Backdrop

Communicative planning is a specific strategic approach to developing plans in cooperation with a broader range of actors. If master plans relied on the expertise of the top-down planner, then communicative approaches aim to broaden the number of voices engaged in the process, include more perspectives, and garner more wisdom from harnessing the bottom-up "wisdom of crowds". 

Here, planning is positioned as being a "wicked problem":  one with poor boundaries, many diverging and overlapping concerns, and no direct pathway for problem "solutions". It is therefore seen as a problem in "complexity" - the term largely adopted so as to refer to the messiness of the problem domain. In this reading, agents in the system are considered as individual stake-holders, each of which have personal interests that need to be resolved or addressed. At issue is how best to 'strategically navigate' amongst these players, so that an "emergent" solution can be reached. 

Within this reading,  it is helpful to consider the differential power that each stakeholder wields, so as to better balance dynamics that might lead to unfair planning solutions. Such situations arise, for example when a particular party (such as a developer), holds inequitable resources available to influence planning decision-making. Accordingly communicative planners try to understand the relative flows of agency available within the process, and then channel these in more equitable, balanced ways.

Relation to Complexity

Planners with these interests are often drawn to principles from complexity, not least because of the fact that one of the key thinkers in the domain Patsy Healey, has a seminal book, the title of which is "Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies". The approach, does indeed, relate to complexity in that it emphasis a bottom-up approach, by which a consensual strategy for planning emerges. Here, the use of the word "complexity" may be more metaphorical then technical (if we assume that in this context it is simply suggesting that planning is 'complicated'). Similarly, there are other aspects of complexity theory that are appropriated in this discourse, some in more direct, others in more metaphorical manners.

Networks

Communicative Planners have a strong interest in how the nature of the actor Networks affect how decision-making takes place (and whose voices dominate the network). There is a strong link between Communicative approaches and Actor Network Theory (or ANT), which examines network dynamics as what ultimately constitutes certain forms or protocols previously accepted as 'givens'. Here, similar to the approach of relational geography, we see that the relations constituting a given entity are being more fundamental than the entities themselves. 

Agents

Part of the objectives of Network analysis are to understand what nodes in the network hold more power, tracing which agents in the system play a larger causal role in driving it forward.  Communicative Planners, consider how Bottom-up Agents, in the form of diverse stake-holders steer the process,  and where differences in agency lie.  While consensus can "emerge" from many kinds of bottom-up agents interactions, such emergence can be subject to inequitable steering depending on how stakeholders are empowered or disempowered in the process. The concern for agents here is thus less about "rule-based" decision making, or how such agents adapt, but moreso about how so-called bottom-up dynamics need to be facilitated so as to ensure that the meaningful input of all agents can be garnered in discovering a planning solution. The concern is that some processes leave agents out - unable to contribute to the emergent characteristics of a given planning strategy.

Emergence

For communicative planners, the concept of emergence is again used more as a metaphorical tool than in a technical manner. To illustrate: even though diverse ants in a complex system form an emergent trail, they do not do so by sitting around together in a colony deliberating and weighing which course of action to take. Emergence in the more technical sense relates to actions that are performed in an environment, where the agents involved  - be it sand grains or ants - need not be consciously cooperating. By the same token, ants need not compromise their own needs on the part of the colony. This is not to say that the communicative approach towards emergent consensus is not of value, only that it is probably not of the same kind as what we would see in natural complex systems.

That said, the language and terms drawn from complexity seem to offer communicative planners with a useful set of concepts: able to convey something meaningful about developing a more contingent, more open-ended, more bottom-up approach and more relational approach to decision making.

Back to Complexity & Urbanism

Back to Navigating Complexity