3 comments about The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes.

1. John Forester's latest book entitled "The Deliberative Practitioner encouraging Participatory Planning Process", (MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1999) develops the key ideas of his earlier writings on participatory planning processes by examining the challenges and difficulties of planning in the midst of contested power relationships.

   Forester perceives planning as the effort to build consensus towards commonly perceived goals. Since the context of the planning is always fraught with differences, conflicts and inequalities, a planning process necessarily shapes opinion, creates value, transforms not just material conditions but human relationships.

   The emphasis on democracy and participation is central to Foresters search for effective planning practices. Keenly sensitive to a world 'riddled with racial violence and discrimination with vast differences in levels of political organization and mobilization', Forester highlights the significance of public deliberations that give space to plural voices and strengthen democratic practices. Adversarial situations are not predetermining. They can be negotiated towards collaborative action. Deliberative planning is seen as a process of learning together to craft strategies towards greater community good. Forester's concern with planning focuses on the issues of rationality, emotional sensitivity and moral vision. Forester defines rationality as an interactive and argumentative process of marshalling evidence and giving reasons. By ethics, Forester understands not a system of fixed codes and predetermined standards, but the continuous allocation and recognition of value inherent in every pragmatic choice assessable by its quality of action and consequences. Emotional sensitivity is seen as a source of knowledge and recognition. "Deliberative practitioner" highlights these issues in a 'live' way by using 'stories' as a narrative method because stories deepen our understanding of planning as a human interaction. Stories bring into play our dual roles of actor and critic, crucial to planning. By capturing situations in their complexity, Forester sensitizes our perceptions to the significance of many non-formal processes and the elements of unpredictability and surprise in planning cautioning against a 'rush to interpretation' and simplistic cure-alls.

   Forester's book makes significant contributions to the discussion on participatory planning. The stories he selects indicate how planners can through their technical inquiry, explicit value inquiry, and learning about social identities succeed in a pragmatic synthesis of rationality, ethical judgements and emotional sensitivities. Forester's book has special relevance to developing contexts, fraught with unevenness, caught between their indigenous cultures and the new cultures that the culture of external development aid brings with it. Development projects in such contexts, under the pressure of measurable, time-bound performance indicators, tend to abandon the process of deliberative planning. Forester's book reminds the planners in contexts of developing economies, of the need for culturally-sensitive planning process if sustainable development has to happen. It underscores the possibility and need of cross-context learning. It also reminds that in a situation of unequal relationship, participatory planning can be said to be successful only if existing relationship have been transformed through greater transfer of power to those who are the subjects of planning. Forester's book creates an effective, innovative way of educating planner, using theory and practice, the general and the particular, to mutually illuminate each other. Finally, and most importantly, it bridges the gap between theory and practice in a way that makes practice insightful and theory relevant, each enriching the other. It restores the practitioner to the centrality of planning discourse, and in doing so, the importance of people in planning.




2. As Forester explains in his Introduction makes, the title of his book is an intentional reference to Don Schön's path breaking The Reflective Practitioner. To use a trite cliché, that his book begins where Schön's book left off. There is, on the one hand, a remarkable similarity between the way Schön frames the situation the planner faces on the one hand, and Forester's description of the planner's world and his concept of deliberation on the other. The difference is in Forester's upfront, no-illusion understanding of the conflict-ridden nature of the world of planners and policy makers. Where Schön's reflection-in-action can, perhaps somewhat unfairly, be read as an improvement of the received view of professional knowledge as the sage expert who solves complex problems for clients in need, Forester has no illusions anymore about the moral and instrumental bankruptcy of the expert model. This becomes nowhere as clear as when we look at the examples each author uses. Where Schön uses one-on-one encounters between a psychotherapist and his supervisee, or an architect and his student, Forester examples include a bitter, entrenched fight over urban development in the Oslo harbour, a black home buyer counsellor in the overtly racist environment of a low income white settlement house, or housing improvement among poor campesinos in rural Venezuela.

   Between Schön's and Forester's book lie almost twenty years of massive social, economic and political change, and, in its wake, almost twenty years of disenchantment, if not disillusion, with the role of politicians, administrators, and experts in the public domain. The world that Forester's planners or today's administrators inhabit is the fragmented, pluralistic, adversarial world that has eroded the steering capacity of central governments and that transferred policymaking power to a fragmented field of social and political actors. It is a world that has become so complex and tightly coupled, that the only thing that seems certain to policy makers is that their actions will generate massive unforeseen effects. A world in which the "privileged" knowledge of experts time and again dramatically fails to foresee or solve social and technical problems, and in which, consequently, citizens no longer take the authority of experts for granted. A world, moreover, in which debates about policy solutions are often less about the effectiveness of solutions as about the nature of the problem or the identity of the parties involved. As Forester makes clear, any theory of planning or policymaking or public administration that aspires to even a modicum of social or political relevance, has somehow to come to terms with this world. Listen to the way Forester, subtly commenting upon Schön, sets the stage for his book: "As planners work in between interdependent and conflicting parties in the face of inequalities of power and political voice, they have to be not only personally reflective but politically deliberative too."(1999: 2) Planners, in order to be effective in this pluralist and conflicted world, have no choice but to work with others in an open, transparent and mutually respecting way.

   So what does democratic deliberation in the real world of politics and administration entail? Without being exhaustive, let me just touch upon some of the more startling insights of this rich and rewarding book. First, deliberation is more than debate and dialogue; more than the opportunity of being heard. (1999: 115) It is above all active participation in joint problem solving situations. Despite the practical stance of the book, it's key argument is epistemic and circles around the twin notions of unpredictability and complexity. Actors have no choice but to immerse themselves in the messiness, ambiguity, and open-endedness of practical situations. Not only are they literally captives of the everyday world, but the social-technical complexity of most public problems is such that it discounts any general problem solving strategy, and demands from the actors' immersion in the rich, diffuse detail of concrete situations. Knowledge, thus, is essentially local and relational.

   In line with the book's epistemic theme, Forester argues that an important part of participatory inquiry consists of telling stories as a special, pragmatic kind of knowing. Much has been written in the last two decades about the role of stories in providing meaning to unstructured, conflictual situations. Forester is particularly insightful about the central role of storytelling in working through everyday political situations. Stories, he tells us, are not mere representations of meetings or encounters between planners and their clientele. Instead, stories are generative; they open up possibilities and close off unwanted or unfeasible lines of action by helping the actors narratively explore the complexities and contradictions of the situation at hand as it is situated in its proximal and distal environment. As Forester puts it, with a particularly happy phrase, stories do all sorts of moral and practical "work": "descriptive work of reportage, moral work of constructing character and reputation (of oneself and others), political work of identifying friends and foes, interests and needs, and the play of power in support and opposition, and, most important. ...deliberative work of considering means and ends, values and options, what is relevant and significant, what is possible and what matters, all together." (1999: 29) Stories are, thus, the prime means for practical judgement. They retain the rich detail that we need for a valid assessment of the situation at hand, yet, by situating the concrete event in a wider moral and causal landscape, stories allow us to connect the particular with the general, the concrete situation with the more general standard. In addition stories allow the actor to explore the emotional dimensions of his actions, both for himself and for others.




3. Once I started reading this book I could not put it aside for long. Perhaps this is because so many of the insights that the author offers on what practioners of deliberative planning and rural development actually do resonates so much with the work I am involved with in Indonesia and the Philippines.

   Unlike many other books I have read on planning and development, this book relates stories of planners' real world experiences. It appears that most of the skills practitioners use to deal with the diversity of interests in the face of conflict are rarely taught in universities or textbooks. One wonders where practitioners learn what they do best.

   While a solid professional background is necessary, planners must also use improvisation to deal with deliberative processes which involve many stakeholders. What I enjoyed most about this book, unlike many others, is that it contrasts rationality with emotional sensitivity, calculation with improvisation, all of which are necessary for good practice.

   The author aslo addresses an often overlooked aspect of deliberative processes in the design professions, that is, how to balance pragmatism in contexts where there has been a history of injustice towards particular groups.

   The book makes use of extensive practical experiences of real-life planners and attempts to draw theory from that praxis. These experiences are just as fascinating to read as the authors' insights into theory. It's like being immersed into a deliberative dialogue.

1 comments about Comet/Asteroid Impacts and Human Society: An Interdisciplinary Approach.

1. The Bobrowsky edited book is an excellent must-read book for anyone conducting serious intellectual inquiry into a potential asteroid impact with the Earth. The articles are a wonderful collection on a very serious topic. The reader gains multiple insights on the varied interdisciplinary issues related to asteroids. This is a fine contribution to the current state of knowledge. The book would make for an excellent university text in either astronomy or public policy agenda-setting and formulation. I highly recommend the investment in this book if you have serious interest in the history of asteroid/comet impacts as well as what humans may do to mitigate such a disaster in the future. I believe this book to be the best I have read on the topic of asteroids impacts. I am pleased to have added it to my personal library.

No comments about Coastal Alert: Energy Ecosystems And Offshore Oil Drilling (Island Press Critical Issues Series, No. 2).

2 comments about Railroad Engineering.

1. RAILROAD ENGINEERING is somewhat pricey for a simple update of a book originally published in the early 1950's. A good introduction to the engineering aspects of railroading but with grossly obsolete economics and operating concepts. This critic, a onetime trackman on the Erie Lackawanna (Local 1502 MOW Employees) and now licensed professional engineer, found the author's suggestion to hire vagrants as gandy dancers somewhat amusing. At half the price, this book would be a worthwhile addition to a railfan's library or to a beginning engineering student's book bag.



2. This is an excellent book for anyone interested in railway civil engineering. (By the way, I bought my copy new in 1982 for $47.50. You can see what inflation has done.)

No comments about Ethics of Environment and Development: Global Challenge, International Response.

1 comments about Sustainable Tourism Management.

1. Proposals, especially for developing countries (case studies included), on how to develop a sustainable tourism policy. focus on governmental initiative, proper control of tourist numbers, conservation, and domestic share of the economic profit of tourism. Knowledgable, thoughtful, and useful.

2 comments about Zoned Out: Regulation, Markets, and Choices in Transportation and Metropolitan Land Use.

1. In addition to giving specific examples of how zoning has prevented infill development and compact development, Levine actually shows how these policies matter - that is, how zoning alters the market instead of mimicking it. For example:
   
   *Levine shows how rare infill is in single-family zones. Because local politicians rigidly prohibit any attempts to add new housing in already developed single-use zones, single-family neighborhoods are never transformed as a region grows. For example, in Massachusetts only 3 of 351 communities experienced a loss of single-family acres between 1970 and 1999. So as a result, landowners' only way of accommodating new housing demand is to build further out in suburbia.
   
   *Levine discusses surveys of developers showing that government regulation consistently forces them to make development less compact. 78% of developers responded that regulation was a "significant barrier" to more compact development. By contrast, only 35% cited financing as a barrier, and only 26% cited insufficient market interest.
   
   *Levine discusses a survey of renters and homeowners in Boston and Atlanta, asking them to make tradeoffs between space and transit/pedestrian-friendliness. He found that in more sprawling Atlanta, development is actually LESS likely to reflect consumer preferences than in more compact Boston. Among the 25% of people with the most pedestrian-oriented preferences, only 7% lived in the most pedestrian-friendly parts of the metro area (as opposed to 25% in Boston). And of that group, 38% of Atlantans lived in the MOST auto-oriented areas (as opposed to 6% of Bostonians). Why? Perhaps because there is little pre-auto stock in Atlanta- which means that thanks to Atlanta's anti-density zoning, pedestrian-friendly housing has never been built in large enough quantities to meet demand. By contrast, in Boston much of the housing stock was built before zoning, which means there is (or more accurately, was before the 2000s housing bubble) an ample supply of pre-auto housing available to meet demand for pedestrian-friendly development.
   
   *Levine demolishes the argument that smart-growth planners are forcing people into higher densities. He asserts that this is simply impossible: that planners can mandate high density, but developers can always avoid such a mandate by building elsewhere. By contrast, low-density mandates can't be avoided so easily: developers would rather turn a profit building to (low) allowable densities than not build at all, and low-density zoning is so widespread as to be unavoidable.



2. This is an excellent book on zoning practices in the United States. A must-read for anyone interested in transportation and land use policy.

1 comments about Land and Natural Development (LAND) Code: Guidelines for Sustainable Land Development (Wiley Series in Sustainable Design).

1. Balmori and Benoit are visionaries on the all-important issue of land development. Their commonsensical approach should guide the behavior of all land policy people--real estate agents, bankers, regional and local zoning commissions AND developers. Doing the "green" thing is cheaper and better, always.

No comments about The Flow of Power: Ancient Water Systems and Landscapes (Resident Scholar).

No comments about Dilemmas of Urban Economic Development: Issues in Theory and Practice (Urban Affairs Annual Reviews).