Promises and Problems of Community Life
Introduction: the organisation of the chapter
Part One, Current Cascades of Change, examines the ways that a number of accelerating social and economic factors are creating insistent needs for more imaginative and effective community planning. These pressures include:
• accelerating innovations in information and communications;
• economic fluctuations;
• expanding transport technologies;
• radical administrative reorganisation;
• major political change;
• destabilised international relations;
• changing mindsets: increasing relativism and loss of intellectual self-confidence.
Part Two, Community Life and Change, relates these challenges to contemporary community life and outlines potential planning responses.
Part Three, Competing Interpretations of Community Structure and Change, delves into differing interpretations of the nature of communities based on the competing priorities of order, productivity, control and cooperation.
Part Four, The Roles of Collaboration, reviews how these themes illuminate the ways that people and organisations can cooperate in planning their communities and leads to Conclusions applying these roles to the practices of collaborative planning.
Part One, Current Cascades of Change
The justification for planning today extends beyond the age-old desire to create a better world. New urgency is being injected by threats to our continued security as a successful and sociable species posed by increasingly volatile conditions
Planning for Community, First Edition. Phil Heywood. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
in the physical, economic and political environments. Because the best solutions to many of these challenges are themselves contested, finding solutions will demand inclusive discussions to shape new agreements concerning values, actions and distribution of costs and benefits. Coordinated responses will have to match and manage impacts resulting from a wide range of powerful drivers, including climate change triggering spiralling environmental instability; increased personal and social mobility; economic uncertainty; impacts of technological change; globalisation of production and information exchange; and most recently, the spiralling impacts of mutating global pandemics. Coherent and responsive planning is also needed to ensure that the solution to one problem does not come at the cost of creating unmanageable impacts on others.i
Because sustainable solutions in free societies must ultimately be built upon communication and collaboration, planning to meet these challenges should involve bringing together not only various technical experts, service providers and business interests but also community members and leaders. This is true across the world – as much, for instance, in the flood-prone villages of the Sundarbans of the Ganges delta, as in the socially and ethnically divided communities of inner cities throughout the ‘rust belt’ areas of the United States and England’s industrial north (Ghosh 2004; Leeds University School of Sociology and Social Policy 2019; Haldane 2021).
components of change
The last four decades can be viewed as a period of widespread accelerated change, or ‘punctuated equilibrium’ during which a number of very rapid transformations have coincided and interacted to create revolutionary situations across numerous systems (Gould 1988). These global trends have exerted potent impacts on the everyday lives of local communities. In the physical environment, climate change is producing threatening rises in sea levels, exerting far-reaching and mounting effects on coastal systems in low-lying areas and
affecting ecosystems, crop production, human health, freshwater resources and settlement safety and planning (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2014; Flannery 2020; National Aero Space Administration (NASA) 2021). Economically, the cumulative over consumption and production that resulted in the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis are producing continuing instability. In politics, the massive global shifts in the balance of power triggered by the end of the cold war are creating continuing instability and mass flights of refugees from places such as Syria, Ukraine and Afghanistan, seeking refuge throughout the world. In human health, the Covid-19 pandemic has resulted worldwide in nearly 15 million deaths (World Health Organisation 2022), restricted social interaction and discouraged previous trends towards high-density concentrations of living and work spaces.
These converging crises in our physical, social and economic environments pose challenging questions for community life and planning worldwide.
Earlier fears concerning border wars between Western and Communist power blocks in Europe, America and Africa have been re-ignited by new crises of invasions of bordering countries by continental powers, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and constantly repeated claims by mainland China over the territory of Taiwan. Escalating local riots, reprisals and killings in communities throughout Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas add to the sense that new, more inclusive approaches are needed to enable communities to live together in harmony with each other and with their neighbours. Earlier fears of a new ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996) have been renewed by rising tides of international terrorism and global competition between the USA and China, and the European Union and Russia. As a result, in times of unprecedented physical mastery and invention, humanity is stalked by escalating threats of disasters resulting from failures to collaborate in the face of external changes or even to coexist in cooperative communities, locally, regionally, nationally or globally.
Solutions will require not only continued innovation but also improved collaboration at all scales of community, which often involves challenging mutual adjustment. Where widespread frustration, anger and social resentments flare among people having to face disruptions to their accustomed patterns of life, policy making and leadership will be required to recognise, manage and assuage these reactions. People will need help and tools to adjust their traditional lifestyles to accommodate
the ‘shock of the new’. Prominent among the roles required of sensitive and sustainable community planning will be assistance to individuals and communities to identify and manage changes that may seem to arrive without adequate warning or fully understood causes. In each of a number of arenas, discussed below, the forces of entropy, pulling things apart, will have to be matched by conscious integration to hold them together.ii In such situations, communities of all scales will need to develop their capacities to interpret rapidly changing conditions; to agree collaborative responses to radically changing circumstances; and to evaluate options for unintended consequences – in short, to plan.
accelerating innovation in information and communications
Remarkable recent advances in information and communications technology (ICT) have made the contemporary world a place of instant and universal communication and greatly expanded the potential scale of communities of association. Consequences, both benign and damaging, have been widespread and far reaching. On the positive side, ‘Glocal’ awareness, transcending communities of place, is stimulating widely occurring and loosely linked initiatives. These include carbon reduction schemes adopted by many individuals, local communities and governments throughout developed countries (see, for example, Australian Government Department of Energy, Science, Industry and Resources 2021; lcarb 2022; Transition Towns 2022). Such networks of environmental and social activism are also making good use of instantaneous internet and email links to assemble powerful coalitions of public, political and media opinion formers to champion or oppose actions on global issues. One such campaign in the early years of this century successfully contested the proposed extension by the World Trade Organization of the global financial market into critical fields such as local land ownership (Monbiot 2004).iii
Both local and larger-scale initiatives can be influential. Where contact is daily and direct, communities remain more intensively linked, but where they are widespread and open-edged to draw in newcomers, they frequently become even more influential and may transcend boundaries to help bolster actions in remote local societies. For instance, in the United Kingdom, these have given rise to the development and advocacy of new strategies to help cope with the impacts of global environmental change on food, water and
energy systems and security worldwide and in advancing the role of science and research networks in a wide range of issues (Environmental Change Institute 2022).
However, potentially negative impacts of instant global communications are at least as significant. They include manipulation of social media platforms to interfere in the elections and political lives of targeted countries and regimes; the rampant spread of worldwide movements promoting hate speech and misinformation and the ultimately even more serious threat of the use of mass surveillance techniques by repressive governments to destroy the civil rights and personal freedom of their own citizens. Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election, which gave rise to a Congressional investigation, made use of the global reach and proneness to manipulation of social media, using the latest developments in global communications (Wikipedia 2022). Equally damaging on a more general, less targeted basis is the use of these same media to promote conspiracy theories and hate speech, associated with the worldwide ‘Alt Right’ movement (Grinnell College 2022). Ultimately, most serious of all is the rapidly expanding capacity of mass surveillance to subject every moment of individuals’ lives to the scrutiny of potentially repressive governments. The People’s Republic of China, for instance, is currently introducing a system of social rewards and punishments based on the evidence of compliance with state policies as indicated by the results of this kind of surveillance (Human Rights Watch 2022; CBN News 2019). Active community advocacy and empowerment at all scales are needed to ensure that prudent regulations prevent the latest developments in communications technology from being used to fuel such abuses. Now, more than ever, the price of individual freedom will be eternal vigilance over abuses of centralised power.
economic fluctuations
Economics has become one of the most contested fields of knowledge and interpretation in the lives of local communities. The prevailing view of the mid-twentieth century that mixed and managed economies could and should balance demand and supply to produce full employment and avoid inflation (Galbraith 1972) was challenged by the militant ideas of supply-side economics associated with monetarist theorists like Milton Friedman (1968, 2008). Arguing that ‘a rising tide will float all boats’ the monetarists advocated prioritising aggregate economic growth over working
to promote individual wellbeing and just distributions of wealth. That orthodoxy has now itself been challenged by the effects of prolonged world economic recessions and bouts of massive localised unemployment, triggered by financial crises and global pandemics. In mixed economies where recurrent government funds and credibility are required to bolster private sector financial institutions and transactions, opportunities may also arise for well-organised communities to play larger roles in shaping their own destinies. In the wake of pandemics and spasms of the global economic system, support from central government funding can be channelled to tackle local problems like shortage of affordable housing and to stimulate local economies to combat future challenges.
Another example of the potential to use economic levers to achieve beneficial results – in this case, at the scale of the global community – comes from the 2021 Rome Summit of the G20 group of the world’s most economically developed nations, which committed all members to ambitious programmes to combat climate change, apply taxation incentives, increase development aid and promote anti-pandemic vaccination – all requiring concerted action by or with communities at a variety of scales from the local to the global (Guardian 2021a).
expanding transport technologies of sea and air
Movement of goods and people is also undergoing dramatic change. The container revolution of the last 40 years both revolutionised the spatial patterns of port cities throughout the world and advanced the international division of labour by promoting routine long-distance exchange of manufactured products. From Baltimore and San Francisco to London and Rotterdam, dock locations moved downstream to new deep-water locations, freeing large swathes of old central area docklands for new commercial and residential development, and often triggering gentrification in their neighbouring communities.
International airports have also recently gone through dramatic phases of development, rationalised by concepts such as the Aviopolis and the Aerotropolis (Kasarda 2009). These developments have seen very large and often privatised airport expansions in cities as diverse as Tokyo, Bangkok, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and London. They have become major elements of the regional settlement pattern and increasingly significant centres of employment. Many have also generated new regional shopping centres and large direct factory outlets (DFOs), which compete with established
metropolitan shopping centres, resulting in disruption of regional transport systems and daily spasms of major traffic congestion. At the same time, their noise and traffic impacts have caused often bitter conflicts over proposals for new runways, flight paths and night-time curfews.
Prior to restrictions imposed by the spread of Covid-19, international trade and travel were binding together global networks ever more securely by stamping out such giant footprints in key locations across metropolitan regions, often on the fringes of long-established urban and rural communities. As the prospect of recurrent and constantly mutating global pandemics restricts the attractions and ease of international movement that had reached their peak in the first two decades of this century, the continued growth of these related developments appears increasingly uncertain. Careful community consultation and planning will be required to negotiate sustainable outcomes. These will have to balance the needs and concerns of existing local and regional communities with the uncertain future of spaces originally dedicated to unlimited expansion of supersonic communications. Community planning can make important contributions to the management of these impacts and spaces, and these are discussed in more detail in Chapter 10, Community Governance and Participation
In many places, the established order has been splintering and re-forming. Centralised and politically regulated command economies, such as the Communist regimes of the former USSR and Eastern Europe, have failed, due as much to internal rigidities and inefficiencies as to external competition. Meanwhile, in the market and mixed economies of the West, Monetarist attempts to maximise profits by replacing political decision by market mechanisms have often resulted in severe disparities of wealth, social injustices and macroeconomic spasms, making market capacities for self-regulation and social efficiency look increasingly questionable (Monbiot 2004; Pinketty 2019). Throughout democracies, mixed economy mechanisms developed in the last century by Keynes are again being widely advocated and adopted in current times of economic uncertainty and are increasingly re-emerging as the most satisfactory way to combine economic efficiency with social justice. However, even within such balanced regimes, sectionalism, fragmentation and populism have disrupted the established mid-twentieth-century order of a fraternal Left in constructive dialogue
and debate with a freedom-seeking Right. The cause of representative democracy itself has ebbed and flowed, advancing in Europe and Latin America, scarcely holding its own in the face of the repeated challenges of populism in much of North America and throughout Asia, and collapsing in many parts of Africa. Meanwhile, in the rapidly growing number of new ‘millionaire’ cities (with populations of more than one million) that now accommodate a third of the world’s population (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2018), local and regional systems of governance have struggled to meet the demands and manage the impacts of rapid urbanisation or to produce effective systems of urban management. They have been constantly haunted by the spectre of militant and self-entitled populism that poses threats of degeneration into autocracy, whether in Brazil, Hungary, Russia, the Philippines, or the USA.
impacts of destabilised international relations
International relations have also exerted powerful impacts on the lives of local communities. The collapse of the Soviet Union and allied regimes ended the cold war’s icy deadlock between communism and capitalism, which had dominated international relations for much of the twentieth century. However, a brief ‘new world order’ of economic and military dominance by the USA was scarcely proclaimed before it was violently challenged by a potent combination of international terrorism, resurgent Russian nationalism and Chinese global ambitions. In Africa, the tragic conflicts of the early 1990s between Hutus and Tutsis in Ruanda and Burundi unleashed waves of ethnic violence that continued more than two decades later to challenge community life across central Africa, extending into the Congo Basin. Meanwhile, in Europe, the EU has worked hard to minimise or contain long-standing inter-communal hostilities in the Balkans and build new continental solidarity but is now having to face serious challenges from resurgent Russian militarism.
Outbreaks of bitter inter-communal violence have occurred in all parts of the world – among Serbs and Bosnians in Europe; Russians and Chechnyans in the Caucasus region; Han Chinese and the local Uiger and Tibetan peoples in Xian Jiang and Tibet; left- and right-wing groups in Latin America; militarists, democrats and ethnic minorities in Myanmar; Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, the Caucuses, Sulawesi and Timor Loro Sae; and most recently between Russia and its western neighbours in the Ukraine. Meanwhile, in this fracturing and
conflict-ridden situation of an unstable and multipolar world, the United Nations has found itself challenged to maintain its global roles of reconciliation, negotiation and leadership. The inescapable bonds between global and local communities, daily demonstrated by the mounting instability that results from political and military repression and the effects of climate change, are beyond the current capacities of any single national government to control or resolve. As a result, waves of refugees are being driven across borders, continents and oceans, to compound the challenges facing community planning in neighbouring and host regions throughout the world (Dantas et al. 2021). The evidence that, for good or ill, we are all, individually and communally ‘members one of another’, presents the most vivid challenges and opportunities for community planning at all scales. Local and regional communities have essential and creative roles to play in planning and shaping solutions.
changing mindsets
The scope and effectiveness of our actions are much influenced by the mindsets and philosophical assumptions of our times. For three millennia, in the western world, there have been well-differentiated philosophical arguments among the great traditions of idealism, rationalism and empiricism. Meanwhile, in the East, Buddhist and Daoist contemplation have provided alternatives to Confucian pragmatism. Both sets of ideas have recently been radically challenged by a welter of assertive new ideas of the late twentieth century, conveniently labelled ‘Post Structuralism’. ‘Deconstruction’ has become a favourite debating technique and ‘Meta narratives’ a potent challenge.iv
Nevertheless, as the air clears, it becomes apparent that the long-standing Western traditions of empiricism (of knowledge through experience), idealism (the power of original thought and communication), and rationalism (the checking out of ideas against observations) are all alive and vigorous. They are of great, often decisive, importance for the way that societies choose to shape the lives and forms of their communities.
Empiricism thrives in the arguments of the American Pragmatists who continue to assert the experience that ‘handsome is as handsome does’ and that ‘mental knives are what won’t cut real bread’ (James, in Passmore 1980). In development planning, this often results in policies that focus on immediate, tangible and available rewards and outcomes rather than pursuing underlying values or considering long term consequences. Immediate
material solutions like urban freeways and airport shopping complexes are often favoured, not delving deeper to weigh the underlying values or interests that are being served.
Elsewhere, the contrasting contributions of values and ideas have been maintained in the neoidealism of European thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault who employ paradox and contradiction to question conventional empirical interpretations and power relations (Foucault 1963, 1972, 1980, 1981) and ‘deconstruct’ received truths (Derrida 1976, 1993, 1995) in order to pursue such values as social justice, equity and diversity. In this, they find common ground with critical rationalist theorists like Karl Popper (1972) in justifying values-based problem-solving and questioning approaches to activities such as community planning, though their style is often very different, relying on paradox rather than deductive logic. Socially engaged Critical Rationalists span contrasting streams of the logics of scientific discovery and social progress. They provide a powerful and persuasive explanation of both scientific method and social engineering to justify the technological optimism of the mid-twentieth century, postulating an upward spiral of individual problem recognition, conjecture, refutation and rehypothesising, that is very relevant to community planning – see Chapter 5, Ways and Means (Popper 1972; Magee 1973).
On the other hand, the more idealist Frankfurt School of Critical Method emphasises the importance, not only of individual values, interests and hypotheses but also of interaction amongst individuals to create communicative action (Habermas 1987) also involving recognition of the rights of others (Honneth 2022). As a result, they advocate the crucial roles of discussion, recognition and exchange among equally privileged participants around a notional ‘policy table’, whereby both knowledge and proposals for action can be resolved in open exchange among interested parties. They term this process Communicative Action (Habermas 1971, 1987, Habermas et al. 1996). This leads them to advocate both general and specific approaches to community planning, which range from participatory processes involving recurrent discussions around actual tables to the conservation and creation of new physical public open spaces to promote opportunities for continuing community debate to enable the reality of community participation. Together, these two wings of Critical Rationalism – the individual and the communicative – provide an effective basis for problemsolving and inclusive community planning.
These ideas can be related to concepts, programmes and choices of action in everyday life. American Pragmatism (Passmore 1980) emerges as the champion of material mastery and physical evidence, advancing and celebrating both mass production and individual consumption. One variant of this view has served to generate such widespread material and individualist outcomes as high-capacity freeway systems, low-density suburbs, walled estates and patrolled shopping centres, favoured and justified on the basis that they promote material progress and serve individual preferences. There are other, more theoretical contributions that Pragmatism has to offer:
• recognising the importance of improving material living conditions;
• developing and justifying evidence-based policy; and
• respect for the evidence of people’s recorded choices and commitment to confirming popular support for programmes and proposals in regular democratic elections.
Critical Rationalism, associated with Karl Popper (1947, 1972, 1989), places such ideas within a social context and emphasises progressive problemsolving to keep pace with the inevitable effects of social and physical changes and challenges. Potential contributions to community planning include:
• practical and purposeful approaches to social change;
• encouraging people to question existing situations, voice individual opinions and test ideas in open challenge;
• encouragement of all members of pluralist societies to be part of continuing social debates.
This approach, discussed further in Chapter 5, Ways and Means, generates inclusive, cyclical and open-ended methods that allow communities to contribute to planning to meet the continually emerging new challenges of current times.
Communicative Action places methods of individual problem-solving within their social context. A number of distinctive characteristics of life in the twenty-first century favour this ‘communicative turn in planning theory’ (Healey 2007). These include:
• the global reach of universal and instantaneous communications;
• the worldwide spread of education and knowledge; and
• the insistent demands of previously excluded groups to have their interests taken into account in allocating opportunities and resources.
Communicative Action is therefore particularly relevant to contemporary community planning and has a number of important contributions to make, including:
• a coherent and convincing rationale for community engagement;
• a powerful and fertile source of objectives –through participation and discussion – to guide the process;
• inclusion of community members in information collection and review;
• insights into key aspects – such as the importance and role of specific public spaces and structures;
• diminishing mounting dangers of excluded dissidents and unrecognised groups developing resentments against those seen as parts of an oppressive establishment or a ‘deep state’.
Contemporary philosophical thought, encompassing contending views of meaning, method and purpose can be harnessed to make valid contributions to the similarly wide field of community planning. Insights can be obtained into the wide range of values and beliefs prevalent in our diverse communities. Unexpected situations can be matched and understood by recognising their underlying values and concepts to help shape acceptable and appropriate solutions. Innovative problem-solving, employing the active involvement of energetic individuals, can be encouraged and integrated. People’s innate capacities for communication can be harnessed in festivals, discussion groups, speakers’ corners and the potentially democratic and inclusive conversations of the internet. Rather than a confusing babble of personal insights, contemporary philosophy can be interpreted as an enriching symphonic performance, combining many different themes and instruments, each with its own distinctive contribution.
Part Two, Community Life and Change
administrative reorganisation
Community administration, too, has experienced great changes. While new technologies of transport and production have been increasing the scale of business, tax revolts and commercially dominated mass media have been advocating the advantages of smaller government (Osborne and Gaebler 1992). The appropriate balance between public interest and market-driven development is increasingly contested, and community governance is experiencing
great pressures and undergoing significant challenges (Pinketty 2013). These uncertainties are now being compounded by the mounting impacts of climate change and the needs for government and voluntary sector leadership in managing the spreading difficulties posed by recurrent mutations of Covid-19. Fresh attention is being focussed on planned and decentralised forms of settlement and governance.
A parallel revival of interest in the distributive capacities of regional planning and support for the growth of secondary centres has resulted from the difficulties of congestion and liveability associated with the growing scale of urban settlement in recent times (Roberts 2014). In the European Community, this has taken the form of support for decentralisation, infusing new life into existing communities by injecting funds from above (Balchin et al. 1999). Even the awkward departure of Britain from the European Community can be seen as a much-improved alternative to the resort to violence and war formerly practiced by European powers for over a millennium whenever they have failed to resolve such misunderstandings and differences peacefully. Elsewhere, in the USA’s Oregon and Canada’s British Columbia, top-down principles have been combined with bottom-up participation to create regional governments with strong planning and implementation powers (Heywood 1997).
The many challenges and collapses faced by the ‘economy of risk’ of recent decades may well prompt more collaborative attitudes of the private sector towards public participation in economic management, resulting in resumed and reinforced roles for governments and communities in public administration. Such alliances between communities and government, as those being promoted by the UK’s Homes and Communities Agency, for instance, could become far more significant in the next few years. One example is Manchester Place , a partnership between Manchester City Council and the government’s Homes and Communities Agency that aims to speed up the supply of new homes across the city, by combining Manchester City Corporation’s planning programme with national government support and commercial investment and development (Place North West 2015). More recently, in Australia, City Deals are a partnership between the three levels of national, state and local government and communities to work towards shared visions for productive and liveable cities. The aim is to align planning, investment and governance to accelerate growth and job creation, stimulate urban renewal and promote economic
reform. The 2021 City Deal for Brisbane, for instance, included a sum of $A3 million for a new indigenous art centre (Australian Government, Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development 2022). In housing, too, the private sector is generally demonstrating active interest in providing affordable housing across Australia in return for Commonwealth government support (AHURI 2022).
Contemporary challenges to community life
Communities consist of groups of people who experience and acknowledge significant links, expectations and responsibilities towards each other. They do not need to be neighbours, but they do need to share neighbourly feelings that may be based on shared spaces, interests or realms of interaction. Nevertheless, ‘community’ may mean different things at different scales and to different people. ‘Friendly association’ is the most allembracing of its many meanings, encompassing such alternatives as ‘all the people in a particular district’, ‘a group of people living together as a smaller social unit within a larger one’ and ‘ownership and participation in common’. Friendly association both promotes and is in turn promoted by community life. Through the self-expression that links people and groups, personal energies can be combined to create communities and cities and maintain their infrastructure of roads, aqueducts and ultimately global communications systems. Through collaboration in production, art, science and technology, settlements that benefit from friendly association and shared values can gain the strength and capacity to transform their environments into places of lasting achievement and beauty. Though there are different views as to whether cities originated through enforced association within containing walls or through cooperation based on mutual aid (Kropotkin 1939), it is clear that at different times, both may have been involved and that their recent rapid growth to accommodate more than half of all humanity (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2018) has depended in part on networks of association, exchange and collaboration. These are most sustainable where they are voluntary, mutually advantageous and pleasurable. Depictions by their artists of the life of very early cities of more than 3000 years ago, like Heraklion and Akhetaton, are full of scenes of people singing and dancing together (Desroche-Noblecourt 1976), just as paintings of medieval cities like Lorenzetti’s
‘Vision of Good Government’ and ‘Vision of Bad Government’ in the thirteenth-century Siena show repeated acts of quiet neighbourliness and mutual appreciation (see Figure 1.1).
Nevertheless, even the most successful cities and communities inevitably bring people into enforced and sometimes unwanted contact with others who do not share their original culture, interests, religion or even language. City life also creates situations where fear, hostility or exploitation can create conflict or the subjugation of whole groups as servants, serfs or slaves. Communities where friendly association has been lost may become dangerous places where vulnerable individuals and groups suffer random assault or systematic exploitation. As a result, the fostering of community life to support and sustain healthy societies requires careful planning and management that will involve choices and decisions about which values and interests will be pursued. These may vary from decisions, for instance, to adopt the elaborate caste systems of traditional Hindu society (Naipaul 1979) or to develop more voluntary networks like those advocated by Mahatma Gandhi and practiced by the craftsmen and artisans of medieval and Renaissance Tuscany (Heywood 1904; Putnam 1993; Hibbert 1979).
The early decades of the current millennium present particularly acute challenges to the invaluable role of communities as places where change can be assimilated and the shock of the new absorbed into a continually re-adjusted balance. Challenging conflicts of communal beliefs and interests have been fostered by the increased individual mobility and personal power of the modern era. These influences have, in turn, been amplified by the global reach of mass media, publicising the attractions of the
world’s prosperous regions to the most remote corners of all continents. Flights from war, persecution, famine and the increasing likelihood of enforced mass migrations resulting from sea level rises caused by global warming may involve many hundreds of thousands – and even millions – of people worldwide, presenting both challenges and opportunities for the creation of vibrant and inclusive new communities (Dantas et al. 2021). We are thus facing a future where the capacity of communities to integrate newcomers will become even more essential.
current trends
Tools and capacities to build such inclusive new communities have been much assisted by developments of mass education and technological reach throughout the twentieth century, climaxing, as we have seen, in the digital revolution of the cell phone with its instantaneous access to the global internet. Most societies now aim to provide some sort of formal primary education for their children. The universal reach of global communications has brought informal education to every village, however poor or remote. Individuals in all parts of the world now have the confidence and the capacity to communicate their ideas, needs and aims with each other and with power holders. As a result, we are experiencing the potential for education to become a major focus and growth point for community life at all scales. An encouraging special case of this is the re-shaping of the two-millenniaold role of public libraries to become welcoming hubs for community inclusion in local and global information systems, dedicated to providing access for otherwise isolated individuals to a universe of information and knowledge.
Figure 1.1 Lorinzetti’s allegory of good government. Source: Ambrogio Lorenzetti / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.
failing and thriving communities
By contrast, vivid failures to manage or accept cultural diversity peacefully and positively are all too common. Cases like the Los Angeles’ 1992 riots, Serbian extermination camps during the Bosnian War of 1992–1995, Ruandan massacres of 1994–1996, those in Mumbai in 1993 and 2008, Russia’s First and Second Chechen Wars of 1994–1996 and 2004–2006 and the Sydney anti-migrant riots in 2007 have become recurrent themes of contemporary life (Robertson 1999; Wikipedia 2014). More recently, police shootings and deaths in custody of African Americans in the USA, black citizens in England and indigenous people in Australia, contributing to the world-wide Black Lives Matter movement, are a daily reminder of the need for more inclusive community planning (Black Lives Matter 2021). The plight of the Myanmar Rohingya, Karen and other ethnic communities in that country is a further daily reminder of the toxic and often fatal consequences of situations where community understanding and tolerance have been allowed to break down or be overthrown by military regimes. Thousands of individuals and families suffer, and no one benefits (Concern Worldwide US 2021). In such situations, the global stakes for community building are very high.
Less dramatic but more widespread achievements of cooperation and mutual aid help to balance such failures of community life. Examples such as the Mondragon Workers Cooperatives, Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank (see Boxes 1.2 and 1.3) and the international community development schemes of organisations like Oxfam, World Vision and World Bicycle Relief have brought increased personal autonomy and essential physical and social resources such as clean water, education and personal mobility to countless small communities throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America. Because human societies depend upon harnessing skill, ingenuity and creative talent in networks of exchange and development, the longterm imperatives of cooperation and voluntary collaboration have always reasserted themselves, overcoming and outlasting explosions of violence and conflict. Individual prosperity and fulfilment ultimately rely on these networks of trust, which in their turn rest upon the friendly associations of community life.
These collaborative realities have great significance for community planning. Interpersonal and ‘bottom-up’ methods of developing policies and plans are equally effective and more durable and resilient than ‘top-down’ and imposed ones.
Model societies in the spirit of such social ‘Guardians’ as Plato (1980), More (1516/1965), Marx and Engels (1846, 1990), and Skinner (1974) have all failed or never even achieved introduction. In his seminal book The Open Society and its Enemies (1947, 1998), Karl Popper has related the repressive failings of closed communities to their unwillingness to acknowledge and integrate the knowledge and experience of their members into discussions of consensual future directions. They thus become caught in a vicious cycle of repression, resentment, resistance and rejection. If, on the other hand, people are motivated and enabled to negotiate with each other, policies will become more widely and securely based and better informed.
These psychological bases of community life have been explored by the celebrated twentiethcentury planning theorist, Jane Jacobs (1961, 1969, 1985, 1992, 2004), in a series of books spanning five decades from the 1960s to the 1990s of the new century. In her 1992 book Systems of Survival, she argues that humans have evolved as ‘dealers’ far more apt to develop robust systems of mutual advantage than are the ‘guardians’ who see it as their prerogative to lay down rules to regulate the behaviour of their fellow citizens.
Jacobs’ ideas powerfully support the methods of ‘Collaborative Planning’ (Healey 2006) that are currently emerging to replace the now superseded ‘Systems Thinking’ of the mid-twentieth century (Chadwick 1969; McLoughlin 1971). Such systems planners often created descriptive models of great scope and explanatory power, but then slid over into the error of assuming that ‘is’ implies ‘ought’. As a result, they saw themselves as appointed experts with responsibilities to project current trends into the future. This frequently led them to advocate such consequential and often devastating innovations as land-use transportation systems designed around massive urban freeways capable of accommodating the traffic flows indicated by their surveys and projections, relying on current private car use for journeys to and from work. Such Trend Planning took no note of community interests and concerns about housing demolition, environmental pollution, economic distributional effects or alternative more responsive ways of managing projected journeys to work flows (Heywood 1974).
contributions of collaborative planning
By contrast, there are many positive examples of the contributions that collaborative community planning can make to promote the life of flourishing
cities and regions. These include, for example, schemes of local community development, microcredit to assist economic development in previously struggling communities; and worker participation in management. One deceptively modest example of local community development can be found in the City Farm and Community Gardens movement by which environmental activists in cities across the world are reintroducing the restorative effects of contact with nature to often underprivileged inner-city communities ranging from metropolitan London to the suburbs of Dili in Timor Loro S’ae.
Box 1.1 Surrey Docks City Farm
Box 1.1 presents one such example in the heart of London, one of the world’s most intensively developed cities. Box 1.2 illustrates how community energy and mutual trust can offer the social collateral to provide microcredit to relieve the isolation of the ‘poorest of the poor’ originating in Bangladesh, one of the world’s most impoverished countries. Box 1.3 describes how the collaborative management of the Mondragon Workers Cooperative has assisted a previously marginalised minority community to achieve prosperity since its establishment in 1956, continuing to the present day.
The aim of city farms like Surrey Docks, in the heart of inner London, is to involve local people and environmental activists in land care, food production and animal husbandry. City farms are areas of repose, centres for conservation of natural life and places for reconnecting with nature to balance the intensity of modern city life. They depend upon support from their local communities, often providing out-of-curriculum activities for local schools and youth clubs and, in turn, relying upon the services of local volunteers. In 2008, there were no fewer than 15 of them in London, all members of the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, a national scale network (Mayor of London 2008).
Surrey Docks City Farm is one of the smallest and most central, occupying two acres of an old docks site at the northern tip of the Rotherhithe peninsula, immediately across the Thames from the towering bulk of the 75-storey Canary Wharf and the spreading mass of London’s new international office precinct of Docklands. The farm was originally founded in 1975 by Hilary Peters, who recalls that
The dreadful alienation of people in the abandoned docks wasn’t just the result of unemployment. They were alienated from themselves, each other and their surroundings. When I started to dig the silt and graze my goats and poultry in Surrey Docks, I was surprised by the urgency with which everyone wanted to join in . . . People who had never related to anyone or anything started to relate to animals. The farm grew due to people who recognized that it met some buried need in them (McConnachie/Peters 2009)
Now the farm is run by Surrey Docks Farm Provident Association, involving schools, businesses, youth organisations and volunteers of all ages including a blacksmith/artist, who work on site every day, providing farm equipment, art objects and continuing interest. It is a focus for local community life, the site of recurrent fairs and festivals, and its café is a regular stopping-off point for walkers and cyclists travelling along the Thameside Path. The small site is densely used and includes in the words of Hilary Peters: ‘fields for grazing, a vegetable patch along the river, a herb garden, a compost area, a duck pond, a wild life patch, at least one yurt, a willow walk housing the bee hives, . . . an orchard full of geese and sculpture. The blacksmith does extremely inventive work with local children collecting the grot off the river beach and making recycled portraits of the farm’s animals’ (McConnachie/Peters 2009).
Although frequently small and very local in their organisation and links, these city farms contribute significantly to making inner cities physically attractive, interesting, socially inclusive and open hearted. Many readers will immediately associate this story with similar community organisations and spaces in their own or nearby cities. Such places and groups express well how community life and organisations can help people take possession of their own living areas and lives in ways that welcome all others who also want, in whatever ways, to contribute.
Box 1.2 Microcredit from Bangladesh to the world
At the end of its bloody war of independence in 1972, when Bangladesh emerged as independent but one of the world’s poorest nations, Mohamed Yunus returned from the USA, where he had been teaching as a professor of economics. Depressed by the inability of academic theories to explain or redress the cycle of poverty in which chronic debt trapped most of the country’s population of more than 100 million people, he experimented, by making 42 small loans totalling US$ 27 in a nearby village (Bornstein 1997). Based on the success of this initiative in enabling the recipients to work and trade their way out of debt and poverty, he developed a general approach to micro-credit, in which the traditional financial collateral demanded by banks, which the poor do not have, was replaced by social collateral, which their daily lives and mutual knowledge provide in abundance (Yunus 1998). Over a period of four years, he and his colleagues organised the Grameen or ‘Seed’ Bank of small local groups linked to form centres of about 30 members, in turn joined district branches each serving 60 centres (Fuglesang and Chandler 1993). The bank’s success depends upon hard work, small sums of money, accountability and respect for human dignity. Because it lends to ‘the poorest of the poor’ who are used to tight budgeting and relies on weekly meetings to decide on loans and collect repayments, the bank has always enjoyed an excellent repayment rate, which is currently running at 98%. Its workers must spend two-thirds of their time travelling to villages and participating in weekly branch meetings of local members. Its lending has grown in 50 years to over US$ 7.59 billion to over 7 million members (over 97% of them formerly impoverished women) organised in 1.2 million groups (Grameen Bank 2022). By the end of the century, the movement had spread to include partner organisations in 20 different countries on all six continents and is still growing with recent branches being opened in Shenzhen, China (Grameen Trust 2022). The achievements of the Grameen Bank are widely celebrated. Mahomed Yunus has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Bank has gained an international architecture award for its contribution to improved rural housing, and the construction of over six hundred thousand homes has also been financed. Grameen Phone, Grameen Knitwear (a weaver’s cooperative) and Grameen Health Care Services have been formed to use the excess funds contributed by members after they have finished repaying their loans. Grameen Phone has transformed the former rural isolation of the country by having one or more ‘telephone ladies’ with a mobile phone, able to reach any resident in any of the 83,000 villages where there are groups (Grameen Communications 2022).
By the turn of the century, the Grameen Bank started to look worldwide, aiming to reach a hundred million of the world’s poorest families, especially women, by providing credit for selfemployment and other financial and business services, in pursuit of the basic aims of:
• reaching the poorest;
• reaching women;
• building financially self-sufficient institutions;
• ensuring impact on the lives of clients and their families.
The bank continues to expand in many directions: upwards to influence the policies of the World Bank to support Micro-credit; downwards to make its members more self-sufficient, in enterprises like Grameen Knitwear and Healthcare Service; and sideways to establish over 2600 branches with nine million borrowers throughout Bangladesh, and with no fewer than 150 national branches spreading throughout all six continents (Grameen Bank 2022).
Box 1.3 Worker and community self-management in Spain
The Mondragon Workers Cooperative (now the Mondragon Corporation) is a notable example of the power of creative ideas and cooperation to transform unsatisfactory and unjust economic and physical conditions. In the early 1940s, Father Jose Arizmendi, emerging from one of Franco’s prisons, founded a democratically managed polytechnic school and began to explore cooperative ideas as an alternative to avoid each of the repressive excesses of the dictatorship then ruling Spain, the rigid and unproductive standardisation of Stalin’s Soviet Russia and the social inequities of contemporary capitalism, which had produced the mass unemployment of the 1930s. In 1956, five unemployed graduates of the Polytechnic pooled their savings and joined with him to establish the basis for a workers cooperative. ULGOR became the first in the network of cooperatives, producing white goods and domestic appliances, which happened to be the items with which they had industrial experience (Whyte and Whyte 1988).
ULGOR was an immediate success and by the early 1960s had grown into a network of enterprises comprising over 3000 worker partners. All members have a financial stake in their work places, which is bought out if they leave, so that only the workers can own the enterprises. Control of the factories and appointments of senior management are made by means of works councils with all workers as voting members, appointing and sharing power with plant managers. By 2022, the original network had grown to include 95 enterprises with over 80,000 member owners and become Spain’s largest producer of white goods, with the highest worker productivity of any Spanish enterprise (Mondragon Corporation 2022).
The Contract of Association stipulates that not less than 10% of the profits must go to community and social services of schools, colleges, health insurance, clinics and research institutes. These ‘second degree’ co-operatives are governed by representatives of the factory co-ops. Wage differentials, originally fixed at a ratio 1 : 3, have since been expanded to 1 : 6 – a small fraction of that obtaining in most market economies – in order to ensure that the co-op network retains its pool of highly talented and energetic young managers and technical experts, to keep it competitive in times of very rapid technological and economic change, as Spain successfully adjusts to membership of the mainstream European Community.
Because membership confers the automatic right to a job, the global re-structuring of employment due to the automation of the 1980s and 1990s posed particularly sharp challenges to the co-ops. Employment growth slowed, and remuneration fell for the first time to about the average elsewhere in Spanish industry. Employment levels, however, remained at 100%. This achievement of consensual decision-taking in the Workers Councils, involved creative innovation by management and rational choices by members to accept reduced wages to stay competitive.
The Co-op starts new enterprises with groups of people who are friends, and sees the natural bonds of friendship as a building block for successful ventures, echoing the definition of community as ‘friendly association’ with which we started this section. Its successful application of radical social and economic ideas is assisting traditional communities to thrive in their home settings and to maintain deeply valued heritages of language, culture and economic autonomy, which elsewhere in the Basque region have been expressed in acts of sometimes violent social dissent.
Part Three, Competing Interpretations of Community Structure and Change
In both developed and developing countries, current challenges of rapid change and conflict are testing to breaking point long-established assumptions about the purposes and processes of community life (Diamond 2005; Ridley 1997; Pilger 1992). Increasingly bitter inter-communal and inter-caste
clashes over conflicting religious beliefs and economic interests raise insistent questions about the effectiveness and directions of prevailing social policy. More inclusive, better-informed and more responsive community planning can provide valid solutions. Such practical applications require a sound and widely accepted theoretical basis to help understand and interpret the character, development and working methods of community organisation. To what extent, then, should the primary aims of such communities be establishing
and maintaining order; promoting productivity; ensuring class control; or establishing a framework for communication and mutual learning? This section briefly explores these four competing accounts of the nature of community life, based on contrasting and competing major aims:
• Order: genetically derived dominance.
• Productivity and exchange: prosperity through market competition.
• Control through conflict: equality imposed through struggle.
• Collaboration: through negotiation, adjustment and mutual aid.
order: genetically derived dominance
In exploring the purposes and organisation of human communities, one prime consideration may be the essential nature of their members. No ideas have influenced thinking on these matters more than the evolutionary ones of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley (Desmond and Moore 1991; Darwin 2008) who argued that evolution and indeed all life was regulated by a natural order imposed by the survival of the fittest, as driven by randomly produced new mutations.v This theory was rapidly applied by the influential school of ‘Social Darwinists’ to champion the promotion of unregulated competition in the political and economic lives of communities, suggesting that communities would advance best by promoting ‘the survival of the fittest’ (Ridley 1997; Constitutional Rights Foundation 2021). Darwin’s friend Thomas Carlyle, for instance propounded a ‘Great Man’ view in which history was shaped by dominant leaders. He condemned the democratic Chartist movement of the 1840s as ‘this bitter discontent grown fierce and mad’ and argued instead for Machiavellian motivation of natural leaders to maximise the worth of their territories and therefore the wellbeing of the communities which constituted them (Desmond and Moore 1991). These ideas were further advanced by later doctrines of ‘Man and Superman’ proclaimed by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Twentieth-century experience has cast dark shadows across the capacity of such unconstrained dominance to achieve lasting social progress. The German cultural tradition stalled under Hitler; Spain and Portugal suffered socially and stagnated economically under Franco and Salazar; and Mussolini’s regime proved disastrous for Italy, climaxing in his corpse being torn limb from limb by a vengeful crowd in Milan in 1944. Currently, the military regime in Myanmar has perpetrated social
injustice, political autocracy, economic penury and multiple ethnic conflicts. As a result of these many excesses and failures, Social Darwinism has lost appeal as a basis for community life in free societies (Ridley 1997). Sociologists and ethnologists have tended to turn more to the mutual aid theories of thinkers like Kropotkin (1939, p. 60), who argued that admitting that swiftness, strength, cunning and endurance to hunger and cold, which are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, making the individual or the species, the fittest under certain conditions, we maintain that under any . . . circumstances, sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Nevertheless, lasting subconscious effects of Social Darwinism have influenced many of the explanatory ideas of twentieth-century urban sociology and economics. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, for instance, Park et al. (1925) and their colleagues in the Chicago School of Urban Sociology developed ideas of urban processes resulting from endless struggles for space and resources. The new urban communities were seen as being continually reshaped by the dynamic of externally driven economic investment and technological change, giving rise to waves of renewal rippling outwards through concentric zones of uniform development. As the city grew, the high-intensity commercial core expanded to redevelop the surrounding environmentally blighted ‘zone in transition’, sending further ripples of redevelopment through the successive rings of inner-residential suburbs, zones of working men’s housing and outer fringes of low-cost accommodation. The language adopted to describe this process, ‘invasion and succession’, reflected Darwinian ideas of competitive evolution: one group was invading the territory of another and succeeding to its ownership. Later, Martin Anderson (1964) and Jane Jacobs (1961) described how these forces were able to annex the powers of city and federal governments, using instruments of ‘eminent domain’ to acquire land compulsorily and speed the process of economic appropriation. The dominant elites of the ‘property machine’ (Ambrose and Colenutt 1975) and the ‘growth machine’ (Logan and Molotch 1987) claimed to be acting in the best interests of the whole urban community. It is not surprising that opposing schools of Marxist urbanists discussed later, developed the counterinterpretation of class conflict.
Twentieth-century developments in genetics both reinforced and modified these ideas of the sociobiology of communities (Wilson 1992). Richard Dawkins argued that human evolution was driven by the struggle of the ‘selfish gene’ to dominate over the competing genes of others of its
own species (Dawkins 1976, 1988, 2009). Although he discounted the ability of human beings to rationally control these drives in the interests of cooperative success and survival, he argued that in the drive to promote our own genes we will support siblings and others within our own communities having some common genetic material. These interpretations may seem to explain some of the collapses of community life and ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the end of the twentieth century, where groups of individuals of shared ancestry seemed to have combined to attack and exterminate neighbours alongside whom they had been living more or less peacefully for decades in Bosnia, Rwanda and northern Nigeria. However, closer examination often identifies other economic and environmental factors, which more satisfactorily explain the patterns of violence and social disintegration. Diamond (2005) argues that the economic scarcity had stretched these communities’ capacities for cooperation to breaking point so that in Rwanda, a survivor explained, ‘the people whose children had to walk barefoot to school killed the people who could buy shoes for theirs’ irrespective of whether they were Hutu or Tutsi (Diamond 2005). However, it is not only in such marginalised and stressed communities that evolutionary biology has offered explanations or influenced social organisation. The cult of the outstanding business leader and the unique gladiatorial sportsperson (both rewarded with annual salaries of many tens of millions of dollars a year) has reached new heights in the current century with figures such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg exploring pathways to unconstrained global dominance. At the national political scale, it may take the form of the personalised cult of the initially charismatic or populist political figure, such as Bolsonaro in Brazil, Trump in the United States, the Duterte family in the Philippines and Putin in Russia. Dire consequences always result for countless local and regional communities and individuals. It is a model not to be welcomed at any scale of community.
impacts on community planning and management
Community planning doctrines of urban order through the imposition of such dominant power relations have influenced development throughout many metropolitan communities, often making use of physical planning controls that introduce segregated and walled residential estates and tourist facilities, recreational and shopping centres and theme parks, frequently patrolled by private security staff and closed to local access or use. In the
twentieth century, in Los Angeles County and elsewhere in the USA ‘cities by contract’ were incorporated as local governments where the wealthy gathered to isolate themselves, making no contribution to the upkeep of the social needs of the wider metropolis (Miller 1981), were incorporated as local governments where the wealthy gathered to isolate themselves, making no contribution to the upkeep of the social needs of the wider metropolis. Such communities suffered from being both provocative and vulnerable to attacks from the excluded workers on whom they depended, and Miller accurately forecast Los Angeles’ 1992 urban riots a decade before they occurred. In the twenty-first century, the United States continues to be ravaged by such conflicts, which have occurred in many cities in recent years, including Washington, Portland and Minneapolis. In 2021, violent support for the superficially anti-establishment rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump, by a group of armed militants believing themselves to be disadvantaged, took the USA to the brink of an armed coup. Community Planning adopts the altogether different position that people’s views of what is right and ought to be done can and should shape what will become the future reality of their lives in communities created by intention and maintained by participation.
Nevertheless, there are some positive and important contributions that the scientific core of genetic science can make to community planning. By establishing the role of the deeply inscribed structures of genomes and individual DNA in deciding individuals’ innate characteristics and competences, genetic science reinforces the arguments of thinkers as diverse as Karl Popper and Noam Chomsky that human beings are not infinitely malleable and therefore able to adapt to any conditions which planners or the market might think fit to provide (Popper 1972; Chomsky 1972, 1992; Lyons 1970, 1991). Their deep-seated competences and values should be respected as valid guides to objectives in planning for communities and settlements, rather than being subjected to attempts at moulding by behavioural conditioning. It is not the science, but the selective interpretation of genetic theory that makes its determinism so faulty.
productivity and exchange: neoliberal freedom and minimally constrained competition
A different model of individualism more appropriate to a productive society than the social dominance of a caste ‘born to rule’ emerged from the combination of the humanism of the Enlightenment
and the physical transformations of the Industrial Revolution. More open meritocracies replaced closed aristocracies. Thinkers as different as John Locke, Adam Smith Jeremy Bentham and Ralph Emerson sought to expand the scope of individual freedom, and the rapidly growing manufacturing communities proved a fertile soil for these ideas, where people of talent could work and trade their way into success or even pre-eminence, and therefore, it was argued, confer advantages on the whole community. Competition was seen as the road to progress and choice.
However, in many pioneer industrial nations, this domination by market economics and the unprecedented social and physical mobility of the twentieth century combined to create rapidly assembled communities afflicted by alienation, insecurity and great disparities of wealth and living conditions (Williams 1973). There were few controls over technological innovations, which often introduced potent new developments appropriated by affluent investors but exerting powerful, unhealthy and destructive environmental impacts of disruption and pollution on vulnerable workers and their families. By the midtwentieth century, urban motorways, a potent symbol of a society always on the move, rapidly replaced long-established systems of public transport of trams and trains. Well-established existing inner-city communities were often obliterated by broad swathes of such new roads and associated cloverleaf connectors. Mass-produced high-rise public housing, sometimes fuelled by corrupt contracts, ignored people’s needs for human contact, convenience and family life (Jephcott 1971; Heywood 1974; Booker 1980). In the United States, the ‘Federal Bulldozer’ flattened inner city ghettos without opening up the new suburbs to Blacks or Latinos (Davidoff and Gold 1970). The assumption that, given choice, people would create the communities that they wanted through market preference foundered on grossly unequal incomes and the reality of self-maintaining class systems and institutionalised racism.
By the second half of the twentieth century, the cumulative and often unregulated impacts of neoliberal permissive planning were afflicting community life in cities throughout the Western world, generating massive pollution, destroying settled neighbourhoods and their green spaces and often failing to achieve well-distributed social benefits from new-found material affluence. Then, in the opening years of the new millennium, environmental, economic and political effects began to create internal contradictions and encounter global limits
in the form of the triple disasters of climate change, financial collapse and mounting urban terrorism.
Another of the potent impacts of neoliberal doctrines on community planning has been the extrapolation of its inherent materialism to justify the belief that human behaviour is largely shaped by material conditions and that values can very rapidly be moulded by physical stimuli.vi This view has major community planning implications, including providing the rationale for standardised and mechanistic living environments, shopping centres arranged to suspend people’s critical faculties and manipulative abuses of public consultation. In their pursuit of perfect competition, productivity-driven policies have often created places for consumption without community and residential communities afflicted by almost intolerable sameness. It is a strange paradox that a view of society originally grounded in the desire to maximise personal choice should reach a stage where its proponents are using mass-conditioning techniques to replace genuine human choosing.
Another result has been pervasive privatisation. The view of Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1991, that ‘There is no such thing as society; there are only individuals and their families’ briefly became a self-fulfilling prophecy (Works and Days 2021). The results in Britain were a retreat from community planning and the acceptance of polarisation between prosperous but repetitious, badly serviced and poorly coordinated suburbs in southern growth areas and devastated and alienated ones of contraction in declining parts of the north of the country, including South Lancashire, West Yorkshire, Clydeside and Durham. The individualist competition of neoliberalism did nothing to provide the inclusion, direction and lively social dialogue that are needed to create healthy community life.
progress through conflict
Given the failings of the imposed order and productivity-driven views of community life, it is not surprising that an opposing school of Marxist urban theorists developed the alternative interpretation of class conflict, leading on to the imposition of a more just order. In this view, community life becomes the battleground in which Carlyle’s ‘great leaders’ and the system planners of the midtwentieth century are alike reduced to mere puppets of underlying class struggles for control of the land, capital and labour that will actually decide who commands the means of production, who will pay and who will benefit.
Community problems and controversies are likewise seen as local expressions of national and international scale contradictions resulting from the exploitation of labour by capital, through the instruments of rentier landlords. Continuing into the mid-1990s, the Marxist geographer and former Professor of Geography at Oxford University, David Harvey (1996) was arguing that resorting to the idea of community was a veil to disguise the potent and naked economic exploitation of labour by capital, and that ‘urban-regional planners’ were the bailiffs and apologists of this process of adaptation and co-option. Harvey illustrates his interpretation with an example of a notional situation where housing stress in an impoverished community is being tackled by advocates challenging planning designations and regulations.
We can see this sort of coalition in action when large corporate interests in suburban locations join with civil rights groups in trying to break suburban zoning restrictions that exclude low wage populations from the suburbs (Harvey 1996, p. 181)
Harvey’s Marxian interpretation leads him to reinterpret a victory for decent housing opportunities and social justice as part of a ‘coalition’ between civil rights groups and corporate interests that neither would recognise. It is highly possible that Harvey is making a direct reference (the circumstances are certainly very similar) to the celebrated and influential community action work of Paul and Linda Davidoff and their associate Newton Gold in the previous decades in establishing Suburban Action Inc in 1969 to fight, often successfully, against discrimination in housing throughout the more desirable outer suburbs of the USA. As both lawyers and planners, they arraigned zoning restrictions which effectively kept Blacks and Latinos out of these jurisdictions at the edges of the spreading new metropolitan areas, enjoying good job prospects and community facilities, as breaches of the second amendment to the USA’s Constitution, which guaranteed equality of opportunity (Davidoff and Gold 1970).
While the Davidoffs’ struggles in the communities and courts and Harvey’s in the fields of theory-building are equally valid, the evidence is that activist commitment to pluralist evolution has proved more effective and relevant in bringing about beneficial social change. American society has integrated quite substantially in the last 40 years, and neighbourhoods are continuing to desegregate their housing; dozens of cities have Black and Latino
mayors and senior officers, and in 2008 and 2012, the country elected an African American President, who had come into politics by way of community development work in Chicago, one of the USA’s most stressed cities (Obama 2004, 2008, 2020). Meanwhile, in Russia and a number of East European countries, overtly Marxist–Leninist regimes that discounted community organisation and life in favour of wider class conflict and solidarity have been overthrown by their own people, to widespread relief (Bater 1984; Ascherson 1996).vii
Of course, deeply humanitarian theorists like David Harvey would be the first to criticise and oppose such cruel and repressive regimes, but they could not point to other examples where dialectical materialism or conflict models of social development have produced better results. If we follow Popper’s argument (1989), that every theory deserves credence until it is falsified in practice, when it should be abandoned or modified, there is a clear conclusion. The criticism that community planning is, in reality, a veil worn by social apologists for continuing class exploitation is based on inadequate evidence and over-generalised interpretation which makes them, in Popper’s terms, ‘non-sense’ neither certainly true nor certainly false, but merely personal speculations, and these seem to be falsified by the accumulating evidence becoming available.
One distinguished example of this revaluation is the early work of Manuel Castells (1977, 1983) and Gemma Vila (2014). Examining the actual evolution of urban and community life in Madrid in the closing years of Franco’s Fascist regime in Spain up to 1975, Castells observed the important role of community groups in shaping regime change from below (rather than by seizing the central organs of power from above as had been advocated by Lenin). Castells was himself involved in the Madrid Citizen’s Movement and it is this direct experience which allowed him to transform the abstract Marxist model into a practical understanding of how different groups negotiate with each other and evolve to match external changes and improve living conditions. What emerges is not so much a class conflict model of community life and social change as a group interaction version. It is significant that reviewing the situation 30 years later with the benefit of hindsight, Gemma Vila, Professor of Sociology at the University of Barcelona, reaches a similar conclusion that in regional centres such as Barcelona, as well as Madrid, it was grassroots community movements which provided the impetus to install the current
democratic regime to replace the crumbling dictatorship bequeathed by Franco (Vila 2014).
By denying the cooperative capacities of community life, the conflict theorists have justified regimes based on the crudest use of naked coercion and justified this by selective historical analysis. Dialectical materialists have found themselves caught in an iron cage of regressive causality of action and reaction of their own making, from which most of them cannot escape. If, for Margaret Thatcher, ‘There is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families’ (Works and Days 2021), for the conflict theorists, there is no such thing as community: only classes fighting to control the State. Well-argued alternatives are available in the form of the roles played within the lives of communities by cooperation (Kropotkin 1939, 1974); by insightful deal-doing (Jacobs 1985, 1992); and by celebration, play and trust (Putnam 1993; Landry 2000).
In a similar way, the Australian State Governments’ Covid legislation of 2020 assisted people experiencing housing stress by protecting tenants from being evicted for rental arrears and making emergency housing available in newly empty motels and hotels in ways that had not been adopted before. As an example, the Western Australian Government rapidly adopted a Hotels with Heart pilot in which about 20 people sleeping rough were moved into Perth's Pan Pacific hotel to reduce the health risks for people experiencing homelessness. This was quickly expanded and widely emulated in other states and resulted in actually improving security of shelter for vulnerable people at a time that could have seen massive problems of increased homelessness and resultant increased possibilities of conditions favouring spread of the pandemic (Centre for Social Impact 2020). Progressive problem-solving rather than top-down structural change was bringing improvement.
Pandemics afford good examples of the principle that in many situations, ‘No one is safe till everyone is safe’. Mixed economies are better placed to combine the dynamism of individual enterprise with the responsiveness of local empowerment than are centrally managed command economies.
In summary, consigning responsibility for beneficial and effective community planning to national concentrations of power and control by centralised planning authorities is destined to produce solutions which are demonstrably worse than the local problems they were originally intended to resolve. Whether one looks to the well-documented accounts of the terrible outcomes of this approach in Soviet era Russia (Solzhenitsyn 1968, 1971, 2022)
or the contemporary abuse of minority groups in Communist China (Leung 2010), Marxist centralisation and class domination emerge as a failed option for shaping humane, just and responsive community planning.
In comparing conflict and collaborative models we should therefore look to their practical applications. Conflict models have proved far from libertarian; many have resulted in authoritarian, top-down and generally repressive urban and community regulation, failing to acknowledge the human determinants of community life. Under the general justification that it is ‘necessary to break many eggs to make a good omelette’, the pursuit of order and uniformity has often devastated the natural creativity of community life. In Stalin’s Russia, for instance, acquisition of the basic necessities of life became a daily challenge, and community life was driven underground and into the deprived outposts of the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ of prison camps (Solzhenitsyn 1968, 1974) before the centralised authoritarian system was overthrown by internal rejection. Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution is now widely excoriated. The devastating effects of the imposed emptying of Cambodia’s towns into the ‘killing fields’ of the Khmer Rouge have caused lasting social damage (Bater 1984; Ridley 1997; Solzhenitsyn 1974; Pilger 1992). Currently, Muslim Uiger communities in Xian Jiang are being forcibly herded into retraining centres bearing unhappy resemblances to concentration camps to undergo re-education ordained by the dominantly Han Chinese Communist Government. Socially such communities create deprivation and alienation and physically the resulting places are regimented and marked by the standardised repetition of concentration camps (Guardian 2021b).
Well-developed alternatives to such totalistic ‘solutions’ are available in the form of cooperative arrangements and roles within the lives of communities. These may take the form of collaborative activities (Kropotkin 1939, 1974); insightful dealdoing (Jacobs 1985, 1992); or celebration, play and trust (Putnam 1993; Landry 2000), all of which are discussed in the following section on Collaboration: through negotiation, adjustment and mutual aid.
The roles of communication and collaboration
Recent developments in alternative dispute resolution aim to combine communication with collaboration. Once people find themselves talking with
someone, there is always the tendency for them to be drawn into a dialogue that may modify and diminish the sharp edges of pure conflict. New creative solutions may emerge. These strong links between communication and collaboration are explored by Margerum (1999, 2002): mutual understanding provides both the motive and the capacity for people to work together. Conflict protagonists tend to dismiss communicative approaches as social therapy or diversionary tactics, while communicative activists tend to point to the wasteful character of social conflicts and the tendency for them to polarise complex situations into hostile camps that accentuate the worst characteristics of both sides.
Communication involves not only expressive speakers but also active listeners and mutual recognition (Honneth 2022). Most communication contains an element of intended persuasion, where development and discussion can pave the way towards collaboration. Reciprocally, collaboration demands prior or simultaneous communication: people cannot work well together until they have discussed and agreed on purposes, activities, roles and rewards. However, it is clear that the two approaches are not identical: communication is about meaning and collaboration about action. It is worthwhile examining the role of each before combining them to consider collaborative planning as an integrated process.
communication and community
The recent communicative turn in planning theory (Healey 1996, 2006) was anticipated by such earlier collaborations as those involved in actual and ideal communities ranging from Plato’s Academy, and Anglo-Saxon Folk Moots to More’s Utopia (Mumford 1961; More 1516/1965)
The major twentieth-century theorist of Communicative Action, Jurgen Habermas, points out (1990) that discussion plays an essential role in reaching valid interpretations and good policies, which emerge not so much from isolated individual thinkers but from the vigorous debate and winnowing of arguments that occur in free and critical discussion in open societies, preferably face to face. This basic role of communication in the evolution of settled societies is also supported by findings from archaeology, biology, linguistics and ethnology. The archaeologist and ethologist Richard Leakey argues that hunting and food gathering necessitated the use of vocal language, as did social organisation and the economy of food sharing. His conclusion is significant for community organisation and planning:
In a small hunter gatherer community, social rules, elaborated through language, produce a cohesion that would be impossible to produce in any other way
(Leakey 1981)
In making the link between communication, collaboration and social organisation so explicit, Leakey is leading us very far from abstract conflict and selfish gene theories. It appears that communication creates the conditions for the collaborative success of communities which may subsequently be modified by competition.
Developing communication was thus basic to the evolution of the first human communities around half a million years ago. The earliest yet found, at Terra Amata on the slopes of Mount Boron overlooking the Mediterranean above Nice, and the Choukoutien caves, an hour’s drive south-west of Beijing, both offer evidence of highly organised community life, which must have depended on the transmission of experience and skills and their application in cooperative social activities (Leakey 1981). On the Terra Amata site, footings have been unearthed of a series of 11 large wicker work huts, each 12 by 6 m, constructed in successive years. Inside, there are the remains of domestic fires, animal prey and pigments for body painting. Excavations of the large cave site in Choukoutien have likewise unearthed many years of ceremonial burials, signifying highly organised and stable societies. Both these societies must have possessed communication skills to support patterned and productive community life. Fossil remains of skulls from these sites support this conclusion, containing much-enlarged brain spaces for Broca’s area, which controls and coordinates the muscles of the tongue, mouth and lips and Wernicke’s area, which is responsible for the structure and sense of language, than those of earlier sites (Leakey 1981). This correlation suggests an upward spiral of improved language skills helping the development of elaborated social organisation. Leakey comments:
Communicating with others, not just about practical affairs, but about feelings and fears . . . and the elaboration of a shared mythology produces a shared consciousness on the scale of the community. Language is without doubt an enormously powerful force holding together the intense social network that characterizes human existence (Leakey 1981)
An equally significant role of communication is to alert society to impending threats. This
