Is the Just City just enough?

The Reading: New Directions in Planning Theory by Susan S. Fainstein

This week’s reading covered three ideas of planning, two conceptual and one practical. The first section provided an analysis of the Communicative Planning model, pioneered by Patsy Healey, the author of the reading of two weeks before. Healey’s position is build upon the foundations of advocacy planning and community consultation, the selling point of theorist such as Paul Davidoff and Sherry Arnstein. However, Fainstein is critical of the Communicative Planning model for being too abstract. Planners must take on the somewhat unlikely role of communicators and mediators – a very value laden position within the dialogue of planning. Fainstein acknowledges that while Communicative Planning has strong merits, the ultimate result of including the voices of many is that some will be heard louder than others, whether because of their perspective on an issue of their power and influence. To paraphrase Fainstein, the problem with Communicative Planning is that power of speech depends on the power of the speaker. Inevitably traditional power roles have a way of influencing the Communicative Planning model. 

The second examination of planning comes through a critique of New Urbanism. This is a very practical application of urban planning. It is almost a renaissance of the design focus of City Beautiful and Garden City movements. I am really drawn to the concept of New Urbanism, and I think there have been some fascinating projects, such as two towns in Florida, Seaside (which provided the set of The Truman Show) and Celebration, a town build by the Disney Corporation. I used to love the idea of Celebration; of the matching house designs and simple but elegant boulevards. However, after doing further research for a project in Year 12, it almost seemed like some sinister Stepford Wives community with this strict corporation forcing this fake sense of familiarity and old world charm in a still very new community (note the police car patroling the streets below). This is Fainstein’s critique of New Urbanism: it promotes an unrealistic sense of environmental determinism, whereby physical spaces are thought to provide every aspect of social desire. However, this is pure oxymoron. You cannot manufacture designated points of social interaction without living in a city first, much like you cannot tell how a house will properly function until you live in it. Ultimately, New Urbanism shows a disregard for consumer preferences in favour of the grand vision of the planner and designer. 

This brings us to Faintein’s main body of work, the Just City movement. In fact, her most well known work is titled ‘The Just City’, and it won her the Paul Davidoff Award for Social Change and Diversity. This strikes me as odd, as the Just City is strongly routed in the political economy. While this is not unwelcome in our increasingly capitalist world full of globalisation, NGOs and transnational corporations, it seems out of place when improving the social structure for the underprivileged, as the Award would suggest Fainstein’s work did. The theory of a just city promotes Fainstein’s Neo- Marxist attitude to urban planning. She does advocate for a level of communicative planning, but stakeholders must be clearly identifiable and their involvement must result in a benefit to the whole project, not just to satisfy their need for inclusion in the planning dialogue. However, Fainstein disembarks from a pure method of empowering the disenfranchised to advocate for increased wealth for the middle class. As Adam said in his presentation to the class, and as Canberra based architect Sheila Hughes also noted in a presentation I went to, can there be prosperity without growth? I think this is my main criticism of Fainstein’s just city approach, in that it is too deeply rooted in economics to acknowledge a more slow paced sense of achievement through more sustainable means of development, incorporating more aspects of environmentalism and preservation, rather than being purely urban focussed. After all, we study Urban and Regional Planning.