of ostensibly ‘best-​practices’ to other places. In many cases, planning consultancy also overlaps with research agendas, leading to both research findings and marketing brands as has happened in the case of the famous Barcelona model (Gomes de Matos, 2015). This rather problematic interdependency of planning and research becomes especially evident in the realm of sustainable urban planning and environmental policymaking. A  broad societal consensus exists about the need to implement environmental urban policies that aim to reduce carbon emissions and protect the natural environment. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently identified cities no longer as places of soil sealing and carbon emissions, but also as places to explore and experiment with technical solutions to confront climate change. The co-​chair of the IPCC Working Group welcomed the IPCC’s decision in 2016 to pay special attention to cities in its work programme towards 2028 and mentioned that this will ‘dramatically increase the scientific evidence on cities and climate change, in order to enable better climate policymaking at the local level’ (ICLEI, 2016). ‘Eco-​cities’ (Roseland, 1997), ‘resilient cities’ (Newman et al, 2009) or ‘green cities’ (Beatley, 2012b) emerged as the new buzz-​words for both academic research and urban policymaking. Researchers are in constant search for the ‘most innovative’ (Beatley, 2012a: 1) initiatives and attempts of urban environmental policies that promise to have the potential to be transferred to other places: ‘Where to look for new models is always a question, and…European cities remain a powerful source of potent ideas and inspiring practice’ (Beatley, 2012b: 1), writes Timothy Beatley in his introduction to the edited book Green Cities of Europe. The origin of environmental policies draws back on the early environmental movements of the 1970s, that  –​ particularly in

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Germany (see Uekötter, 2014) –​were interwoven with other social movements from which they picked up claims of social justice, political participation and a critique of the capitalist economic system. In the entrepreneurial city (While et al, 2004), however, these claims and ideas have been transformed beyond recognition in an urban environmental management (Béal, 2012). Here, environmental policies are often implemented by a variety of actors, including investors, public bodies and civil society, whose interactions are highly professionalised and market-​driven but vaguely regulated. They are sustained by a stage-​ managed consensus (MacLeod, 2011: 2632) and flanked by forms of ‘particitainment’ (Selle, 2011) that often includes an environmentally conscious middle class that benefits from the implementation of the planned developments. Very often the focus has shifted away from social justice, environmental protection and democratic participation towards economic competitiveness and growth orientation (Raco, 2005: 324), which raises searching questions regarding the democratisation of urban planning. The implementation of environmental goals and economic competitiveness is often based on the search for the best example or –​in other words –​the ‘best-​practice’, that is, idealised abstractions that are symbolically connected to concrete places (Silomon-​Pflug et al, 2013: 203). The identification of indicators, that help to ‘define the elements and goals of urban sustainability’ (Joss et al, 2012: 109), is an important scientific field and certainly contributing to a better understanding of sustainability and the various processes that influence climate change or environmental protection. It is often made with the ‘good intent of providing urbanites with a clean environment, a growing economy, and a society that promotes harmonious citizen interactions, while simultaneously limiting carbon dioxide and other GHG emissions’ (Zhou et al, 2015: 448). ‘Best-​practice’ research, however, becomes problematic, when it is based on a naïve understanding of indicators (that is, a modal split in transportation, energy consumption, density of the build environment, CO2 emissions and so on) that ignores the political complexity of negotiating between the environment, the economy and the social sphere. Scientific measurements are neither neutral nor objective and ‘best-​practice’ research fails when it reduces the political nature of indicators and rankings to an oversimplified juxtaposition of ‘problem’ and corresponding ‘solution’. Also, ‘best-​practice’ research tends to ignore the selective incorporation of environmental goals when economic growth strategies and competition are green-​washed by selective sustainability goals. The quantification of sustainability

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and environmental goals leads to a new level of urban environmental competitiveness with cities around the globe competing for the title of the ‘greenest city’ (Rosol et al, 2017). Aspects such as social justice and equality are hereby reduced to superficial participation processes. Today, there is a wide market (McCann, 2011: 114) with immense economic interest (Silomon-​Pflug et  al, 2013: 3) for global policy consultancy that mobilises policies around the world and fosters economic competitiveness by environmental policy orientation.

Best-​practice Freiburg Freiburg has been heralded for its multiple strategies and implementations of urban sustainable policies. Academics and researchers from around the world attest the city great success in its multi-​faceted initiatives and achievements in the realms of green low-​carbon economy, sustainable transportation, energy efficiency and innovative land use planning as well as citizen participation. In one of his last interviews for the Guardian about his most recent book Good Cities, Better Lives: How Europe Discovered the Lost Art of Urbanism (Hall, 2013b), Sir Peter Hall, British iconic figure of creative planning, describes European green cities, in which he counts Freiburg a prominent example. Regarding Freiburg he states that ‘[t]‌hey have created good jobs, built superb housing in fine natural settings and generated rich urban lives. But not only that:  simultaneously these cities have become models of sustainable urban life, minimising energy needs, recycling waste and reducing emissions’ (Rogers, 2014). Peter Hall, who has maintained personal relations with Freiburg’s former chief planner, is not alone in the orchestra of positive evaluations of Freiburg’s sustainability agenda. Other publications, policy reports or brochures emphasise Freiburg as a model for sustainable urbanism. Central to this argument are the two ‘eco-​ quartiers’, Vauban and Rieselfeld, the city has built during the 1990s. Both neighbourhoods are constantly mentioned in numerous publications about eco-​cities or green cities (Scheurer and Newman, 2009) as best-​practices for planning and sustainable housing. While both neighbourhoods are reflecting different interpretations and ideologies of the ‘sustainable city’, they became equally prominent examples of Freiburg’s sustainable urban development. Vauban and Rieselfeld were built and planned during the 1990s/​early 2000s, at times when the city witnessed a great shortage in the local housing market leading to suburbanisation processes. In particular Vauban’s holistic implementation of sustainable measures, that is, sustainable

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mobility and traffic concepts, low/​passive and even plus-​energy standards in the built environment, a socially integrative and mixed composition of inhabitants, de-​centralised energy supply and the implementation of innovative modes of urban governance and participation during the planning phase are repeatedly mentioned. Since 2010, the city of Freiburg started to advertise its sustainable urbanism in a global ‘green city’-​marketing campaign aiming to position the city internationally. In 2010, Freiburg participated at the EXPO in Shanghai and promoted their sustainability agenda in the ‘urban best-​practice’ area, assuming a leading role as a model for sustainable urban development. In the same year, the city elaborated abstract guidelines for its urban development that were published in the Freiburg Charter for Sustainable Urbanism, sustained and promoted by the Institute of Urbanism in London in cooperation with local planners (Medearis and Daseking, 2012). This charter embraces 12 principles, which are mostly focusing on the social and political dimension of urban sustainability, participation, transparent and inclusive urban politics, ‘a city for all’, and cooperation with all parts of society. Only few publications in this context highlight the dramatic forms of social exclusion, polarisation and the displacement of lower-​income groups and subcultures (Mössner and Krueger, 2018) that takes place in Freiburg today. From today’s perspective, both neighbourhoods, Vauban and Rieselfeld, failed to ease the housing market which still witnesses a dramatic housing shortage accompanied by a growing demand for affordable housing in the city. While Vauban and Rieselfeld became attractive for an ecologically responsible upper middle-​class, leading to socially homogenous and expensive neighbourhoods, whose buildings are equipped with leading green technologies, today they are among the most expensive places to live in the city (Mössner, 2015). Compared to other neighbourhoods, Vauban and Riesefeld achieve the highest margins in rent and property value (Amt für Liegenschaften und Wohnungswesen der Stadt Freiburg, 2013). In terms of housing costs, Freiburg is among the most expensive cities in Germany (at the fourth or fifth position according to different sources, standards and calculations). Suburbanisation is not only a way to escape from green ideologies but also a de facto affordable housing policy (Mössner and Miller, 2015). These internal contradictions contrast with Freiburg’s image as a best-​practice in academic research that highlights the city’s efforts to social inclusion, participation processes and transparent decision-​ making processes. In his book Leading the Inclusive City (Hambleton, 2015), the author sees Freiburg as ‘a world leader when it comes to

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responding to climate change’ (p 228). Quoting from the Freiburg Charter, a quasi-​academic brochure published for marketing purposes, he confirms the city’s good planning practices. It remains unclear in the book, however, from where he takes the belief that the city is ‘bringing together politicians, urban planners and residents in a highly constructive participation’ process, as the participation process is not further described, explained or analysed. Other publications come to rather different conclusion, indicating that participation was constructive as long as the participants agreed on the consensus to reconcile ecological goals with economic growth (Mössner, 2015). Confusing the old-​industrial Ruhr valley and the never-​industrialised Upper Rhine valley (Fitzgerald, 2010:  1), where Freiburg is located, Fitzgerald states that her visit was accompanied by the same (ex-​)director of the city’s planning department (p 1), who has been quoted by Hambleton as well as Hall before. Unsurprisingly, the book Emerald Cities (Fitzgerald, 2010) tells the Freiburg success story, reports from car-​free neighbourhoods and –​as Hall does –​from prospective green economies and ‘good jobs’. With the university of Freiburg being the largest employer in the region, there are many well-​paid academic positions, but even more underpaid and precarious jobs in academia and university administration. It comes as no surprise that Freiburg’s average household income is among the lowest in the region (Badische Zeitung, 19 November 2013) and the city employs a significant high number of low wage workers compared to other cities in Baden-​Württemberg (Badische Zeitung, 20 March 2012). Publications like Emerald Cities or Leading the Inclusive City are stimulating publications contributing to an important field of urban planning, but they only tell one part of the complex story, as do others with regard to urban transportation. Other authors hail the public transportation system that would enhance social equity in the city. There are a few authors, who have obviously misunderstood the ticket price system of Freiburg’s tram lines, writing that trams would be free (Newman et al, 2009). While a free tram system would certainly lead to a more ‘resilient city’ and certainly enhance social equity, the Freiburg tram system is in fact quite expensive. Moreover, the heralded tram connection to eco-​model neighbourhood Vauban has excluded Merzhausen, a town bordering with Vauban in the south of Freiburg, from the same tram system. There are authors who have hinted that ‘social equity is high since all parts of the city are easily accessible by public transport, cycling, and walking’ (Buehler and Pucher, 2011). Others speak of an ‘excellent public transport systems and high levels of walking and cycling’ (Kenworthy, 2006: 71). It, however, remains

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rather unclear how this excellence is measured and situated in the social context of the city as a whole. We agree with all of the authors that public transportation plays a crucial role for social equity but disagree that all Freiburg neighbourhoods are well connected to the public transportation network which in fact is rather small and, for example, does not include most of the suburban neighbourhoods. These examples raise questions about the diffusion of information and the quality of empirical work. While we cannot give answers to individual research, there are some general observations that hint to the strong connection between academic information seekers and political interests in the city. There is a huge number of academic researchers and students travelling to the city every year. Due to the huge demand, there is a privatised non-​profit organisation specialised in academic tourism, offering information and facts as well as guided tours and meetings with experts to foreign researchers (Innovation Academy, 2017). This organisation is founded by key actors of the ‘green growth machine’ that has an economic interest in positioning Freiburg as a green city. As the Innovation Academy is the central hub for (international) researchers and controls the distribution of scientific information, interviews are often made with selected city planners or related actors (such as the former chief planner who continues to appear on academic conferences). It is of no surprise that many publications rather uncritically repeat the standard imagination of Freiburg as a green city that has been promoted by the city marketing for some time. By doing so, these authors not only use ‘slippery words’ (Marcuse, 2015), they also uncritically repeat and in return contribute to the political manifestation of a specific geographical imagination, in this case, of Freiburg being a sustainable, technically advanced and socially just/​ inclusive city (Hambleton, 2015). This becomes even clearer when it comes to analyse political processes about who in society gets a voice or becomes excluded from daily politics. Freiburg politicians continuously repeat their efforts in participation and the high level of equity in representing different groups, communities and people in urban politics, but there are other examples that tell an opposite story.

Academic research and the post-​politicisation of the green city The logic behind this argument is complex. The city has produced its own historical path-​d ependency towards sustainability by instrumentalising the environmental protests around Freiburg in the 1970s (see Freytag et al, 2014; Mössner, 2015). The successful protests in

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Wyhl, near Freiburg, against the construction of a nuclear power plant in the 1970s are today considered one of the foundational moments for Freiburg’s sustainable urbanism (Fastenrath, 2015; Rohracher and Späth, 2014; Scheurer and Newman, 2008). This event is normatively charged and considered one of the significant historical moments for the emergence of Germany as the ‘greenest nation’ (Uekötter, 2014). The success of the early environmental protests is today considered as something positive, desirable and referred to as a truly political moment in German history. Referring to these events and connecting current politics to past protests transfers the positive image to urban politics and legitimises those policies as just and ‘grassroots’-​oriented. Academics have contributed to manifesting this image: The beginnings of [Freiburg’s] dynamic development… were…driven by the ambitious vision to reduce the dependence on what were increasingly perceived to be dangerous energy sources: coal and nuclear energy. Plans to build a nuclear power plant nearby mobilised strong resistance in the mid-​1970s…Since then, a broad range of environmentally engaged civil society initiatives have been able to build up and keep up momentum for a local energy transition. (Rohracher and Späth, 2014: 1417) Such publications draw attention to the way ‘local initiatives’ and ‘civil society’ stand at the bottom of Freiburg’s green city transition and are very much in line with the mayor’s own statement during the sustainability awards on 6 December 2012, when he explained that it’s the ‘engaged citizenry’, who are pushing city politics towards implementing these policies. Referring to these protests again, other authors state that ‘[t]‌he campaign marked the birth and a formative early success for Germany’s powerful anti-​nuclear movement and, as critical side-​effects, raised awareness on energy policy issues in the region, and highlighted the importance of community participation in political processes. Freiburg’s role as a network node of grassroots activism consolidated’ (Scheurer and Newman, 2009). Many more publications are to be mentioned, all arguing that the local initiatives have lead to Freiburg’s role as a forerunner of sustainable urban development (Broaddus, 2010; Joss, 2010; Park and Eissel, 2010; Sellers, 1998). Giving the fact that urban policies in Freiburg have their (constructed) origin in the protests of Wyhl, the policies and policymaker benefit from the positive image of these earlier protests.

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According to Erik Swyngedouw, this is politics ‘reduced to expert management, based on accountancy practices, and to the rituals and choreographies of power’ (Swyngedouw, 2017: 58). The ‘post-​ political consensus’ (Macleod, 2011) about the capitalisation of urban resources to which sustainability goals are subjugated is legitimised by an increasing literature that contests the success of such policy approaches. The commodification of public infrastructure and services, the privatisation and public–​private partnerships and other forms of market-​oriented governance that lead to increasing economic and social disparities (Mayer, 2013) vanish into thin air, when academics reduce them to a means to become a ‘best-​practice’ contender. At the same time, the political power of such ‘best-​practice’ research lies in its contribution to silencing opposing and contradicting voices and ignoring necessary societal ruptures that occur with any political engagement. Although society exists in different and complex arrangements and facets, best-​practices research reduces urban policies to a specific part, ignoring other parts and thus contributes to the post-​ politicisation of sustainable urban policies. The lack of any reference to social and political inequalities and contestation in Freiburg in the aforementioned literature suppresses the part of urban society whose reality is strongly connected with daily forms of social exclusion. As a consequence, the green city becomes taken-​for-​granted (Davidson and Iveson, 2015: 544), while the ‘contested city’ that coexists disappears from public awareness. The ostensible ‘neutral’ position of research findings obscures the fact that there are other logics that mutually coexist. In Freiburg, it has become increasingly difficult to argue against academic findings based on best-​practice, and space for other forms of knowledge that goes beyond indicator-​based research is rather limited. The open and transparent debate about different and contradicting ideologies and positions within society is silenced by indicators and results brought forward by ostensibly unpolitical and neutral experts. From this perspective, academic research is not neutral but political, contributing to the silencing of alternative positions in urban politics. This powerful role is rather neglected in the quoted publications. Housing prices in Freiburg are very high and lead to the exclusion of large parts of the lower income population, but also of those people who seek for more profitable investments in suburbia. Consequently, Freiburg’s sustainable development research is limited to the processes that occur within the city boundaries and not beyond (see Wachsmuth et al, 2016).

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Conclusion This chapter discussed the vicious relationship between academic research seeking for easy success in times of neo-​neoliberal knowledge production and planners seeking for positive justifications of best-​ practices. The picture we sketched goes beyond the individual responsibilities of the researchers. It is instead a symptom of a pervasive logic of neoliberal governance that transversally hits several sectors of society, from public policy to academic research. This is a systemic societal transformation that has made planning and scientific research co-​dependent on standardised and uncritical knowledge. We see in this an unholy relationship of our post-​political times. Best-​practice research has been heavily promoted within academia in recent years. Funding streams are increasingly dependent on problem-​ based research, leading research agencies and universities to cater for easy-​to-​buy and uncritically propositional conclusions, supporting clear and implementable recommendations for governments and private agencies. The production of generalist knowledge through ‘best-​practices’, that does not appreciate the complexity of specific contexts, plays an important role in today’s technocratic planning processes. As we have argued, it contributes to the post-​politicisation of urban planning. Drawing on a specific experience with research carried out in Freiburg we have shown that academic research is closely intertwined with urban policymaking and urban practitioners. This leads to a highly selective analysis of the ‘green city’. Within the field of applied urban research, the search for iconic and immediate empirical conclusions has also distorted the process of data collection and analysis that is too often limited to building databases rather than to fundamental and critical analysis. The reasons for this are manifold and depend on the specific institutional context. Important factors are the system of rewards of academic production, the privatisation and externalisation of funding streams, the compulsory search for public–​private partnership in supporting research projects as well as the need of universities to cope with increased pressure from students without public funding. Increasing numbers students have to be taught on high quality levels, there are immense amounts of time needed for administrative work and the pressure to publish quickly is constantly rising. We noticed that many of the researchers we met in Freiburg have spent only between 48 and 72 hours in the city –​enough to talk to very few contacts who were willing to overcome often existing language gaps. As the

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number of academics researching the city rises, it also becomes more and more difficult to contact urban planners and policymakers. Most of the publications about Freiburg therefore draw on the same single source. In the same time, researching ‘best-​practices’ guarantees easier access to publications and grants, as the results and scientific findings are welcomed by politicians and policymakers. While the mantra of Freiburg as a ‘green city’ is constantly repeated, we have argued that in the context of technocratic urban planning, expert knowledge is used to legitimise political decisions. Our aim is to stimulate a discussion about such research. We argue that it is important to influence politics, to contribute to open debates and to formulate guidelines and ways towards a more sustainable world. At the same time, academic research also needs to be aware of its political nature and the power relations researchers construct and change while doing proper empirical research.

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Conclusions: the technocratic logics of contemporary planning Federico Savini and Mike Raco

In this concluding chapter we re-​assess our core propositions, as set out in Chapter 1, that sought to reveal the multiple expressions of a ‘new technocracy’ found in the planning of contemporary western cities. We argued that technocratic planning occurs: (i) when abstracted representations of reality are used as the only legitimate form of knowledge to understand and govern complex urban dynamics; (ii) when particular types of specialist expertise monopolises governance processes; and (iii) when the instrumental rationalities of problem-​based technical thinking dominates the political field of (democratic) goal-​ setting. Preceding chapters have drawn on these core characteristics to examine and assess the emergence of technocratic logics in contemporary urban environments and the interweaving of new modes of technocracy with political projects and agendas following the financial crisis. While the term technocracy is associated with particular, and very specific, historical conjunctures (compare Newman and Clarke, 2018), we argue that by focusing on technocratic logics and conceptions of technocracy it is possible to develop more powerful insights into contemporary planning processes and governance dynamics. At the heart of our discussion lies a dialectical tension between political projects that seek to implement technocratic modes of governance in the pursuit of broader aims, on the one hand, and the complexities of places and place-​politics that often lie beyond the limits of technocratic calculation and control on the other. The tensions between these dialectical perspectives are on-​going, subject to multiple influences, and prone to forms of incompleteness and contestation at various scales. We have shown that the rolling out of technocratic logics is often underpinned, in Gray’s (2004) terms, by ‘techno-​utopian fantasies’ (p 22) that imagine that it is possible to replace the divisive and sectarian nature of everyday politics with rule by experts who understand how to govern in the name of the ‘common good’.

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The first part of this concluding chapter draws on the book’s contributions to examine the ‘newness’ of contemporary technocratic logics and practices. While it is difficult to identify a clear-​cut physiognomy of technocratic planning based on classical definitions of the term, it is clear that contemporary knowledge and expert systems revolving around planning processes show that, under certain conditions, particular logics could be defined as ‘technocratic’. We identify three principal elements:  (i) a growing prominence of delivery-​based planning regimes delivered through the creation and implementation of simplified abstractions. These abstractions take the form of standardised, compartmentalised, and solution-​based managerial plans, underpinned by contract-​based technologies; (ii) the emergence of contradictory tensions within planning processes between pushes for standardisation and technical control and attempts to use those same technical controls to shape practices in a range of contexts; and (iii) a growing hostility towards democratic engagement as a mode of governance, with quantitative and technical assessment procedures being institutionalised within regulatory frameworks of planning. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the limits of technocracy and some of the core counter-​trends that are emerging in western societies. We argue that there is an urgent need to establish a research agenda that builds a critique of variegated forms of technocracy occurring in different countries and across different scales.

How new is the new technocracy? The growing prominence of delivery-​based planning regimes Technical abstractions  –​namely those simplified understandings of complex urban realities –​are becoming dominant instruments to define political goals of action and carry out complex, and often conflicting, governance processes. These tools of abstraction –​whether they are financial plans, business cases, statistical overviews, architectural plans, algorithms or published best practices  –​appear to work almost as fetishised representations of the certainty, security, capacity of control and management that are wished for by policymakers in times of deep uncertainty and social change. The use of abstractions to organise governance processes, as we here argue, should not be dismissed as a mere technique for organising inclusive political processes. Instead, they bear serious biases and limitations. They frame what is relevant and why it is relevant within a particular planning process, building the boundaries of space (a particular area) and in time (a particular

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horizon). In planning processes, abstractions have power and influence, because they create the discursive and often physical space and time of the political process. In all chapters, we clearly see that abstractions are the instruments of negotiation and mediation between public and private planners, civic groups, designers, engineers and accountants. In its technocratic logics, we may argue, planning is carried out as a negotiation between abstractions, between different partial and limited understandings of urban problems and goals. As we argued in the introduction, and as demonstrated by Hebbert in his analysis of technocracy, instrumental post-​war abstractions were dominated by systems-​led management approaches that reified the power of the manager, the grand architect and the public bureaucrat (Healey, 2018; Thrift, 2007). Bureaucrats gained their legitimacy within state apparatuses because they were the gatekeepers of those formulas, protocols, certifications and administrative plans that governed funding, interventions and management of planning processes. Today, we see a pluralisation of actors that are ‘formally’ involved in urban planning and an apparent pluralism of both typology and ownership of those abstractions. But these technical models are not treated on an equal level. As Weber, Metzger and Zakhour, Taşan-​Kok and Van den Hurk show, private development agents and consultants have introduced a broad repertoire of models that are largely involved in taking ‘informed’ decisions on large-​scale urban projects. These actors mobilise different kinds of technical expertise, but it is striking how central and dominant specific assessment models, contracts or development agreements are in the organisation of complex planning processes. In Chicago, Weber uncovers a hyper-​professionalised business of ‘future builders’ that determine planning visions and planning goals at early stages in the process. These firms operate as the gatekeepers of anticipatory knowledge and combine different capacities to forecast, project and engage. In Luxemburg, Dörry analyses how financial investors are seeking remunerable investments on land plans by means of legal, fiscal and econometric schemes that have little to do with the qualities of land where they operate. In the chapter by Metzger and Zakour we see that the planning of land development occurs as a succession of specific decisions and ‘agreements’ with both private and public developers over the cost-​recovery on land sales. Similarly, Gunn shows that this understanding of planning, as a succession of ‘milestones’ or ‘deliverables’, is deeply rooted in the governmentalities and practices of both public and private planners. She sees the emergence of an ethic of commodified delivery in countries such as England, that underpins planning reforms and the actions of agents on the ground.

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This ethic is so pervasive, as seen in Layard’s chapter, that even the planning of social housing in England is today carried out according to regulated hyper-​detailed economic cost–​benefit assessments. Against the social urgencies for which public housing needs to cater, these assessments are quantitative viability studies made by public and private actors which are relatively difficult to contest by publics and communities, and are accountable in complex and diverse ways. From a different angle, Kitchin and his colleagues show that a culture of delivery, calculation and simplification also pervades the IT sector. At the time of the ‘smart city’, the development of new algorithms becomes the goal around which coalitions of firms are built. These coalitions fuel the growing expectation by public governments that algorithms and other modes of calculation are able to predict (better than other instruments) social and economic trends. These algorithms are not used as planning support systems but become the device that is considered able to achieve ‘comprehensive’ understanding of urban change; they are an ambition in itself of decision-​making processes. These examples allow us to conclude that contemporary technocracy is built on a broad array of representations that appear as black boxes (see Layard) to the public and that are appropriated by particular experts in the process. These are particular forms of dominant abstractions and framings of urban dynamics. We might expect that under conditions of plural governance and diversified landscapes of knowledge, planning actors would deploy a larger variety of instruments and draw on multiple forms of knowledge in producing strategies and plans. Instead, we see that their focus is on the production of specific and contextual programmes of action, with a focus on ‘deliverability’, the meeting of targets and the building of new (mainly residential) units. The production of a simplified ‘image’ of urban processes appears to be an objective of plan-​making processes. These images are not used to set against each other to discuss the social, economic and environmental risks/​benefits of a particular decision. They rather become the very end to which professional actors operate. When privatised, these abstracted representations of cities become objects of income for private consultancy firms for whom the production of plans and contracts become ‘weapons for extracting profit’, rather than tools for the production of more inclusive and diverse forms of urban development (Froud et al, 2017). This emerging techno-​managerial post-​political culture, we argue, is built around the valorisation and marketisation of simple abstractions to complex planning problems and objectives. The role of the contract deserves particular attention to understand how this technocratic (govern)mentality is recursively reinforced,

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enacted and institutionalised in contemporary governance. The contract gives stability and order to actors seeking certainty in times of complexity and increasingly globalised investment markets. The contract is an aspirational goal of politicians seeking secure results; it is the achievement for an investment firm seeking to secure income in the future and establish clear divisions of responsibilities; paradoxically, it is also an expectation on the part of home-​owners, investors, civic groups and electorates that what is promised by elected officials or investment groups will be delivered. This latter aspirational value of the contract becomes even more important in times of financialised investments where future returns through interest, mortgages, loans and exchange rates determine portfolio strategies for real-​estate investment firms (Aalbers, 2011; Bowman et al, 2015). In times of austerity, the deployment of contracts also provides governments with external legitimacy and a sense of objective managerial purpose in both delivering large infrastructure programmes while simultaneously complying with spending limits. They increasingly depend on ‘expected’ and ‘secure’ returns rather than on actual available means. The contract, we argue, becomes the key device of management in times of governance in the same way that ‘protocols’ was were used by managers in times of modernist top-​down policymaking. In this book we see that a growing range of governmental practices and working relationships are being framed through legally-​binding forms of standardisation, calculation and contract-​writing. At all levels of planning, contracts are becoming increasingly important in shaping planning outcomes. Contracts have always formed an integral part of the organisation and structuring of the relation between state bureaucracies and non-​state actors (Riles, 2004, 2005). Yet, in modern times the contract was a tool for ‘implementation’. Today, the scope and scale of contractual activities has both expanded and transformed. As multiple chapters have shown, the traditional skills and knowledge(s) that underpinned the practices of post-​war planners –​such as the ability to negotiate between private and public interests, while maintaining a strategic overview of place development –​look increasingly outdated. They still haunt contemporary policy imaginations of a supposedly ‘bureaucratic’ nature of planning, but with the mushrooming of private involvement, these representations are of diminishing significance. In their place the skills to support contemporary planning practices are now to be found in the fields of contract negotiations, the use of governance templates, the specification of quantifiable inputs and outcomes, and the empowerment of a new generation of technocratic experts. The capacity to negotiate a ‘good contract’ with a private

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developer or a ‘social contract’ with home-​owners and tenants has taken on a new primacy within planning authorities, many of whom are now themselves looking to expert help from private consultants. Standardisation, technical forms of control and contemporary planning practices A number of contributions analyse the negotiations and mediations that take place between different types of abstractions and expertise. In our introduction, we argued that abstractions are not problematic per se and that they may even ensure that planning avoids the domination of powerful actors when used within democratic processes. Yet, looking at how abstractions were used in modern technocracies we see that technocratic knowledge occurs when a particular form of abstraction becomes dominant over others. Abstractions that claim representativeness across contexts become the tools of a representational domination of certain framings and discourses over others. There are a number of contributions in the book that show how this process of domination occurs dynamically in the daily practice of planning. They show how, in diverse contexts, contemporary planning involves a series of conflicts between powerful, privatised representations of knowledge and the needs of civic groups and citizens. They show that this dialectic is far from being symmetric and equal and that the knowledge of some actors is considered more legitimate than others. Mössner and Catarina Gomes de Matos are critical of the academics and consultants who travel to Freiburg, the ‘greenest’ city of Europe, and act as legitimate gatekeepers of best-​practices, but in doing so limit the possibilities for more detailed and nuanced understandings of the social and economic (in)justices and the broader impacts of so-​ called ‘eco-​development’. In Helsinki, Hirvola and Mäntysalo show how civic organisations are contesting the plans for the Guggenheim Museum but are only able to do so through the employment of the professionalised expertise of lobbyists. Here, the authors claim that professional lobbying is relatively effective in contesting the abstractions put forward by powerful developers, but only if they are subject to democratic oversight and emerge in relatively inclusive contexts. Kitchin and colleagues analyse urban policymaking at the European level and characterise it as a power game of coalition-​building around the exclusionary expertise of a new ‘data elite’. Yet, they also claim that it is important to analyse how these powerful groups mediate and are perhaps challenged in the implementation process in specific city contexts. Verloo’s detailed ethnographic work observes how, in

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practice, planners simultaneously attempt to standardise protocols and cater for contextual variations between communities and places. In her field work, it is possible to see that even when bureaucracies attempt to reach out to the micro-​context of the neighbourhood, they have to continuously manage the powerful ‘cage’ of their institutional organisation that create lock-​ins. Similarly, Koolmees and Majoor show how, in times of austerity, local bureaucracies in Amsterdam attempt to seek out innovative forms of adaptation but do so in permanent tension as they also aim to ‘control’ and ‘manage’ resources. Working within the same national context, Rauws and De Jong reach a similar conclusion. They show how bureaucracies are no longer monolithic entities, but exist in permanent tension between control and spontaneity, between standardisation and learning. These same processes are evident in England, as Brownill shows in her work. In studying how neighbourhood planning is regulated she describes how technical-​managerial protocols are devised to include citizens and their associations. The logic of management is here the reason why ideals of inclusivity turn technocratic in practice. The contradiction between the power of control through abstraction and the desire to accommodate different practices, publics and outlooks characterise all public bureaucracies that have been studied in this book. These insights are provided by the analysis of planning systems that still see a strong and prime position of public authorities in the development process. We included these cases to demonstrate empirically the diverse forms of contemporary technocratic planning that are occurring. This is particularly the case in countries in which public authorities and public bureaucracies have been undergoing public management reforms and restructuring since the 1990s (Newman and Clarke, 2009). It is interesting to note that as tensions between standardisation and openness, and between contextualisation and abstraction become increasingly complex, so the role of agencies that can ‘stabilise’ this complexity become even more important. The work by Parker, Street and Wargent, for instance, shows that in times of neoliberal reform and the outsourcing of services, the complexity of managing public tasks inevitably creates a market for ‘technocratic fixers’ drawn from the private sector. These ‘fixers’ play a powerful stabilising role in the complexity of the process, but they do so from a problematic position. They are para-​governmental subjects that are not dependent on nor accountable to the interests of the public. Similarly, the lobbyists described in Hirvola and Mäntysalo’s chapter do not have their own political goal in the planning process. They work to scrutinise, advise and advocate for particular conceptions of a public interest. These

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agencies are the modern ‘link’ between public and private and between public and civic. Yet, their role of ‘connectors’ is not motivated by explicit purposes of public governance and inclusiveness. They operate to smooth the process of delivery, decision-​making, continuity and control under conditions of uncertainty, popular dissent and conflict. Politics and technocracy and the ‘constraints’ and ‘costs’ of democratic engagement The classic technocracy of the post-​war period was the product of the progressive detachment between the political base of the state and its internal working processes. Reforms to planning procedures and regulations undertaken in the 1990s, that drew on the language of inclusion and engagement, were proposed and justified as possible ways to address this increasing disengagement between urban dynamics and state bureaucracies or what Fainstein (2000) termed greater modesty. Contemporary forms of technocracy should be understood as an unintended outcome of this broader project that was founded on a fundamental challenge to modernist technocratic planning and expertise. However, it is an ideological project that also aligns closely with neoliberal political projects and critiques of central planning during the 1980s and 1990s. Market-​led reforms were justified as a way to diversify, pluralise and externalise expert knowledge, originally internal to public bureaucracies, and establish new landscapes of partnership working among different agencies (Pennington, 2006). Within this neoliberal logic, such externalisation was intended to produce new jobs for highly skilled professionals within tertiary sectors, such as expert advice and consultancy, as well as to make planning more responsive to varieties of urban dynamics and interventions. Instead, they appear to have produced a fragmented landscape of privatised expertise that may risk being even more alien to context. The early neoliberal project in the planning sector was justified as a way to ‘free up’ planning decisions from the standardised and top-​down planning process. As contributors demonstrate in this book, the privatisation of public tasks has led to a variegation of types of knowledge and expertise that has internal power asymmetries, allowing some of these experts to be appropriated by powerful actors. This new horizon of expert knowledge problematises the condition of popular consensus and legitimacy in contemporary planning. How can these actors –​private firms, consultants, star-​architects, IT experts, street level bureaucrats and so on –​gain the public legitimacy to act in

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a (public) policymaking process? Why is it so hard to counteract their abstractions and to establish a more even playing field of expertise? To answer these questions, it is important to address the issue of popular consensus and the hegemonic priorities of growth that impinge on the dialectic between politics and technique within contemporary democracy. The shifts in planning politics represented a reaction to the (albeit circumscribed) engagement agendas promoted by governments and agencies across the Global North throughout the 1990s and early 2000s allied to a perceived post-​financial crisis urgency to use planning to prioritise the pursuit of economic growth. When the primary concern of national governments is to support economic growth, urban planning systems are re-​imagined as having a key role to play in facilitating entrepreneurialism and development. Too much democratic engagement, it is claimed, privileges input-​centred forms of legitimacy over outputs and represents a luxury associated with earlier periods of growth and manageable public demands. Consequently, new forms of planning, as described in this book, seek to reverse the relationship and the fundamental principles of planning systems in order to empower those best able to generate and deliver new forms of growth. If policymakers see their primary role as one of ‘managing expectations’ among populations and facilitating expert-​led forms of interventions, then some of the fundamental principles of representative democracy are inverted. In Levi-​Faur’s terms, the implications of these shifts are that, we could now be experiencing a transformation from representative democracy to indirect representative democracy. Democratic governance is no longer about the delegation of authority to elected representatives but a form of second-​level indirect representative democracy –​citizens elect representatives who control and supervise experts who formulate and administer policies in an autonomous fashion from their regulatory bastions. (2005: 13) Throughout the book we have seen how this ‘second-​level’ representative democracy works in different contexts and practices. Experts position themselves at distance from the spaces of popular consensus and political decisions. The schism between technical expertise, the state and the civic realm, inevitably call for regulation by the public authorities to manage and cope with this myriad of external advisory and consultancy firms.

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As Layard shows in her chapter, this new relation between politics and expertise is epitomised by the codification of feasibility studies and quantitative measurement of standards for the planning of social housing in the UK National Planning Framework. She demonstrates that the rolling out of calculative rationalities in the delivery of urban housing has been enacted through a judicialisation of planning in which the courts have been used to hold experts to account for their decisions. The juridical relation between the achievement of public standards and the need to measure, quantify and programme through privatised expertise is evident in parts of this book. These include the role of public project managers in Amsterdam (Koolmees and Majoor), the contractual procedures in Dutch planning law (Taşan-​Kok and Van den Hurk); the protocols of decision-​making on public land in Stockholm (Metzger and Zakhour) and the rules to which street level bureaucrats are bound when dealing with neighbourhood conflicts (Verloo). The new structural (non)relation between expertise and public processes inevitably limits traditional forms of transparency, accountability and the possibility of appeal in public processes. A number of chapters demonstrate that the role of expert knowledge when privatised, often remains uncontested. As Ponzini shows, standardised architectural visions finds fertile ground in contexts with limited public engagement and where there are no or little institutional possibilities for appeal against public decisions. Similarly, all the chapters in Part IV show that the externalised services issued by private firms are increasingly insulated from popular control and opposition. As previously noted, this leads to the paradoxical result that even movements that try to contest planning need to inevitably hire private lobbyists to advance their claims (Hirvola and Mäntysalo). The lack of transparency is an evident undertone to the works by Livingstone, Mössner and Gomes de Matos. Livingstone shows that professional real-​estate advisors shape public debate by manipulating public discourse. They do so by convening particular indicators for real estate markets and connecting them to broader political projects on the impacts of Brexit. The use of large media platforms becomes a vehicle for the establishment of legitimate frames of discussion over economic growth and investments. They present the Brexit vote more as an issue of real estate policy rather that one of social marginality and exclusion. Mössner and Gomes de Matos similarly show that a lack of transparency is constitutive of the way we build ‘best practices’ in the field of sustainable development. The criteria, methodologies and procedures through which these best practices are built (and published) are often problematic and not transparent. This leads to

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the consequence that scientific outputs are relatively uncontested and alternative voices have little legitimacy to emerge. The recent wave of populist politics in the EU can be understood as a paradoxical consequence of this difficulty of voicing dissent against hard-​to-​understand models and expert-​based politics. The ‘expert’ is no longer a public bureaucrat, but it is instead the professionalised elites who have easy access to public arenas of decision-​making. Far from closing down democratic debate, the political environments of many European and other developed countries are being gripped by populist revolts fuelled by attacks on technocratic knowledge and the legitimacy of experts and expert systems. Most of these European movements –​such as Italian Five Star movements, the Podemos in Spain –​seek to mobilise ‘ordinary’ citizens and attempt to bring them into conflict with expert-​led forms of decision-​making. These ideals are mobilised by a broad spectrum of interests, from activists on the political left, who are responding to the obvious democratic deficits associated with technocratic forms of policymaking, to those within the new Trump regime in the US who aim to challenge the legitimacy of expert opinion in a range of public policy fields. Expert knowledge has been increasingly politicised and viewed by critics as detached and disconnected from the everyday lives of citizens. The emerging populist reactions to new technocratic planning also show that a new technocracy is far from stable or homogeneous and that the position of experts vis-​à-​vis planning systems is always contextual and subject to challenge (Newman and Clarke, 2018). The culture of delivery and the search for standardised simplifications of urban markets are examples of the ways in which both contemporary governments and private firms attempt to ‘secure’ their authority and legitimacy. The social and economic contexts within which planning systems are operating are becoming increasingly unstable, to the point where writers such as Streeck (2016) are openly questioning their governability. The built environments of major metropolitan cities have become centres for international financial speculation by powerful elites who are increasingly able (and willing) to circumvent territorially-​based regulatory systems, often at the expense of broader policy priorities over politicised public interests. Planners and planning policies that were designed for earlier eras of capital accumulation are thus increasingly unable to limit and/​or control development processes. Utopian privatisation models that have been rolled-​out during the 2000s have become increasingly prone to serious structural weaknesses, corporate scandals and financial crises. While a market for planning has emerged in many cities, the

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consultancy sector has come under growing pressure to try and make a profit and maintain returns in an increasingly uncertain political and economic environment. Some of the ‘expert’ firms lack the skills and competencies to deliver on their contractual obligations and as Taşan-​Kok’s chapter indicates, in some instances private contractors have had to carry significant risks. It is also difficult for investors and private actors to judge market dynamics and uncertainties. Livingstone’s chapter highlights some of the challenges that a new breed of market experts have faced in dealing with political shocks, such as Brexit. Others, including Weber, highlight the risks and calculations that go into the investment decisions of companies and the complexities raised by complex urban built environments as investment spaces. While efforts are made to generate financial mechanisms and packages that reduce risks (compare Dörry), urban markets are still risky places, prone to instabilities, not all of which can be foreseen and managed (see Baum and Hartzell, 2012).

Towards a new research agenda In this book, we showed that the notion of technocracy, while often associated with modernist narratives, can generate powerful insights that disentangle and problematise the complexity of contemporary governance and planning processes. It does so by showing how knowledge and expertise are mobilised and configured to pursue goals of urban economic growth and to stimulate entrepreneurial investments in cities. The focus on expertise can compensate the already well-​ developed literature on the use of other types of resources in urban politics, such as land, money and regulations. This book is certainly not a comprehensive empirical analysis and (with few exceptions) it does focus on one specific section of the European context. Its aim was to consistently take back the notion of technocracy within political critique to planning, releasing it from its modernist roots. This allows advancing possible new lines of critique for urban scholarship. First, exactly because the term ‘technocracy’ has been fruitful in raising key mechanisms of contemporary governance, we stress that it is important to carry out more historical work on this theme. As Hebbert shows, the term ‘technocracy’ went through different historical cycles and it is far from being a homogeneous and rigid concept. It rather points at specific ‘problems’ of how technical expertise impinges on political processes. Historical work is thus necessary to formulate useful hypotheses for further investigations on the tension between the technical and the political in contemporary democracy. Contemporary

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studies that claim a ‘newness’ to the processes they are analysing need to maintain a strong historical imagination. Second, the book suggests that knowledge has different forms and different positions. The early distinctions provided by critiques of technocracies were built around the tension between knowledge and praxis, between codified knowledge and know-​how, between standard and specific, between quantitative and qualitative. These dichotomous understandings need to be questioned in light of what we have seen in this book. Quantitative information may act as a powerful tool to contest expert decisions. Legal frameworks that focus on social and environmental priorities may provide protection against particularistic and instrumental behaviour by professional elites. These examples show that knowledge cannot be discussed without looking at how it is used and embedded within broader political projects. Detailed, theoretically-​ informed case-​based research makes it possible to study how planning is in fact not only a negotiation between goals and objectives, but also a process where different types of expertise are set against each other. As Bowman et al (2015) note, ‘it will never be easy to identify elite groups because capitalist circumstance and intellectual resources change…elite studies [therefore] need to be constantly updated’ (p 308). This call for more empirical analysis on technocracy also requires the deployment of broader sets of methodological tools. Planning scholarship can bring a key contribution to the insights on technocracy by political philosophers and political scientists. The analysis of how urban change is motivated, carried out and legitimised reveals how dynamic the relations are between technical ‘solutions’ and political goals. The analysis of process management and of the proponents of these management trajectories is crucial for understanding how political goals are formulated. Finally, this book shows that comparative research can be designed based on key conceptual lines of critique. In our introduction we set up three questions: What abstractions? What asymmetries between them? and With what political inference of technical goals? These questions emerged from our reading of technocracy and established a set of diverse contexts in order to reveal continuities and similarities. Such cross-​national comparative work is useful if we want to move away from a national relativism of planning analysis that may be obfuscating structural changes in global politics.

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308

Index

A Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-​Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, 1998   222 abstractions  8–​10, 14, 49–​50, 201, 255, 256–​257, 258, 260 Abu Dhabi, UAE  235, 238 Central Market project  234, 236 academic research and knowledge  17, 241–​243, 252–​253, 260 Freiburg, Germany  17, 241–​242, 246–​249, 252–​253, 260 ‘green city’ and best-​practice  243–​246, 252 post-​politicisation of the green city  249–​251 ‘advisors’, planning consultants’ role  158, 158 advocacy coalitions in smart cities  200–​201, 205–​206, 209, 210 ‘advocates’, planning consultants’ role  158, 158 affordable housing viability assessments in England  213–​217, 223–​224, 258, 264 calculation methods  218–​220 technocracy and quantification  217–​218 transparency  220–​223 Aldar  234, 235 algorithmic technology in smart cities  16, 201–​203, 209–​210 ‘All Ireland Smart Cities Forum’  206 Allmendinger, P.  162 ‘altruistic public service’, as characteristic of professionalism  127, 128, 134 Amsterdam, the Netherlands  15, 48, 57 contracts in PPPs (public-​private partnerships)  48, 49, 51, 52–​53, 57, 264 New Orleans student housing project  52

Overhoeks project  63–​73, 65, 68, 70 public management reform for urban redevelopment projects  59–​60, 63–​64, 65, 68, 70, 72–​73, 261, 264 leadership  69–​71, 72 organisational structures  64, 66–​67, 72 work processes  67–​69, 72 ‘street-​level professionals’ case study  79–​88 ‘anchoring agents’  105 anticipatory knowledge  see future knowledge ‘anti-​expert’ rhetoric, in the Brexit debate  103–​104 architects, international elite  17, 21, 225–​227, 236–​239 features and reasons for transnational mobility  227–​228 Foster+Partners  227, 230–​231, 232, 233, 234–​236, 236, 237, 238 transnational circulation and transfer  228–​230 Armytage, William  19, 20, 22, 23, 27 Arnstein, S.R.  82 Artz, L.  106, 110 Astana, Kazakhstan, Abu Dhabi Plaza  234–​235, 237 Aussant, J.  105 austerity policies  4, 7, 13, 20, 59–​60, 118, 131, 157, 208 ‘automated management’  201

B Bakker, J.  34 Beatley, Timothy  244 Bellamy, Edward  23 belonging tensions  37, 40–​41, 44 ‘best-​practice’ research  241–​242, 245–​ 246, 251, 252, 253, 260, 264–​265 Bevir, M.  214 Big Society  172 Blackett, Sir Basil  23

309

Planning and Knowledge Bobbio, L.  7–​8 borrowed size  121, 122, 125–​126 boundary spanners, and CIs (community initiatives)  33–​34, 261 Buurtmakers case study  34–​35, 38–​43, 44, 45 sources and types of tension  35–​38 belonging tensions  37, 40–​41, 44 learning tensions  37, 41–​42, 44 organising tensions  37, 39–​40, 44 performing tensions  37, 38–​39, 44 Bowman, A.  267 Bradley, Q.  180 branding, of global cities  227 Brexit referendum  106, 125, 159, 264, 266  see also London, UK, post-​ referendum real estate markets Brownill, Sue  16, 21, 169–​180, 261 Buchanan, James  28–​29 Buiksloterham  64 Bulmer, Martin  29 Bunnel, Tim  226 Bunnell, G.  98 Burchell, R.W.  95, 97 business interest groups, and lobbying  144 business-​led NP (neighbourhood planning)  176 Buurtmakers research and training organisation, Netherlands  34–​35, 38–​43, 44, 45

C Camden, London, Community Investment Programme  179 Campbell, H.  127, 128, 134, 135 Carcas, C.  231, 238 CDO (Chief Data Officer) role  203, 210 Centeno, Miguel Angel  8, 11, 28, 29 Central Milton Keynes, UK  176 Checkpoint Helsinki  151, 154 Chicago, US  15, 100, 257 China  5, 237, 238 ‘Chinese walls’  135, 165 choloroflourocarbon emissions  30 CIL  132 CIO (Chief Information Officer) role  203, 210 CIs (community initiatives), and tensions with POs (public organisations)  33–​34 Buurtmakers case study  34–​35, 38–​43, 44, 45

sources and types of tension  35–​38 belonging tensions  37, 40–​41, 44 learning tensions  37, 41–​42, 44 organising tensions  37, 39–​40, 44 performing tensions  37, 38–​39, 44 cities  branding  227 city governance, and Public Choice theory  28–​29 city rankings  123  see also ‘green cities’; smart cities Clarke, J.  7 climate change  30  see also sustainability, and urban planning Coalition government 2010–​2015, UK  157, 172 Coletta, Claudio  16, 21, 199–​211 collaborative planning  78 commensurability  100 community initiatives  see CIs (community initiatives), and tensions with POs (public organisations) Community Infrastructure Levy Regulations 2010  220 Comte, Auguste  29 conflicts of interest in planning  135–​136 Conservative governments, UK  157, 172, 174 consultants/​consultancy sector  4, 12, 244, 257, 258, 263, 266 affordable housing viability assessments in England  214 development of in US  96–​98 in English planning system  16, 157–​159, 158, 162–​164, 163, 261 Local Plan-​making  159, 164–​166, 167 political context  159–​161 reciprocity and mutual dependence relationships with public sector  98–​99 future knowledge  91–​92, 94, 98–​102 economic and fiscal impact analyses  94–​98 and public involvement in planning/​neighbourhood planning  171, 175–​176, 177, 178–​179 smart cities  203, 205  see also experts/​expert knowledge contracts:  PPPs (public-​private partnerships), Netherlands  14–​15, 47–​49, 51–​52, 55, 56–​57, 67–​68, 264

310

Index diversity of contracts  53–​54, 56 mutual dependency  54, 56 public accountability  52–​53 public planners’ expert knowledge  49–​51, 56 role of  258–​260 co-​production in planning  11–​12, 167, 171  see also localism; NP (neighbourhood planning); publics, and planning Cork Smart Gateway  206 corruption, in Finland  145–​146 cost-​benefit analysis  92, 100 Council of Development Finance Agencies  98 coupling  117, 123, 125 Creese, Walter  23 Crewe, Tom  20 Crouch End (FEC) Limited  221 CTO (Chief Technical Officer) role  203, 210

D datasets  14 David Lock Associates  176 Davies, Jon Gower  27 Davoudi, S.  174 DCLG (Department for Communities and Local Government)  171–​172 de Jong, Martine  14, 33–​45, 261 Dehon, E.  222 deliberative planning processes, ‘street-​level professionals’ role  75–​88 Delors, Jacques  28 Delouvrier, Paul  26 democracy:  and capitalist development  5 democratic power  12 and planning  12–​13, 14, 256, 262–​266 and technocracy  8 Demortain, D.  218 Dennis, Norman  27 Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG)  171–​172 development engineers  16, 21 digital technologies, in smart cities  199–​200, 200 DM (development management)  134 Dodge, M.  201 Dorchester Group  176 Dörry, Sabine  15, 115–​126, 257, 266 Drutman, L.  143, 148

Dublin, Ireland, Smart Dublin project  206, 209 DuPuis, Melanie  29, 30

E EG (Estates Gazette)  104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 EIP-​SCC (‘The European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities’)  206 Ellul, Jacques  27 Elmhirst, Lionel  23 emergent markets of expertise  3, 7 enclaves  120 engaging, in future planning  93 England  257 affordable housing viability assessments  213–​217, 223–​224, 258, 264 calculation methods  218–​220 technocracy and quantification  217–​218 transparency  220–​223 NP (neighbourhood planning)  169–​170, 171–​172, 173, 174–​175, 261 business-​led   176 private sector consultants in  175–​176, 177, 178–​179 re-​representing knowledge in  178–​180 role of members of public in  177–​178 stages in  172, 173, 174 use of consultants in planning system  16, 157–​159, 158, 162–​164, 163, 261 Local Plan-​making  159, 164–​166, 167 political context  159–​161  see also UK Environmental Information Regulations 2004  222 environmental management  30 environmental movement, 1970s  244–​245, 249–​250 environmental sustainability  see sustainability, and urban planning epistemic communities  105, 160–​161 definition  204 smart cities  204–​205, 209, 210 Estates Gazette (EG)  104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 ethics, in planning profession  15–​16, 128, 134–​136, 147

311

Planning and Knowledge EU (European Union)  5, 28, 120 Council Directive 2003/​4/​EC  222 populist politics  265 smart city initiatives  205–​206, 208 European Commission  26 ‘European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities, The’ (EIP-​SCC)  206 EUV+ (‘existing use value + premium’) basis for land value calculations  219–​220 Evans, Leighton  16, 21, 199–​211 exit options in contracts  53 ‘expectancy’  92 experts/​expert knowledge  4, 8, 11, 14, 50, 192, 201, 262–​263, 264 ‘anti-​expert’ rhetoric, in the Brexit debate  103–​104 emergent markets of expertise  3, 7 and public involvement in planning/​ neighbourhood planning  170, 178–​179 of public planners in the Netherlands  49–​51, 56 public rejection of  103–​104, 159, 265 role of  7  see also consultants/​consultancy  sector

F FABS (financial and advanced business services):  financialisation and technocratic expertise  117–​119 Luxembourg  115–​117, 119–​123, 125–​126 technocracy and place  123–​125 Fainstein, S.  262 FEC (Far East Consortium)  213–​214, 215, 221–​222, 223 FIA (fiscal impact analysis)  95–​96, 98, 99, 100 financial and advanced business services  see FABS (financial and advanced business services) financial organisations  see FABS (financial and advanced business services) Financial Times (FT)  104, 106, 107, 108, 108, 109, 110, 111 financialisation  117–​119 Finland:  planning system  145–​146 politicisation  153, 154 professional lobbying  143, 144–​145, 147–​148, 149–​150 Gugenheim Museum in Helsinki  141, 150–​152, 154, 260

fiscal impact analysis (FIA)  95–​96, 98, 99, 100 Fischer, F.  84, 220–​221 Fitzgerald, J.  248 Five Star movement, Italy  265 Floyd, S.W.  62 Flyvbjerg, B.  167 Ford, Henry/​Fordism  23 Fordham, R.  161 forecasting, in future planning  93 Forester, J.  79 Foster, Norman  238 Foster+Partners  227, 230–​231, 232, 233, 234–​236, 236, 237 France  26 Frankfurt School  27 Freiburg Charter for Sustainable Urbanism  247 Freiburg, Germany  17, 241–​242, 246–​249, 252–​253 Friedman, Milton  29 Froud, J.  7 FT (Financial Times)  104, 106, 107, 108, 108, 109, 110, 111 future knowledge:  mediation of  79, 85–​87 private development consultants  91–​92, 94, 98–​102, 257 economic and fiscal impact analyses  94–​98 privatisation of  97–​98 future, planning for  92–​94

G Gareau, Brian  29, 30 geographic boundaries, in future knowledge  99 Giddens, A.  9 global financial crisis, 2008  3, 99 impact on urban development  59–​60, 71 Amsterdam, the Netherlands  63, 72 and UK local government cuts  20 Godwin, K.  142 Goldsmith, Trevor  28 Gomes de Matos, Catarina  17, 21, 241–​253, 260, 264 Gove, Michael  104 Gray, J.  6, 255 Greater London Authority Supplementary Planning Guidance 2017  219, 222–​223 ‘green cities’  243–​246 Freiburg, Germany  17, 241–​242, 246–​249, 252–​253, 260

312

Index post-​politicisation of  249–​251 Griffiths, Brian  29 Guardian  104, 106, 107, 108, 108, 109–​110, 111 Gugenheim Museum, Helsinki, Finland  141, 150–​152, 154, 260 Gunn, Susannah  15–​16, 127–​137, 257 Gunnell, J.  28 Gutkind, E.A.  25

H Haas, Peter  204 Habermas, Jürgen  12, 27, 28 Hacking, I.  214 Hall, Peter  246, 248 Hambleton, R.  247–​248, 249 Haraway, Donna  223 ‘hard knowledge’  190 Haringey  see London Borough of Haringey Harman Commission  219 Haughton, G.  162 Hayek, Friedrich  25 Headington Neighbourhood Forum  179 Healey, Patsy  78, 223, 241 Heaphy, Liam  16, 21, 199–​211 Hebbert, Michael  14, 19–​30, 119, 257, 266 Helsinki, Finland  147–​148, 149, 153 Gugenheim Museum  141, 150–​152, 154, 260 Hendler, S.  135 Hesse, M.  120–​121 Hillier, J.  142, 150 Hirvola, Aino  16, 21, 141–​155, 260, 261–​262 historical development of technocracy  19–​21, 20, 29–​30, 266–​267 first wave  21–​23, 22, 24, 25–​27, 26 neoliberalism  19–​21, 28–​29 second wave  27–​28 HKR Architects  235 Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters, Hong Kong  231 Horkheimer, Max  27 Hornsey Town Hall development  213–​214, 215, 221–​222, 223 housing corporations, the Netherlands  34–​35, 36  see also Buurtmakers research and training organisation, Netherlands housing developers  133 affordable housing viability assessments in England  213–​217, 223–​224

calculation methods  218–​220 technocracy and quantification  217–​218 transparency  220–​223 housing provision:  Luxembourg  122 Modern Movement  27 Stockholm, Sweden (  see Stockholm, Sweden, urban development engineers in public land development Housing, Town Planning &c. Act 1909  216 Housing White Paper 2017  215, 219, 221 Howe, E.  135 Huxley, Aldous  23 Huxley, Julian  23 hyperbuildings  see architects, international elite

I iconic urban design  see architects, international elite IFCs (international financial centres)  116–​117, 119, 124  see also FABS (financial and advanced business services) IMPLAN (Impact M for Planning)  102n1 Inch, A.  170 inclusive planning  11–​12 Information Commissioner  222 ‘information technocracy’, and London’s post-​referendum real estate markets  103, 104, 112–​114 ING  67, 68, 69, 70 in-​house lobbying  144, 148   see also lobbying, professional input-​centred  3–​4 input-​output (IO) models  95, 96, 99, 100 Institute of Urbanism  247 institutional memory  82  see also past knowledge, mediation of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  30, 244 International Economic Development Council  98 international financial centres (IFCs)  116–​117, 119, 124  see also FABS (financial and advanced business services) International Library of Sociology and Social Reconstruction  25, 26

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Planning and Knowledge IO (input-​output) models  95, 96, 99, 100 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)  30, 244 Ireland  206, 209 Italy  265

J Jaatinen, M.  142, 143–​144 Java Island, Amsterdam  80–​88 JLL  116

K Kalleinen, Tellervo  151 Kantola, A.  144–​145 Kazakhstan  231, 238 Abu Dhabi Plaza, Astana  234–​235, 237 Keynes, John Maynard  91 King, A.D.  229 Kitchin, Rob  16, 21, 199–​211, 258, 260 Klenk, T.  166 Knorr-​Cetina, K.D.  105 Know, P.  229 knowledge  future research agenda  267 ‘hard knowledge’  190 and public involvement in planning/​ neighbourhood planning  174–​177, 178–​180  see also academic research and knowledge; experts/​expert knowledge; future knowledge; past knowledge, mediation of; present knowledge, mediation of knowledge mediation, and ‘street-​level professionals’  77–​78 Amsterdam case study  79–​88 knowledge production  4, 7 Koolmees, Thijs  15, 59–​73, 261, 264 Korthals Altes, W.K.  51, 54 Krzhizhanovsky, Gleb Maksimilianovich  23

L Laine, M.  145 Land Use and Building Act (1999/​132), Finland  146 land values, and affordable housing viability calculations in England  214, 219–​220 Lane, P.J.  62 language and semantics, in media discourses, post-​referendum real estate markets in London  111–​112

Laocoön metaphor  19, 20, 22, 23, 27 Larochelle, G.  28 Lascoumes, P.  92, 101, 102 Lasswell, H.  77 Latin America  5 Lauria, M.  50 Law, John  223 Laws, David  78–​79 lawyers and legal structures  14, 16–​17, 50 Layard, Antonia  16–​17, 21, 213–​224, 258, 264 Le Corbusier  11 Le Galès, P.  92, 101, 102 leadership:  and organisational change  61, 62, 62 Overhoeks project, Amsterdam, the Netherlands  69–​71, 72 types of  62 learning tensions  37, 41–​42, 44 Lefebvre, Henri  9, 27 Levi-​Faur, D.  263 Lewis, M.W.  37 Ley de Suelo 1956 (Spain)  28 Lieberherr, E.  166 Lipsky, M.  75, 76 Listokin, D.  95, 97 Liu, Y.  8 Livingstone, Nicola  15, 21, 103–​114, 264, 266 lobbying, professional  16, 21, 141–​147, 261–​262, 264 and corruption  145–​146 Gugenheim Museum, Helsinki  141, 150–​152, 154, 260 implications of in planning  147–​150 and politicisation  141–​142, 152–​154 strategy and tactics  143–​144 Local Government Act 1986 (UK)  29 local governments, budget cuts and public service reductions  19–​20, 131, 157, 164 Local Plan-​making, consultants’ role in  159, 164–​166, 167 localism  16, 169–​170, 171–​172, 173, 174–​175, 177 Localism Act 2011 (England)  172, 176 ‘logic of improvisation/​logic of institutionalisation’  36, 38 Loh, C.  167 London Borough of Haringey  213–​214, 215, 221–​222, 223 London Planning Aid  178 London School of Economics  25 London, UK:  as a financial centre  126

314

Index post-​referendum real estate markets  15, 103–​104 characteristics of  104–​105 media discourses  103, 104, 106–​114, 108 Long, M.  50 López Amado, N.  231, 238 Lounasmeri, L.  145 Lukes, S.  189 Luxembourg, FABS (financial and advanced business services)  115–​117, 119–​123, 125–​126, 257

M Mac Donncha, Darach  16, 21, 199–​211 MacKinnon, D.  123 Maclean, Nancy  19 Madanipour, A.  174 Majoor, Stan  15, 59–​73, 261, 264 Major, John  157 Mannheim, Karl  25, 26 Mäntysalo, Raine  16, 21, 141–​155, 260, 261–​262 Marcuse, Herbert  27 Marshall, R.  127, 128, 134, 135 McAllister, P.  220 McCann, E.  228 media discourses, post-​referendum real estate markets in London  103, 104, 106–​114, 108, 264 media relations, and professional lobbying  143 methyl bromide emissions  30 metis (individuals)  10–​11 Metzger, Jonathan  16, 21, 181–​195, 257, 264 Meynaud, Jean  27 Mid-​Cherwell NP  176 Middle East:  large-​scale urban development projects  237   see also Abu Dhabi, UAE Miller, P.  92, 101 Miltton Group  151 Minnesota IMPLAN Group  102n1 Mintzberg, Henry  61 Mitchell, T.  5 Modern Movement  26–​27, 29 Monnet, Jean  26, 28 Montreal Protocol  30 Moore, M.  107 Moreau Kusonoki Architects  150 Morgan Stanley  100 Mössner, Samuel  17, 21, 241–​253, 260, 264

MSM (mainstream media)  see media discourses, post-​ referendum real estate markets in London Municipal Land Department  65, 66, 67, 69 municipal services, contracting out of  48–​49

N National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) 2012  215, 216–​217, 219, 264 Nazarbayev, Nursultan  234, 235 NDPs (Neighbourhood Development Plans)  172, 173, 174  see also NP (neighbourhood planning) neighbourhood planning  see NP (neighbourhood planning) neo-​conservatism  19, 25, 28–​29 neoliberalism  3, 5, 119, 128, 136, 244, 252, 262 and historical development of technocracy  19–​21, 28–​29 Sweden  193–​194 ‘net present value’  93 Netherlands:  Buurtmakers research and training organisation  34–​35, 38–​43, 44, 45 contracts in PPPs (public-​private partnerships)  14–​15, 47–​49, 51–​52, 55, 56–​57, 67–​68 diversity of contracts  53–​54, 56 mutual dependency  54, 56 public accountability  52–​53 public planners’ expert knowledge  49–​51, 56 planning system  47–​48, 57 public management reform for urban redevelopment projects  59–​73   see also Amsterdam, the Netherlands network structuring  35–​36 New Deal, USA  23 New Labour governments, UK  157 ‘new managerialism’  119 New Orleans, Amsterdam  52 New Public Management  61, 261 New School for Social Research, New York City  22 New York Planning Commission  23, 25, 105 Newman, J.  7, 177 Newman, P.  250 NGOs (non-​governmental organisations), and lobbying  144 Nolan Committee  127, 134 Noordwarts  64, 66–​67, 69

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Planning and Knowledge North-​East England, real estate markets  15 Norton, R.  167 NP (neighbourhood planning)  16, 169–​170, 171–​172, 173, 174–​175, 261 business-​led   176 private sector consultants in  175–​176, 177, 178–​179 re-​representing knowledge in  178–​180 role of members of public in  177–​178 stages in  172, 173, 174   see also NDPs (Neighbourhood Development Plans) NPPF (National Planning Policy Framework) 2012  215, 216–​217, 219, 264

O Ong, A.  227 Open Source Planning (Conservative Party)  174 ‘option agreements’ in contracts, the Netherlands  53 organisational structures, and organisational change  61, 62 Overhoeks project, Amsterdam, the Netherlands  64, 66–​67, 72 organising tensions  37, 39–​40, 44 Ostrom, Vincent  29 output-​centred  3–​4 Overhoeks project, Amsterdam, the Netherlands  63–​64, 65, 72–​73 leadership  69–​71, 72 organisational structure  64, 66–​67, 72 work processes  67–​69, 72 Oxford Brookes University  178 Oxford, UK  175–​176 Özdemir, E.  51

P Pain, K.  229 Panorama Nord  64, 66 paradox theory  37 Paris Treaty  30 Parker, Gavin  16, 21, 157–​167, 175, 261 participation consultants  21 participatory planning  11–​12 Amsterdam case study  79–​88 ‘street-​level professionals’  75–​76  see also deliberative planning processes past knowledge, mediation of  79, 81–​82, 86–​87 Peltonen, L.  145

penalty clauses in contracts  53 PEP (Political and Economic Planning)  23 performing tensions  37, 38–​39, 44 ‘perma-​reform’, in UK planning system  162–​164, 163, 166 Phillips-​Fein, Kim  19 Pickles, Eric  172 planning  5–​6, 7 conflicts of interest in  135–​136 context of public-​sector planning  131–​132 delivery-​based  256–​260 emergence of as a concept  23–​24 examples of public-​private provision from practice  128, 129–​131, 131 expert knowledge  160–​161, 167 neoliberalism  128, 136 politicisation  141–​142, 152–​154 postwar period  25–​26 privatisation  157–​158 reciprocity and mutual dependence relationships with private sector  98–​99 reform of  4, 261, 262 Netherlands  59–​73 UK  128, 133, 157, 159–​161, 166, 167 standardisation and technical control  256, 260–​262  see also public planners Planning Aid  177, 178, 179 planning gain  6, 132, 216  see also s106 agreements planning knowledge  4, 6 planning professionalism  127–​128, 132–​136 context of public-​sector planning  131–​132 examples of public-​private provision from practice  128, 129–​131, 131 and neutrality  147 Podemos, Spain  265 ‘polder model’, the Netherlands  47 Political and Economic Planning (PEP)  23 politicisation  141–​142, 152–​154 Ponzini, Davide  17, 21, 225–​239, 264 Poppwe, Karl  25 populist politics, EU (European Union)  265 POs (public organisations), and tensions in CIs (community initiatives)  33–​34 Buurtmakers case study  34–​35, 38–​43, 44, 45 sources and types of tension  35–​38 belonging tensions  37, 40–​41, 44 learning tensions  37, 41–​42, 44

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Index organising tensions  37, 39–​40, 44 performing tensions  37, 38–​39, 44 Positivism  23 post-​structuralism   8–​9 PPPs (public-​private partnerships)  see public-​private partnerships (PPPs) Preda, A.  105 present knowledge, mediation of  79, 82–​85, 86–​87 Prince, R.  104, 108 privatisation  7, 119, 157–​158 process management  35, 36 professional lobbying  see lobbying, professional professionalism:  principles and characteristics of  127–​128  see also planning professionalism projecting, in future planning  93, 94 property development organisations  see FABS (financial and advanced business services) public accountability  77–​78 PPPs (public-​private partnerships) contracts in the Netherlands  52–​53 public affairs consultancy  142–​143  see also consultants/​consultancy sector; lobbying, professional Public Choice theory  28–​29 public organisations  see POs (public organisations), and tensions in CIs (community initiatives) public planners  contracts in PPPs (public-​private partnerships), Netherlands  14–​15, 47–​49, 51–​52, 55, 56–​57 diversity of contracts  53–​54, 56 mutual dependency  54, 56 public accountability  52–​53 public planners’ expert knowledge  49–​51, 56 public-​private partnerships (PPPs)  251, 252 contracts in the Netherlands  14–​15, 47–​49, 51–​52, 55, 56–​57 diversity of contracts  53–​54, 56 mutual dependency  54, 56 public accountability  52–​53 public planners’ expert knowledge  49–​51, 56 smart cities  202–​203 publics, and planning  169–​170 new technocracy context  170–​171

 see also localism; NP (neighbourhood planning) Puerto Rico  25 Putnam, R.  4–​5 Puustinen, S.  147

R R. (on the application of Perry) v Hackney LBC [2014] EWHC 3499 (Admin)  222 Raco, Mike  3–​17, 170, 174, 201, 255–​267 Ramsey, G.  107 Rauws, Ward  14, 33–​45, 261 RB and Clyne vs ICO & Lambeth EA/​2016/​0012   222 Reagan, Ronald  28, 119 Real Estate Research  97 ‘regional science’  97 REMI (Regional Economic Models, Inc.)  102n1 ‘residual land value’  214 Rhodes, R.A.W.  214 Rieselfeld, Freiburg  246, 247 risk assessments  92 Rogers, Richard  238 Rohracher, H.  250 Roosevelt, F.D.  23 Rose, N.  92, 101, 172 Routledge & Kegan Paul  25, 26 Royal Borough of Greenwich vs ICO & Shane Brownie EA/​2014/​012   222 Royal Dutch Shell  64, 66 RTPI (Royal Town Planning Institute)  128, 132, 133, 137n2, 157 RTPI Planning Aid  177 Rydin, Y.  127, 160

S s106 agreements  132, 216, 217, 220 Sabeel Rahman, K.  103, 112 Saint-​Simon, H. de  29 Savini, Federico  3–​17, 201, 255–​267 SCC (‘Smart City Council’)  205 Schuerer, J.  250 scientific management  23 Scott, Howard  22–​23 Scott, J.C.  10–​11 ‘scrutineers’, planning consultants’ role  21, 158, 158 ‘selflessness’, as principle of public office  127, 134 Siemiatycki, Matti  229 Silva, P.  8 Skelton, D.  5 Sklair, Leslie  227

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Planning and Knowledge smart cities  16, 21, 199–​201, 200, 258, 260 advocacy coalitions  200–​201, 205–​206, 209, 210 algorithmic technology  201–​203, 209–​210 critique of and resistance to  207–​208 epistemic communities in  204–​205, 209, 210 financial issues  208–​209 ‘last mile’ problems in  206–​209, 210 smart city technocrats  203–​206, 210 ‘Smart City Council’ (SCC)  205 Smart Dublin  206, 209 ‘smartmentality’  202 Smith, W.  37, 45 Smyth, William Henry  21–​22, 24 socio-​technical theory (STS)  105 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation  150, 151  see also Gugenheim Museum, Helsinki Somers Town Neighbourhood Plan  177–​178, 179 Soviet Union planning systems  23 Spain  28, 265 Späth, P.  250 ‘star’ architects  see architects, international elite ‘Stockholm Model’  184, 189, 190, 194, 195n1 Stockholm, Sweden, urban development engineers in public land development  16, 181–​182, 184–​188, 185, 193–​195, 264 influence and consequences of  188–​192 as ‘new urban technocracy’  192–​193 Swedish public land management system  182–​184 Streek, W.  265 Street, Emma  16, 21, 157–​167, 170, 261 ‘street-​level professionals’  15, 75–​76, 260–​261, 264 Amsterdam case study  79–​88 and capture  76, 78–​79 challenges  76–​79 mediating knowledge  77–​78, 81–​87 Structural Adjustment Programmes  5 STS (socio-​technical theory)  105 sustainability, and urban planning  241–​242, 243–​246, 249–​253, 264–​265 Swanick  179 Swyngedouw, Erik  13, 182, 243, 251

T Taşan-​Kok, Tuna  14–​15, 21, 47–​57, 257, 264, 266 Taylor, Frederic Winslow/​ Taylorism  23 TCC (Thame Town Council)  175, 177, 178 TeamGO (Team Area Development)  67, 69 techne (technical knowledge)  10–​11 technocracy  4–​5, 6–​7, 117, 255 definitions  7–​8, 103 emergence of as a term  21, 22 future research agenda  266–​267 historical development of  19–​30, 266–​267 liberal perspectives on  225 two faces of  28 technocrats:  definitions  11 smart city technocrats  203–​206, 210 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), USA  23 Thame Town Council (TCC)  175, 177, 178 Thatcher, Margaret  28, 119, 157 threshold land value  214, 219 Tiebout, Charles  29 tokenism  82 Tonell, L.  183 Tosari garden, Amsterdam  80–​81, 82, 86 Town and Country Planning Act 1947 (UK)  26, 216, 217, 220 Town and Country Planning Act 1990 (UK)  216 trade organisations, and lobbying  144 trade unions, and lobbying  144 trans-​calculative issues  217–​218 transnational architecture and urban development firms  see architects, international elite transparency, in affordable housing viability assessments in England  220–​223 Treyz, George  102n1 Trump presidency, USA  265 Tugwell, Rexford  23, 25 Turner, S.  7, 8, 160, 161 TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), USA  23

U UAE  231 Abu Dhabi,  234, 235, 236, 238 UCL  178

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Index UK:  city governance  28, 29 examples of public-​private planning provision from practice  128, 129–​131, 131 grassroots activism in planning  27 local government cuts  19–​20 planning in the post-​war period  26 planning professionalism  127–​128, 132–​136 planning reforms  128, 133, 157, 159–​161, 166, 167 public-​sector planning context  131–​132  see also England UK Lobbying Register  143 ULL Property  221 UN  26 Upper Heyford, UK  176 urban development:  and financialisation  117–​119 Luxembourg  119–​123 PPP (public-​private partnership) contracts in the Netherlands  47–​57 public management of  60–​63, 62 reforms in the Netherlands  59, 60, 63–​64, 65, 66–​73, 68, 70  see also architects, international elite urban development engineers, in Stockholm, Sweden  16, 181–​182, 184–​188, 185, 193–​195 influence and consequences of  188–​192 as ‘new urban technocracy’  192–​193 role in Swedish land management system  182–​184 Urban Land Institute  98 US:  Department of Housing and Urban Development  97 local government accountability  96 professional lobbying  143

USDA Forest Service  102n1 Uthwatt Expert Committee on Compensation and Betterment  219 Utilitarianism  23

V values, in planning profession  15–​16, 128, 134–​136 Van den Hurk, Martijn  14–​15, 47–​57, 257, 264 Vanolo, A.  202 Vauban, Freiburg  246–​247, 248–​249 Veblen, Thorstein  22, 29, 117 Verloo, Nanke  15, 75–​88, 260–​261, 264 Voluntary Action Camden  179

W Walters, Alan  29 Wantage, UK  179–​180 Wargent, Matthew  16, 157–​167, 261 Warren, Robert  29 Weber, Rachel  15, 21, 91–​102, 257, 266 Weinberg, Alvin  217 welfare state reform  19–​20, 118 Westminster University  178 Winner, L.  50 Woodcote, UK  177 work processes, and organisational change  61–​62, 62 Overhoeks project, Amsterdam, the Netherlands  67–​69, 72 World Trade Center Abu Dhabi  see Abu Dhabi, UAE Wyatt, P.  220

Z Zakhour, Sherif  16, 21, 181–​195, 257, 264 Žižek, S.  5 zoning  100

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This book uses an international perspective and draws on a wide range of new conceptual and empirical material to examine the sources of conflict and cooperation within the different landscapes of knowledge that are driving contemporary urban change. Based on the premise that historically established systems of regulation and control are being subject to unprecedented pressures, scholars critically reflect on the changing role of planning and governance in sustainable urban development, looking at how a shift in power relations between expert and local cultures in western planning processes has blurred the traditional boundaries between public, private and voluntary sectors. Mike Raco is Professor of Urban Governance and Development in the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. Federico Savini is an Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Planning at the Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam.

ISBN 978-1-4473-4524-4

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Planning and Knowledge Edited by Mike Raco and Federico Savini

“Planning and Knowledge is an important contribution to the understanding of contemporary politics and urban development. It highlights the dilemmas of an urban world that appears to be increasingly in the hands of technocrats seeking to depoliticise policy and practice”. Rob Imrie, Goldsmiths, University of London

HOW NEW FORMS OF TECHNOCRACY ARE SHAPING CONTEMPORARY CITIES EDITED BY

Mi k e Raco Fed eri co S avi ni