Investigaciones sobre la regeneración urbana en el barrio

Collaborative planning theory might be understood as ‘middle-range’ theory (Merton, 1957), standing at the mid-point between the practice of planning and broader sociological theories. Two broader social and political theories that collaborative planners draw upon are identified: Habermas’ theory of communicative action and Giddens’ theory of structuration.

From Section 2.3 above, it can be seen that collaborative planning theories assume that planners act within a world of inter-subjective reasoning. Planners are concerned with culture, Patsy Healey tells us, understood as a product of social processes. Social processes generate systems of meaning and thought, and these appear to us as culture.

However, culture is not a static product but one that is continuously reshaped. Moreover, culture is not passively reflected in plans and planning processes. Planners are implicated in politics, in communicative acts; they play a part of the process of continuously reshaping culture. Unlike technical-rationalist planning, collaborative planning acknowledges the social context within which meanings are generated. Planners are obliged to aim for broad participation and dialogue to ‘reveal and counteract communicative distortions’ (Sager, 2005). These claims draw upon and express concepts drawn from the social and political theories of Jurgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens.

Habermas

The notions that planners are ‘implicated in communicative acts’ and should work to ‘reveal and counteract communicative distortions’ are taken directly from Jurgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action, whereby meanings are generated through inter-subjective reasoning. Habermas focuses on the qualitative and interpretive dimensions of knowledge, emphasising the role that public dialogue plays in the interpretive process. Published in 1981, this treatise is welcomed by a growing audience of planners who are increasingly keen to challenge the rationalist paradigm in planning, to find a theoretical justification for their practical engagement with politics, and their engagement, talking and listening, with communities who are evidently experiencing inequality in the face of power (Forester, 1989; Throgmorton, 1991).

Cultures and structures through which we make sense of the world are formed and transformed through our communicative efforts (Healey, 2006, p.50). Moreover, given that we make meaning inter-subjectively, collective dialogue offers the possibility for social transformation. Habermas defines communicative rationality as ‘oriented to achieving, sustaining and reviewing consensus’ - and indeed a consensus that rests on the inter-subjective recognition of criticisable validity claims (Habermas, 1984, p.27). Habermas, says Healey, ‘provides a rich stream of ideas about how to reconstitute the public realm through open, public debate’ (Healey, 2006, p.49). For Habermas, ideal communication is predicated on principles of equality and trust between participants in a dialogue. Power distorts the conditions within which mutual

understanding can flourish. Creating the conditions for good communication and collective agreement is essential for social progress. In collaborative planning theory, this general proposition about the relationship between communication and a better society is applied to the sphere of planning. Hence the planner takes responsibility for the quality of communication and takes steps to create the ideal conditions for engaged communication, seeking to remove or mitigate the distortions that may arise from unequal access to power and information.

Giddens

If Habermas provides a conceptual framework that places dialogue at the centre of the interpretive practice of planning, Anthony Giddens offers the conceptual means to overcome the dualism between structure and agency. Giddens pursues ‘a conceptual investigation of the nature of human action, social institutions and the inter-relations between actions and institutions’ (1991, p.201). Giddens conceives of a dynamic inter-relationship between a person’s capacity to act and shape the world, and the contextual circumstances that provide both constraints and opportunities for action. For Giddens, structure and agency are bound up with each other. On the one hand, people actively shape their circumstances (agency) and, on the other hand social circumstances such as history, geography, institutional arrangements and even modes of thought constrain the opportunities for social autonomy (structures). ‘Structuration’ is the term Giddens uses to refer to the mutual, ongoing relationship between these two dimensions in which each aspect of structure and agency is implicated in the other.

Giddens echoes Karl Marx’s general proposition that ‘man makes history, though not in circumstances of his choosing’. However, Giddens qualifies the proposition by emphasising the ways in which structures are actively constituted through our actions. In this sense, structuring is ‘inside ourselves’ (Healey, 2006, p.46). He draws our attention to ‘the way in which social activities regularly reconstitute the circumstances that gave rise to them in the first place’. Given this dynamic inter-relationship, ‘Social systems have structural properties, says Giddens, but they are not, as such, structures’ (Giddens, 1991, p.203).

Healey draws on Giddens’ concern with ‘active agency in the power of structures’ when she defines culture as ‘the continuously reshaped product of social processes through which systems of meaning and thought are generated’. For Giddens, social forces impose structure on social relationships; the forces providing the context within which people actively and interactively construct their lives. These forces bring to any given social context ‘implicit and explicit imperatives for how things should be done’ (Healey, 2006, p. 45); they also express power relationships that are reproduced over time. Structures, institutions, power relationships and systems of meaning may appear to exist independently of human agency in a given situation, but actually they are the product of human action, albeit often from another social situation.

Together, Giddens and Habermas provide the theoretical building blocks for collaborative planning. Giddens contributes a means to conceptualise active agency in the power of structures; Habermas contributes a framework concerned with collective dialogue and a concern with addressing the distorting impact of power on ideal communication. On this basis, collaborative planning is conceived as ‘processes of intersubjective communication in the public sphere, through which dynamic mutual learning takes place’ (Healey, 2006, p.55) that aspire to transform the public realm and to change structuring forces.