PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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or “congestion.” This is why all discourse theoretical approaches, no matter whether they
feel more inspired by Jürgen Habermas or Michel Foucault, deserve credit for unveiling
the mask of “objective rationality” behind which dominant transport and planning
approaches hide.
Of course, we cannot analytically deconstruct our way out of congestion, but
discourse analysis can help us understand why policy approaches might focus on
“congestion” in the first place, and how metaphorical terms such as “bottlenecks” gain
meaning and widespread currency. Richard Willson (2001:2) powerfully underscores
this fundamental point:
Are not measures of vehicle flows, levels of service or cost effectiveness robust
representations of reality? Gridlock is gridlock, right? For planning, however,
gridlock is not gridlock until we have defined it as a problem and decided to do
something to address it. Transportation plans depend on what gridlock means, and
establishing meaning is an inherently social and linguistically based process. The way
that transportation planners use language – understanding certain ideas and values and
excluding others, hearing some things and not hearing others, and defining roles for
themselves, their organizations, decision makers and the public – shapes knowledge,
public participation, problem definition, process design and negotiation, and the
outcome of planning.
In the case of European Union transport policy making and planning, Eurocrats in
the Transport and Energy Directorate recently forcefully resuscitated the nightmarish
vision of gridlock in favor of many other possible imagined futures, thereby also focusing
their views much more on the likely outcomes than on the underlying causes of current
transport system inefficiencies. “Safety” and “emissions” are other frequently heard
worries. The entirety of Europe’s predominantly road- and motor-vehicles-based
transport system is rarely questioned, however, since it is seen as providing the
foundation for European economic competitiveness.