To plan or not to plan? Is this the question?

Few articles within planning debates have generated both indignation and fascination like the Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom. The idea of the Non-Plan is to embrace a more experimental approach to spatial planning by observing what would happen if people were free to choose how to transform their living environments. As this paper shows, practitioners and scholars have perceived the utility and applicability of the Non-Plan proposals in somewhat ambiguous ways. In their iconoclastic essay, Rayner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price criticise traditional planning schemes while revealing the different ideologies involved in – and enacted by – the quest for designed orders. Current levels of interest and momentum surrounding the proliferation of ‘plans for societies’ in contemporary discourses make the idea of Non-Plan still fascinating and worth considering. The reactions that the Non-Plan have sparked may be a warning for mavericks of past, present and future generations

Norms and the City

Conformity is the tendency to modify one’s behaviour to match the behaviour of others. Lisciandra et al. (2013) introduced the concept of conformorality to refer to the susceptibility of moral judgements to conformity. While it is often suggested that conformorality is generally bad, recent interdisciplinary work indicates that conformorality can also promote epistemically and morally positive outcomes under certain conditions. In the literature, little attention has been paid to the geometry of urban spaces. Here we combine results from the philosophy and psychology of conformity with general insights from urban studies to distinguish three ways in which the geometry of urban spaces might relate to conformorality, namely: urban spaces can exemplify, afford, or constitute conformorality. This paper’s analysis contributes a more nuanced understanding of the different faces of conformorality, as well as their bearing on urban planning and city living

The 'conformorality' of residential displacement debates

Much scholarly discourse about the problems of and solutions to urban residential displacement has tended towards ‘conformorality’ and, in so doing, has overlooked certain key aspects for study. First, there has been a lack of interest in explaining the complex motives of displacers. Second, certain solutions to displacement have become so commonly espoused that their negative aspects have been obscured. Third, addressing these issues, this paper suggests new ways to confront ‘conformorality’ by encouraging scholars to engage with the deeper ethical and normative questions about displacement solutions that have, hitherto, not often been addressed. Through exploring these rarely discussed topics, scholars may be able create new or improved responses to displacement that target inherent issues

Planners’ ideals and realities : Normative behaviour and conformorality

People often make presumptions about planners – rational, altruistic, self-interested, bureaucratic, and so on. However, what is a realist portrait of planning practitioners? What normative dispositions do they tend to adopt, why do they adopt them, and how they behave based on them? To shed light on these questions, this study explores the normative behaviour of planning practitioners. A meta-ethnography was conducted focusing on 19 empirical studies relevant to the normative behaviour of English local authority planners from 1978 to 2022. The paper’s synthesis of the same revealed prominent normative frameworks within the planning community across different social-temporal contexts. The findings highlight consistent normative features among planners: a deep internalisation of a moderately progressive professional ideal and a strong identification with the planning profession. These results indicate a widespread phenomenon of conformorality within the planning profession, with planners frequently facing challenges when it comes to adhering to two sets of norms: the bureaucratic, and the professional. The study also discusses different mechanisms that contribute to the achievement and maintenance of planners’ conformorality, including compliance, identification, and internalisation

Conformorality and the Economic Urbanism of Jane Jacobs

The renowned urbanist Jane Jacobs made radical and important criticisms of and contributions to both economics and urban planning. Yet, while her contributions to planning have been embraced and admired, her contributions to economics have been mostly overlooked by the economics profession as well as by most of her ardent supporters. Contrasting the strength of conformorality in each of these disciplines may provide part of the explanation, and comparing the experience of Jacobsian economics with market-process economics can shed additional light

Editorial: Exploring conformorality in planning debates

This themed issue on “conformorality” is inspired by the work of Chiara Lisciandra, Marie Postma-Nilsenová, and Matteo Colombo (2013), which explores the tendency of individuals within a particular group or community to align with certain ideologies and values. The term “conformorality”, which combines the concepts of “conformity”, “conformism”, and “morality”, was first introduced into planning debates by Claudia Basta, the former coordinator of the AESOP Thematic Group on Ethics, Values, and Planning, in her thought-provoking presentation entitled “Unequal, thus Unjust?”. This presentation was delivered at a research seminar entitled “The Just City in Practice: Operationalising a Broad and Varied Concept,” which was held on August 21, 2020 in The Hague after the long period of social distancing that had been enforced due to COVID-19 restrictions. In Basta’s presentation, conformorality represented the widespread sentiment that exists between planning scholars that economic inequality equates to injustice; she discussed the limitations of this uncritical attitude

Deal-making cities in Latin America : Why we should pay less attention to master plans

This paper challenges traditional planning paradigms by examining the tensions that exist between planning as a public process and the plan as an instrument. We explore the concept of conformorality, whereby individuals adhere to specific moral values to gain social acceptance within their groups, and influence urban conflicts and policy outcomes. Through this framework, we analyse the complex interactions that exist between planning, public interest, and moral considerations. By using the Urban Intervention Projects (UIPs) case in São Paulo, we demonstrate how moral factors influence negotiations and policy implementation in urban governance. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the moral dimension within planning studies, and advocates for interdisciplinary approaches to the field, as well as new attitudes toward necessary changes

Room for uncertainty in infrastructure planning: How continuous certainification by decision makers results in more uncertainty

An increasingly dynamic environment and engaged society necessitates decision makers in infrastructure planning to adopt adaptive and participative planning approaches and give room to uncertainty in planning and decision making. In planning, individual actors belonging to a group of like-minded actors may attempt to influence decision-making about planning proposals. They do so by using a mix of instruments such as research, participation, agreements, and so on. To gain greater insight into the processes of interactions between decision makers and other relevant actors in planning, the planning of three infrastructure cases – a road upgrade, an airport runway redevelopment, and a river bypass in the Netherlands – was studied in-depth each covering a period of 20 years. Interestingly, a couple of overarching patterns regarding dealing with uncertainty in planning and decision-making appeared from the study. Decision makers continuously strive for ‘certainification’, and do so by deploying authority-based instruments. Indeed, they keep doing so, even if the the result obtained is opposite of that which was desired. Certainification i.e., decision makers striving for reducing uncertainties, often results in a reaction of ‘decertainification’ from opponents. It seems as if decision makers strengthen the latter’s own opposition. And when decision makers actually do give room for uncertainties through adopting an adaptive approach, other actors often demand less uncertainty; driving decision makers back to their thirst for certainification. To overcome this continuous loop, an arena and institutional setting should be created in which actors from different advocacy coalitions are involved in open dialogue to better balance the perceived uncertainties of all stakeholders

Editorial

This issue of Transactions of AESOP brings together papers that address key contemporary planning themes and agendas with a particular emphasis on appreciating the importance of time and space in shaping the substantive matters planning addresses and the manner in which it responds to these

“Don’t despise us!”: Addressing the irrelevance of the vulnerable in public space

This paper attempts to develop a novel insight into Hannah Arendt’s socio-political theories in order to examine and alleviate the socio-spatial exclusion of the vulnerable by greater society. It utilises Arendt’s classification of the terms ‘communal’ and ‘irrelevant’ as a pair of opposing concepts in which the state of ‘vulnerability’ is associated with being deemed to be ‘irrelevant’ within society. The study addresses the exclusionary qualities of public spaces by focusing on the complex relationships observed between these concepts in Turkey through a content analysis of 35 national satire magazines and 30 YouTube channels that reflect on various states and perceptions of vulnerability in Turkish society and culture. It concludes with a series of recommendations by which to close the gap within the communal-irrelevant duality that could enhance vulnerable individuals’ urban rights