Making Strategies in Spatial Planning

This provocative collection of essays challenges traditional ideas of strategic s- tial planning and opens up new avenues of analysis and research. The diversity of contributions here suggests that we need to rethink spatial planning in several f- reaching ways. Let me suggest several avenues of such rethinking that can have both theoretical and practical consequences. First, we need to overcome simplistic bifurcations or dichotomies of assessing outcomes and processes separately from one another. To lapse into the nostalgia of imagining that outcome analysis can exhaust strategic planners’ work might appeal to academics content to study ‘what should be’, but it will doom itself to further irrelevance, ignorance of politics, and rationalistic, technocratic fantasies. But to lapse into an optimism that ‘good process’ is all that strategic planning requires, similarly, rests upon a ction that no credible planning analyst believes: that enough talk will miraculously transcend con ict and produce agreement. Neither sing- minded approach can work, for both avoid dealing with con ict and power, and both too easily avoid dealing with the messiness and the practicalities of negotiating out con icting interests and values – and doing so in ethically and politically critical ways, far from resting content with mere ‘compromise’. Second, we must rethink the sanctity of expertise. By considering analyses of planning outcomes as inseparable from planning processes, these accounts help us to see expertise and substantive analysis as being ‘on tap’, ready to put into use, rather than being particularly and technocratically ‘on top’.

This book discusses strategic spatial planning with emphasis on the role of values and cognitions dynamics within the planning-evaluation interplay.

In the book, values and cognitions dynamics are investigated as crucial aspects of planning practices devoted to the development of strategic actions strictly linked to spatial contexts. Different methodologies and approaches are examined to support collaborative decision making and to manage comprehensive and participatory knowledge throughout strategic planning processes. The discussion is carried out from both theoretical and practical points of view.
The book also dissects the multiple meanings of strategic planning and its implication in terms of mobilization and creation of values and knowledge. Critical issues are examined in relation to both the dynamics of negotiation and construction of diverse values and knowledge in planning processes, and in relation to some experiences carried out in different urban contexts.