The Geography of Planning Practice

Abstract

Planning practice is a contingent situated activity. The anatomy of planning practice may be understood as a structure of communicative action involving claims regarding content and context, thus systematically presenting questions and demanding judgments in the face both of uncertainty and of ambiguity. Practical communicative claims are established in the planning process through the ongoing social reproduction of beliefs, consent, trust, and attention. If planners are to be sensitive to these processes of social reproduction, they must be attentive to four dimensions of the geography of their practice: a cognitive geography of knowledge production, a political-legal geography of power and consent, a ritual geography of social identity, and an economic-resource geography of attention. Recognizing this structure and field of practical action, planners may enhance social learning, resisting threats to democratizing movements, in part by distinguishing and protecting learning processes in two dimensions, the technical and the practical. Refusing to reduce issues of normative ambiguity to issues of technical uncertainty, planners may themselves continue to learn about the political and normative aspects of their practice and so foster, rather than render apolitical, democratic social-learning processes.