PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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the “communicative rationality” approach which emphasizes interaction and process.
This time, Langmyhr aims to demonstrate how a communicative rationality perspective
ends up with a different set of pros and cons regarding the issue of investment packages
than a traditional perspective emphasizing instrumental rationality. This aim is both
interesting and relevant. In the article itself, however, Langmyhr then surprisingly
categorizes the cunning practice of using investment packages to couple unpopular
measures (e.g. road pricing and fees) with popular ones (e.g. local expansion of
infrastructure with national funds) in the “pro-category” of the communicative rationality
perspective – simply because “the potential for consensus building is enhanced” by this
practice. So it seems to me that some proponents of the communicative approach have to
distinguish more clearly between genuinely “communicative” settings where supposedly
unbiased actors shape policy processes, and bastardizations of such ideal typical
situations in which planners, public officials and/or bureaucratic decision-makers simply
better sell (and thus ultimately achieve) largely preset agendas through opportunistic
packaging of arguments and resources.
In a wide-ranging assessment of communicative rationality as a possible
alternative to conventional transport planning approaches, Richard Willson (2001)
presents a sophisticated analysis of the current state of transport planning in developed
countries, making several excellent points that cannot be recounted in detail here.
Ultimately, his answer to whether communicative rationality represents a promising
model for transportation planning is that “the promise is substantial” (p.25) but also that
the promise alone “is insufficient to displace the traditional model” (p.23). At the outset
of the article, Willson, like others before him, posits the communicative approach in