Bad Planning Theory - Coursework Example

Bad Planning Theory Bad planning started facing criticism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There are two levels of bad planning in the post-war urban development criticism that emerged in 1950. The two levels are criticism of physical determinism and criticism of social blindness. In the criticism of social blindness, the collection of planning practices is not criticized but the theory concerned with the practice. The physicalists were bound to their own conception of town planning and the planners tended to see the towns and their issues in aesthetic terms. They did not pay attention to the social matters because their theory of planning obstructed them from considering social issues. The origin of the problem is attributed to the surveys that were undertaken by the town planners in preparation for planning, they were rarely done. The failure to take into consideration the social issues into planning was criticized by Young and Willmott (Taylor and Taylor, 1998). In the criticism of physical determinism, the social issues were not ignored and the major concern was to plan for the community life according to neighborhoods. In planning the neighborhoods, the town planners had the tendency of assuming that the form and the layout of the neighborhood physical environment would mold and determine the quality of the social life. Maurice Broady and Ruth Glass were critical of the ideology that the social neighborhoods could be developed by physical planning (Taylor and Taylor, 1998). Anyone can get involved in the planning process and majority of the individuals get engaged in a goal-oriented behavior. Planning is seen as the capability to control the forthcoming consequences of the present actions. An individual will succeed in planning if he or she is capable of controlling more consequences. Doubts usually arise as to the efficacy of the national economic planning; they are rarely discussed and answered. Advocates for the planning and plans spend less time demonstrating how it can be successful. Instead, they spend more time explaining how wonderful planning is despite the fact that things have not worked out the right way (Wildavsky, 1971). Planning is defended in terms of the valuable process and not in terms of the results. How the individual got there matters a lot than how much the individual did there. Therefore, “planners talk about how much they learned while going through the exercise, how others benefited from the discipline of considering goals and resources, and how much more rational everyone feels at the end” (Wildavsky, 1971). Cohen, the author of the Modern Capitalist Planning: The French Experience offers a detailed analysis of the French people in the process of planning. The Monnet plan was created in 1945-6 and Cohen asserts that it overestimated the forthcoming amounts of the investment funds. The planners and the politicians finished the first and the second plan successful and ahead of the schedule (the plans were 4). However, the third plan which was finished in 1958 indicated hard times to come. The plan failed and Cohen states that it was due to the fact that planning was a political process. Thus, the French planners could not control the public and the private sector. The power to control the private industry was not bestowed upon the planners but the Ministry of Finance. Additionally, the Ministry of Finance has the authority and the final obligation over the financial incentives that are used to implement the plan. The planners are not capable of controlling the incentives but the Ministry of Finance has the capability (Wildavsky, 1971). Cohen states that the absence of coordination between the middle-term programs and short-term policy of the plan is the origin of the difficulty between the plan and the Treasury; this is the most serious obstruction towards the implementation of the consecutive plans. Cohen asserts that planning is a political process. He goes on to indicate how political commitments over a long period of time impact the translation of the planning ideologies into practice. Planning gets into difficulty due to the traditional political forces in the day-to-day making of the decisions. If they fail to realize their aspirations within the plan, they find ways to finish it (Wildavsky, 1971). Planners are usually exposed and unless they take caution to make their goals too unclear to be assessed, failure basically exhibits itself. They are supposed to spend their time arguing their evident failures and not how they have succeeded. When a project gets into trouble, there are various classic explanations that can be adopted without admitting failure. The general tactic is to claim that the project was not tried satisfactorily and “that doing more of the same would bring the results originally predicted” (Caiden and Wildavsky, 1980). There is a general argument in planning, if there are more commitment, more dedication, and more effort things would become better. The argument is repetitive because if things were the way they were supposed to be, then planning would not be needed (Caiden and Wildavsky, 1980). When planning does not meet the expectations the planners are the usual suspects. They are often accused of being not ambitious enough or overambitious. They have deviated from their calling by joining politics or they have not been sensitive to the political dimensions in regard to their tasks. They spend much of their time looking at the economic relationship between one sector and the other while at the same time ignoring the analysis of the individual projects. At other times they spend a considerable length of time looking at specific matters that they are incapable of dealing with within the economic context (Wildavsky, 1973). Planners have failed to define their roles; they have trouble in explaining who they really are and what they are expected to be doing. In other words, the planner has become his own victim of planning; the creation made by him is overwhelming such that he has been unable to handle it. The planning has become huge such that the planner has been incapable of deciphering its dimensions. It has also become very complex such that the planner has failed to keep up with it (Wildavsky, 1973). Disagreement of Bad Planning Theory Planning is developed in response to the social demand. Planning functions as the institutional agreement between the private sector, the civil groups, and the government within a particular society. Changes within the human society bring about the changes almost all professions and planning is not excluded (Zhang, 2006).The planning process has become obstructed by political impasses and the deeply entrenched data collection procedures used in the planning process. The planners have raised questions regarding the limit of analytical planning approaches in the future and they have experimented new and detailed approaches. In the past years, the planners have mainly focused on the ways to represent the future. There are 3 most significant representational methods that have surfaced and they include persuasive storytelling, scenario-writing and visioning. A vision is a statement of the goals of a particular group and it is accompanied by a strategy formulated to achieve the goals. On the other hand, persuasive storytelling and scenario-telling are processes that produce stories that explain the importance of the events that are likely to happen or they have already happened and offer suggestions of how the actions in the current scenario will impact the future (Kitsuse and Myers, 2000). Persuasive stories, scenarios and visions interpret the future by decreasing the complexity and at the same time bringing a number of perspectives into reflection. Vision focus on the citizen’s desired ends and it functions as the benchmark for planning actions and decisions. Scenario-writing is particularly used by the planners as means to sensitize themselves to a number of probabilities in the future and which they can be planned for or against. Stories told persuasively can be utilized to woo individuals into the planner’s way of thoughts (Kitsuse and Myers, 2000). The vision movement has emphasized on the need for the citizen participation in process of planning. A beneficial review and evaluation of the present wave of the visioning practices is found in the article written by Amy Hellinng. The visioning movement has emphasized more on goal setting and process than the ways in which the goals are accomplished. For visioning to be effective, collaborative and creative visioning process aspects are supposed to be balanced by the grounding in action scenarios and feasibility projections. “In the absence of strategies for achieving goals and the authority to implement them, visions risk devolving into inconsequential and expensive wish lists for the future” (Kitsuse and Myers, 2000, p224). Scenario writing is a practice that was developed by the business strategists and planners and it still applies in the same capacity to the urban planning scenario. Scenarios are basically stories concerning events that would have effect on the planning decisions if they happened. In the process of scenario building, the planners develop several stories about the equally possible futures, study the impact of each future for the company or organization, and then develop strategies for the organization response as if each of the scenarios has come to pass (Kitsuse and Myers, 2000). Hirschhorn offers suggestion to scenarios typology that categorizes scenarios as process or state driven. State scenarios offer a vision of how the world will look like at a particular time in the future without offering description of the process by which the end state will be achieved. On the other hand, process scenarios offer description to the sequence of events and circumstances by which a certain end state or vision will be realized (Kitsuse and Myers, 2000). Persuasive stories are meant to persuade the individual to adopt the storyteller most preferred course of action. It is a means of communication that is very effective in contentious scenarios in which the analytical argument often leads in more polarization of the views. Throgmorton states that story-telling that is future oriented is the main work of the planning. Throgmorton compares good planning to good fiction. The planners are supposed to persuade the interpretive communities to agree to their interpretive assumptions in the advent of the anticipated doubts (Kitsuse and Myers, 2000). Planners (those who are persuasive storytellers) are supposed to convince the individuals by developing “images of the past, present and future, and rhetorically employing scientific facts such as forecast, surveys, and models to show how these components fit coherently together” (Kitsuse and Myers, 2000). Planners who are persuasive storytellers also make use of myth as the method of establishing a point of view and engaging the commonly shared values (Kitsuse and Myers, 2000). Application of the Theory There are some areas within Abu Dhabi that have been neglected mainly due to bad urban planning, and lack of urban planning. The Abu Dhabi new peripheries, which include Emirates Palace, the Rim, Yas and Saadyiat Islands, the new Salam Street, the Corniche, and the older Mushrif area, look sparkling and new. However, in between them there exists aridness, loss of amenity, dirt, lack of urban planning and shabbiness. Part of Abu Dhabi has been transformed into an arid industrial zone, the construction works and the building material shops are everywhere and it has resulted in industrial and living place becoming one. The city having planned in the 70s experiences problems related to high population growth. Yet another problem that exists is the description of buildings and locations. This is because the city’s addressing system is scantily applied. The problem of bad planning in parts of Abu Dhabi can be corrected by accepting compromises to resolve certain conflicts and come up with better long term solutions. The stakeholders in the problematic areas need to be consulted to establish their issues and views which should then be considered when making plans to correct the current situation. The root causes of the current problems should be analyzed and dealt with to make the place better. Basic plans should also be developed to correct problems such as to manage parking and regulations instituted to correct various problems. References Caiden, N. & Wildavsky, A. B. (1980). Planning and budgeting in poor countries. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Taylor, N. & Taylor, N. M. (1998). Urban planning theory since 1945. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Kitsuse, A. & Myers, D. (2000). Constructing the future in planning: A survey of theories and tools. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 29, 221 – 231. Wildavsky, A. (1973). If planning is everything, maybe it’s nothing. Policy Sciences, 4, 127 – 153. Zhang, T. (2006). Planning theory as an institutional innovation: Diverse approaches and nonlinear trajectory of the evolution of planning theory. City Planning Review, 30(8), 9 – 18. Read More