Is there a cultural theory perspective on the COVID pandemic of 2020-21? Of course there is:
Davy, Benjamin. “Social Distancing and Cultural Bias: On the Spatiality of COVID-19.” Journal of the American Planning Association 87, no. 2 (2021): 159-166. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2020.1824617
Thomas Hartmann writes in the journal Planning Theory on wicked problems and clumsy solutions in planning.
Thomas Hartmann, 2012. Wicked problems and clumsy solutions: Planning as expectation management. Planning Theory August 2012 vol. 11 no. 3 242-256
Abstract
In 1973, Horst W Rittel and Malvin A Webber introduced the term ‘wicked problem’ in planning theory. They describe spatial planning as dealing with inherent uncertainty, complexity and inevitable normativity. This contribution picks up the concept of wicked problems, reflects on it from a planning-theoretical perspective, and proposes the use of Cultural Theory’s concept of clumsy solutions as a response to wicked planning problems. In discussing public participation processes in spatial planning, it is then shown what clumsy solutions mean for spatial planning. The four rationalities of Cultural Theory are then used to explain why public participation in planning can become wicked, and how these rationalities provide a response that copes with this wickedness.
Chatting with my young son this evening it occured to us that superheroes require certain types of cities, certain kinds of urban form, in order to thrive. Spiderman needs tall buildings closely packed in order to leap between them. The Hulk needs impressive edifices to knock down. Only certain types of urban form are fit for superheroes.
There’s a new documentary about the rise and fall and return of Detroit. The director of Requiem for Detroit? , Julien Temple, was fascinated by the idea that Detroit was at the leading edge of American urban for many years, leading the rest of America into the future. Now Detroit is doing it again, showing us what the first post-American city looks like.
Will it be a city fit for humans?
Image Credits: Daquella manera/Flickr; laughlin/Flickr; walid.hassanein/Flickr
The Child in the City, Anarchy in Action and Welcome Thinner City are three of the most influential books for the shape of my adult life. I’m mourning the death of writer and activist, ‘giant of social commentary’, Colin Ward.
Ward’s claim in Anarchy in Action (1973) that the international postal system was a perfect example of anarchist organisation helped me to see the meaning of Wright’s ‘sociological imagination’. Rather than looking for a political party with a headquarters and a manifesto, I began to see self-organising social systems everywhere, spontaneous egalitarianism, an immanent. if distinctly patchy, utopia.
Welcome Thinner City (1989) was for a time my Bible for understanding urban politics and policy at the end of the Thatcher period. Looking back it almost single-handedly made sense of what I did then and caused me to do what I do now.
The Child in the City (1978) helped me to see how urban policy can be shaped for the benefit of the people who actually have to live with it. ‘making the city more accessible, more negotiable and more useful to the child’ remains one of the most important things we can attempt.
“I believe that the social ideas of anarchism: autonomous groups, spontaneous order, workers’ control, the federative principle, add up to a coherent theory of social organisation which is a valid and realistic alternative to the authoritarian, hierarchical and institutional social philosophy which we see in application all around us. Man will be compelled, Kropotkin declared, “to find new forms of organisation for the social functions which the State fulfils through the bureaucracy” and he insisted that ”as long as this is not done nothing will be done.” I think we have discovered what these new forms of organisation should be. We have now to make the opportunities for putting them into practice.” Anarchism as a Theory of Organisation (1966).
In this series about planning in Palestine we’ve looked at three alternative ‘plans’. The first, thankfully, will never be built (although, chillingly, it’s really just a vision of present segregated reality). The second may well be built (though it would take a dramatic turnaround in political will). The third offers a glimpse of a progress-free future where nothing gets built (which is wholly unrealistic, given large population increases in the next 20 years).
These three visions of a future Palestine raise some important political questions and they show how spatial planning can focus the political process on actually getting things done. Here are some of the issues: Continue reading Beyond Enclaves in Palestine (Part 4)
What future can be planned for Palestine?
So far in this series we’ve looked at a nightmare sci-fi segregationalism generated merely from revealing the implications of the Oslo Accords as architectural impressions. We’ve also looked at a much more positive spatial plan to develop a central north-south transit corridor, linking most of the main settlements and directing future urban growth without sprawl. The architectural student, the leading planner, what, thirdly, would an artist have to offer in terms of a vision for Palestine? Continue reading Beyond Enclaves in Palestine (Part 3)
I’ve been struck recently by three somewhat contrasting visions of physical development for a future Palestine.
Palestine. Perhaps nowhere else on earth has the philosophy of space been so consistently conceived as a weapon.
The sophistication of the manipulation of space for military and political purposes in the West Bank and Gaza has made the Berlin Wall and the DMZ look dumb by comparison, and the East/West Belfast sectarian divide seem distinctly amateur. Israel has pursued a policy of redefining its own spatial limitations by ‘walking through walls’ at the same time as constraining the movement of others by establishing new spatial limits ‘seam-line obstacles’ and ‘depth barriers’, contesting both below and above in what architect Eyal Weizman has called a ‘Hollow Land’. Continue reading Beyond enclaves in Palestine: Constructing the physical reality of territorial integrity (Part 1)
Four Cultures 