Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemPlanning as a democratic practice : antinomy and mediatisation( 2004)The thesis seeks to reconcile planning with its role as an aspect of democratic governance in liberal societies. Planning is directly considered as an instrument through which people seek to govern themselves. Planning problems are seen as analogous to the problems of democracy, using the idea of antinomy - that democracy contains internal contradictions between its various desirable precepts which tend to 'pull' against each other as irreducible dilemmas, requiring trade-offs to be made. Focusing upon democratic antinomy allows the essential qualities of a given democratic system, including planning, to be revealed. However, an assessment of the traditions of urban planning indicates that in practice and theory, planning has not dealt with the antinomy of democracy in any comprehensive fashion, leaving it impoverished in terms of its role and meaning in liberal democracy. The body of work loosely described as communicative planning, however, provides the basis for a reappraisal of planning as a democratic practice, based on the work of Jurgen Habermas, to account for the antinomy of democracy. Two central concepts of Habermas's work are focussed upon. Firstly, the idea of democracy as knowing and steering is used as an overall ideal. To know itself, a people must understand the challenges and opportunities it faces, and inclusively determine what outcome they wish to achieve. To steer, a people must have the capacity to act in the knowledge they inclusively developed. Secondly, however, Habermas suggests that the central impediment to democracy is mediatisation - the increasing influence of instrumental logics, such as law or money, upon the manner in which we manage collective affairs. The planning systems of The Netherlands and Singapore are used to ground the theoretical basis of the research, establishing that distinct planning systems can be characterised as particular resolutions of democratic antinomy. Further, these planning systems are used to establish that certain media do appear to be deployed in distinct ways in each system, and that this influences the 'communicativeness' of these systems. Building upon this grounding, the planning system of Victoria, Australia is subsequently examined in detail to demonstrate the manner in which media influence knowledge and steering in the chronically repeated processes of Victorian planning. This analysis, focussing on local planning, suggests that certain resolutions of democratic dilemmas are better, tested against the ideal of knowing and steering, and that the deployment of media in a planning system is integral to these resolutions of democratic dilemmas. It is concluded that communicative planning could be modified to include understandings of mediatisation, allowing it to address the practical difficulties of planning as an aspect of democratic governance.