PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

87
Allmendinger (2002b:77), in a recent review article on typologies of planning, now notes
the existence of a “post-positivist domination of planning theory in recent years …
[whose] impact through various guises including collaborative, postmodern and neopragmatic
approaches has been significant.”
Post-modern meta-theoretical arguments are at the same time immensely
important and greatly problematic for anyone attempting to re-conceptualize planning
and policy-making processes at the beginning of the 21 st century. The practical relevance
of post-modern theories for planning and policy-making is primarily in challenging their
technocratic and elitist traits. On a theoretical level, Foucauldian discourse theory is now
increasingly being posited as an alternative to Habermasian communicative rationality in
planning theory debates, thus indicating the growing influence of postmodern discourses
in the discipline (Richardson 1996).
On one hand, post-modern approaches are certainly correct to sharply criticize the
negative social and environmental consequences of industry-led modernization. It was
particularly the inability of the modern state and its multi-layered institutions to
adequately respond to global environmental challenges that prompted post-modernist and
anti-modernist scholars to reject the Enlightenment project and Modernity. On the other
hand, by calling an end to all aspects of Modernity, and, most importantly, by denying
the possibility of some form of “enlightened rationality” (however redefined), it seems
that post-modernists are often throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Although
rightfully criticizing instrumental rationality, many postmodernist analyses leave us with
few alternative visions as to how restore faith in the possibility of benevolent, futureoriented,
“rational” decision-making. This presents an immense dilemma for planners