PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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approaches to the field of transport planning” (p.669) is Tore Langmyhr’s (2000) article
“The Rhetorical Side of Transport Planning”. Based on a case study of transport
planning in the Norwegian medium size city of Trondheim, Langmyhr discusses different
rhetorical arguments over the construction of a bypass road and over the introduction of a
road pricing scheme. Although Langmyhr’s abstract promises an outline for “normative
framework based on communicative planning theory”, the core of the case study in fact
consists of an evaluation of planners’ (largely successful) use of opportunistic rhetoric in
order to assure a political majority for the projects. At one point Langmyhr ambitiously
reverts to Forester’s (1989) four “critical pragmatist,” Habermas-inspired, abstract
concepts of “comprehensibility”, “sincerety”, “legitimacy”, and “truth” as guiding posts
for “good communication,” only to immediately retract from the ideal of distortion-free
information as “unreachable” (p. 680). In the end, Langmyhr ends up promoting rather
than critiquing privileged transport decision-makers’ increasing use of rhetorical
strategies since, as he argues, with “a larger transportation land-use system than before
[and] an expanded set of societal values … planning authorities are in need of persuasion
competence to justify their expertise” (p. 684, my emphasis). This might be true, yet a
persuasive, retroactive justification of expert decisions is likely not what Habermas had
in mind with regard to ideal speech situations.
In a related piece, Langmyhr (2001) discusses the overall rationality of transport
investment packages, arguing that such package policies involving several modes “entail
some specific possibilities and traps in planning and decision-making processes” (p.157).
In this article, Langmyhr again uses Norwegian national transport policy to compare “the
instrumental rationality approach” focused on means-end rationality and efficiency with