The Urban Planning Imagination. Nicholas A. Phelps

and clubs continues to evolve. Across the global south, the numbers, training and resources of state planners mean that they struggle to exert influence on the actions of citizens or powerful club interests. Clubs have the substantive foci and often the human and monetary resources to compete with or augment the urban planning of states; finding productive engagements between these two sets of actors will demand imagination. In an age of greater individualization of politics, risk and uncertainty (Beauregard, 2018; Beck et al., 2003), it is citizens that often emerge as those with an imagination born of ‘the need to act’ (Bhan, 2019: 13) in a world where club and state planners can appear paralysed.

      Citizens might typically be thought to possess an imagination for the short term and the fine grain of the built fabric of cities. However, across global south cities, citizens have necessarily expanded into collective and longer-term actions for their respective neighbourhoods, their city and the global commons in light of the failures of clubs and states. If ‘planning is a contested field of interacting activities by multiple actors’ (Miraftab, 2009: 41), a purposeful urban planning mix might have significant potential at the intersection of state and citizen actors shown in figure 2.1. This potential has existed in the case of statutory planners working for more equitable outcomes in Cleveland in the US (Krumholz, 1982) and may yet be produced in the experiment with localism in the UK (see chapter 5). It exists in the emotional intelligence that has been little appreciated by academics and practising planners (Hoch, 2019) but which is vital to recognizing and empowering marginalized citizens.

      The urban planning imagination of club actors has typically been visible at the middling scales of neighbourhoods, districts or self-contained settlements and in the middling time frames relating to the build-out of communities over several decades. Turning the undoubted resources and customer or special interest focus of planning by or for clubs to more consistently socially just, sustainable and inclusive ends remains a challenge and opportunity for the urban planning imagination. Club actors span the spectrum from for-profit developers of new communities with a keen appreciation of broad segments of consumer tastes to associations with an intense focus on and skill in advocating for minority interests, and we ignore either of these capabilities and imaginations at our peril. At the intersection between citizens and clubs are, for example, not only the socially minded Baugruppen housing developments (chapter 3) but also any number of less deliberative home-owner associations of gated communities.

Nation states have typically master planned at neighbourhood and city scales and offered strategic national spatial plans while simultaneously regulating with land-use and building codes at the finer grain most familiar to citizens. Nevertheless, many states across the global north and south now struggle with, or have retreated from, big-picture planning. Of the actors considered here, it is the state that appears least able to deal with the complex challenges of place making in the present. And yet ‘it is in relation to the state that social change is articulated and enacted’ (Roy, 2018: 145); it is precisely in those intersections between the urban planning imaginations of states, clubs and citizens shown in figure 2.1 that new urban imaginaries are to be found. The combinations of states and clubs in figure 2.1 find expression in the charrette method (chapter 5) and in the design competitions for publicly owned or acquired land in Scandinavian countries (chapter 4). Some of the cities that are most referenced at present – Dubai, Singapore – are powerful but limited amalgamations of club and state imaginations. Vacuums in statutory planning capacities in the global north and south are filled by the exceptionalism of master-planned club communities (Roy, 2005). The city is both a problem for and a prompt to government; questions of citizenship and the state come together in the city in ways which may yet see global south urban planning imaginaries increasingly take root across the global north (chapters 5 and 6), not least since the domestic and international diasporas that constitute some communities mean that citizens are ever more at the centre of networks, flows and virtual connections, through which the urban planning imagination can be mobilized with states and clubs in methods that resemble social learning (Bollens, 2002).

The overlaps in the imaginations of actors at the centre of figure 2.1 might be considered a ‘sweet spot’ – one that promises the production of new urban planning knowledge called for in the ‘southern critique’ (Bhan, 2019; Lawhon et al., 2020) of the universal relevance of global north urban planning approaches. States and clubs have much to learn from citizens with respect to the appropriateness or frugality of urban planning interventions (chapter 7). The sharing and production of new knowledge among citizen, club and state planners can increase the options and negotiating skills open to the former (Anzorena et al., 1998) and generate pragmatic solutions to complex problems of ordering urban space, such as land sharing (Angel and Boonyabancha, 1988) and participatory budgeting, that have wider application (Carolini, 2015). At its best, the intersection of imaginations shown at the centre of figure 2.1 may see citizens, club and state actors share their respective expertise, unlearn some of what they thought they knew, and let go claims to exclusive substantive interest, wisdom and methods. However, we should guard against easy assumptions. At its worst, ‘pick-and-mix’ planning might amount to nothing more than an incoherent jumble of motives, principles and visions – an eclectic mix empty of any sense of the wisdom of urban planning. ‘Spatial plans cannot and should not reconcile the multiple beliefs and expectations that come into play animating the places we inhabit’ (Hoch, 2019: 2). Pick-and-mix planning may be rendered as a processual exercise that reconciles different actors’ interests in lowest-common-denominator outcomes, as with planning for growth in England’s ‘Gatwick Diamond’ sub-region (Valler and Phelps, 2018) or strategic spatial planning in Northern Ireland (Brand and Gaffikin, 2007).

The history and temporality of planning

      ‘Modern town planning sprang from … two different worlds, far removed from each other in time and space: the one embracing ideal cities and finite visible utopias, heavenly and earthly Jerusalems, perfectly formed works of art; the other composed of documents, manifestos, pamphlets and blueprints for new social orders’ (Rose, 1984: 33). These twin aspects of urban planning can be seen in the comparisons of different planning systems presented in chapter 6: some are more abstract and ideal in their complete codification of rules; some define urban planning in more empirical, pragmatic and discretionary terms. Discussion of urban planning systems and cultures needs to move beyond history as interesting contextual background (Booth, 2011: 20).

      Tilly (1984) distinguishes macro- and micro-historical levels of analysis where the former include urbanization, state making and bureaucratization. Little of the extant urban planning literature addresses itself to processes of macro-historical change; it instead speaks to the micro-historical level of encounters of individuals and groups or a meso-level of the institutional configurations of nations.¹ Yet ‘national, international, regional, local and personal factors intermingle continuously’ (Sutcliffe, 1981: 188–9) in the history of urban planning.

Macro-historical change: empires, economic systems and states

If, in the present, urban planning and its effects are hard to define (Reade, 1983; Wildavsky, 1973), in the longer sweep of history it is clear that ‘no city, however arbitrary its form may appear to us, can be said to be unplanned’ (Kostof, 1991: 52). An historical perspective