:UT Arlington Student Planning Association

An abstract I have submitted for the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (Montreal, Oct. 11-13, http://www.4sonline.org/meeting.htm). The session is entitled “Towards a Socio-Technical Understanding of Architecture & Urbanism. 2) Reclaiming the city: An STS perspective on urban knowledge and activism.”

The paper stems from my inquiry into the intersection of urban planning theory and the field known as Science, Technology, and Society (aka Science and Technology Studies, STS). Drawing on the disciplines of political science, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, and others, STS considers how science and technology shape and are shaped by society.

Jeff Howard

Implications of rapid climate change for urban planning – A reconstructivist STS perspective

This paper focuses on a conundrum of urban planning theory and practice that in the early years of the millennium grows more conspicuous by the day: how to overcome the inertia of prevailing disciplinary concepts, institutions, and political-economic postures predicated on endless spatial, material, and economic growth in order to decisively confront the implications of rapid global climate change. Drawing on the theories of democratic expertise and intelligent trial and error, the paper offers a preliminary survey of the intersection of planning and the reconstructivist mode of STS.

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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 “Ecological Planning – New Theoretical Approaches for Planning Paper.”

Jeff Howard

Intelligent trial and error as a theoretical framework for ecological planning

Intelligent trial and error (ITE), an extension of political theorist Charles Lindblom’s work on incrementalist decision making, has been developed in the field of science and technology studies as a framework for coping with the inevitable and frequently profound uncertainty inherent in technological development – and for minimizing the frequency and seriousness of mistakes that plague such development. The paper begins by outlining the premise of ITE and briefly reviewing its application in technology studies. The paper then explores ITE’s applicability as a framework for understanding and addressing the analytical and political challenges of ecological planning. If we understand planning as a pivotal species of technological decision making, how might ITE help us (re)interpret the ecologically haphazard character of conventional planning and the significance of the marginalization of ecological planning? How might it help us strategically confront the challenge of making ecological planning sufficiently intelligent to help move humanity beyond the global environmental crisis to which conventional planning has made such an enormous contribution? Answers to these questions, the paper argues, revolve around how these forms of planning approach six strategic considerations – precaution, the pace of feedback, monitoring the pace of scale-up, commitment to flexibility, and incentives for error correction – and, consequently, how planning expertise is conceptualized and politically enacted.

Collingridge, David. 1992. The Management of Scale: Big Organizations, Big Decisions, Big Mistakes. London: Routledge.

Lindblom, Charles E. 1959. “The science of ‘muddling through’,” Public Administration Review 19: 79-88.

Lindblom, Charles E. 1965. The Intelligence of Democracy: Decision Making through Mutual Adjustment. New York: Free Press.

Lindblom, Charles. 1990. Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society. New Haven: Yale.

Morone, Joseph G., and Edward J. Woodhouse. 1986. Averting Catastrophe: Strategies for Regulating Risky Technologies. Berkeley, CA: University of California.

Woodhouse, E. J. 1988. “Sophisticated trial and error in decision making about risk.” In Technology and Politics, ed. Michael Kraft, Norman Vig. Durham, NC: Duke University, 208-223.

Woodhouse, Edward J. 1983b. “Toxic chemicals and technological society: Decision-making strategies when errors can be catastrophic.” Diss., Political Science, Yale University, Princeton, NJ.

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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.

Fischer, Frank. 1990. Technocracy and the Politics of Expertise. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Fischer, Frank. 1993. “Citizen participation and the democratization of policy expertise: From theoretical inquiry to practical cases.” Policy Sciences 26: 165-87.

Forester, John. 1999. The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes. Cambridge: MIT.

Myers, Nancy J., and Carolyn Raffensperger, eds. 2006. Precautionary Tools for Reshaping Environmental Policy. Urban and Industrial Environments. Cambridge: MIT.

White, Rodney R. 2002. Building the Ecological City. Boca Raton, FL: CRC.

Woodhouse, Edward J., and Dean Nieusma. 2001. Democratic expertise: Integrating knowledge, power, and participation. Knowledge, Power, and Participation in Environmental Policy Analysis. M. Hisschemöller, R. Hoppe, W. N. Dunn and J. R. Ravetz. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction: 73-96.

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The 2007 IPCC Working Group report confirms that mankind’s role in driving climate change is a significant, if unintended, consequence of technological advancement. Unfortunately, our socioeconomic fabric is knit from technologies the waste products of which include high concentrations of greenhouse gases that drive the warming of our climate. Not only is this relationship ultimately unsustainable, but it also raises the specter of unforeseeable, nonlinear climate catastrophe.

The icon of our social, technological, political, and developmental advancement – the modern city – is a crucible in which planners struggle to balance environmental sustainability, individual preference, and the public good. Urban planning-as-usual appears to present an insufficient response to a post-industrial, environmental threat that derives from the very source of our prosperity . However, migrating planning to a more sustainable footing may be more easily said than done.

At least in the short-term, numerous structural impediments militate against the capacity of contemporary urban planning theory and practice to constructively respond to these environmental risks: the global dominance of a growth-obsessed political economy, tradition-bound city and regional planning institutions, the increasing influence of property rights advocates in the national and local dialogs, and the continued decay of social capital. In order to realize a future in which American urban planning is an essential contributor to developing a truly sustainable urban future, it is critical that we confront these challenges and seek a new path.

Kent Hurst

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