ACSP abstract — Planning for climate protection
An abstract I have submitted for the annual meeting of theAmerican Collegiate Schools of Planning (Oct. 18-21, Milwaukee, http://www.acsp.org/events/conferences.html). The session is entitled “Planners’ Role in Reducing GHG Emissions.”
Jeff Howard
Planning for strong climate protection: Toward a democratic, precautionary footing for planning expertise
The broad consensus that a global climate disaster is underway must be understood as a profound challenge to planning theory and practice: how to move climate protection from the periphery of the profession and the discipline directly into their core. The crisis presents a singular opportunity to examine – and reshape – the political assumptions embedded in mainstream planning expertise. The climate crisis exposes some of the central, largely tacit political assumptions of mainstream planning experts, who have informed, sanctioned, and actively facilitated sprawling, car-dependent, energy-intensive urban and suburban development. Drawing on political-theoretical critiques of scientific and technical expertise, the paper proposes that these assumptions are intimately bound up with a model of the planning expert as technocrat. The paper then argues that if the planning community is to commit itself to greenhouse gas reduction as deep and rapid as the crisis appears to demand, it will require a dramatically different model of expertise: one predicated on marrying experts and laypeople in a more explicitly political and thoroughly democratic fashion than conventional understandings of planning expertise would allow; and one predicated on protection of environment and public health in the face of scientific uncertainty.
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