ancient cities

underlies planning can be seen as politically neutral
because the type of knowledge deemed relevant in a
situation is already a value judgment requiring
political commitment and resource allocation.
Instead of one official plan, Davidoff proposed having
many plans with knowledge and arguments
supporting them and a court determining which
course of action is more justified than others.
The idea of advocacy planning has been influential
particularly in liberal societies with weak public
authority. It has also led to more open
participation in planning. However, the suggested
institutional reform has not been realized; the public
authority remains the principal agent producing
plans. In cases of conflict, however, administrative
courts are generally used to devise a solution.
Transactive Planning
In rational planning theory, knowledge is usually
assumed to be unproblematic; that is, an
objective and disinterested gathering of reliable
information takes place. However, in epistemology
(theory of knowledge) and in the sociology of
knowledge, knowledge is much more complicated
and often inherently connected to human agency,
culture, and politics. One of the early critiques of
objective knowledge in planning was published in
John Friedmann’s theory of transactive planning
published in 1973. According to Friedmann, a gap
exists between the processed knowledge of the
planning expert and the knowledge based on experience
that practitioners have. Experts rely on science
and calculation, whereas practitioners rely on
earlier examples of what is possible and what is
not. Instead of resorting to scientific methods and
professional identity supported by their peer group,
Friedmann suggests that planners should strive for
real human interaction, accepting the radical otherness
of other agents. Knowledge should not be
abstracted from the human being but seen as part
of the totality of communication, including feeling.
Transactive planning theory can thus be seen as
one of the roots of what was later called the communicative
turn in planning.
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning has its roots in warfare, first,
and second, in private business planning. It has
Planning Theory
605
also been applied in public administration and
planning, although these professions have been
reluctant to adopt a strategic perspective. This is
partly due to the welfare state ideology and partly
to the monopoly of jurisdiction of planning agencies.
During the 1980s and 1990s, however, as
entrepreneurialism and regional and global competition
increased in urban politics, planners and
planning theorists started to take strategic thinking
more seriously. The most important change in
public planning is the awareness that action alternatives
are not good or bad per se, but their success
is dependent on the results of the game that is
played locally, regionally, and globally. As a latecomer
in strategic thinking, theories of public
planning have not contributed much to the development
of strategic theorizing in other fields. Most
often, existing concepts and theories have simply
been adopted: visioning, mission statements, and
SWOT analysis that pinpoints the strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities, and threats of the organization,
city, or region in question. Strategic thinking
in planning has also been criticized for its inability
to accommodate traditional ideals of public planning
such as accountability, participation, and the
transparency of public administration.
Alternative Planning Theories
Communicative Planning
Communicative planning theories have their
roots in the 1960s’ democratic movement in
Europe and the United States, but they are also
informed by more recent developments in the
social sciences and philosophy. One of the most
important sources was the German sociologist and
philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who published his
influential theory of communicative action in
1981. Habermas, a disciple of the Frankfurt School
of Critical Theory, wanted to show that instrumental
and strategic actions were special cases of
human action that were oriented only to success
(thus representing instrumental rationality). Real
communicative action that determined human
interaction, on the other hand, was based on the
ability of human beings to coordinate their action
on the basis of a common understanding of reality
and a common set of accepted norms. The latter
were arrived at discursively in discussions where