Rationalising a Response to the Free Distribution of Facts: Feminist Agency or Objectivist Equality?
Introduction ‘Planners who provide just the facts, or information about procedures, to anyone who asks for them seem to treat everyone equally. Yet where severe inequalities exist, treating the strong and the weak alike ensures only that the strong remain strong and the weak remain weak. The planner who pretends to act as a neutral regulator may sound egalitarian but is nevertheless acting, ironically, to perpetuate and ignore existing inequalities’ (Forester, 1989). The very beginning of the RTPI code of professional conduct (2011), paragraph 1(d), states that members ‘shall not discriminate on the grounds of race, sex, sexual orientation, creed, religion, disability or age and shall seek to eliminate such discrimination by others and to promote equality of opportunity’ (emphasis mine). This essay argues that personal rationalization of the terms of ‘promotion of equality’ would hold the ‘neutral regulator’ either valid or fallible. Equality and equity are difficult concepts to rationalise in the chaotic and multi-faceted field of real-world decision making. It is often easy to rely on the relative justifiability of figures and weighing of data to reach a decision. However, as Forester writes above, decision making in a stagnant, static-normative structural system merely entrenches the existing power structures. Instead, he writes (Forester, 1993, p.6), planning should aspire to be the ‘situated practical, politically charged organising of attention’. In this essay, feminist theories of planning code will be examined with regard to the free distribution of facts and procedural information by planners. This raises issues of the structural position of those in power and the debateable necessity of the empowerment of minorities to fairly respond to larger voices. As one of Hendler’s
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