Actor collaboration 2

Why this is an important part of planning education in Africa?

We occupy a Complex, conflicted and rapidly urbanising continent

'Conflicting rationalities'

Rational

Whose voices, vision, knowledge and expertise should guide planning processes and decision making?

The 'good city'

Staying alive

Actor collaboration: Starting points

Acnowledging Conflict

Differentiation

The toolkit takes the approach that actor collaboration in planning is indissolubly linked to larger social questions about power, access to resources and accountability

It has been argued that these urban settings require “a different approach…which questions the starting point of communicative action planning theory in assumptions of consensus and rather considers a starting point in assumptions of conflict.” (Watson 2009: 1)

Engaging with the challenges of scale

Planners operate at different scales:

Localities, precincts and neighbourhoods that are spatially, socially and economically differentiated

Settlement and city scales

Provincial and national scales which address overarching spatial development priorities

Actor collaboration within different planning paradigms

'Paths are made by walking'

'Actor collaboration'

Romantic image?

Cities are deeply fractured by income and spatial inequalities

Within the city there are many different knowledges and different knowers

Nairobi, Kenya

The promises of the city...

...are shadowed by the urbanisation of poverty, informality and slums growing faster than anywhere else on the planet

Specialist technical knowledges

The livelihood opportunities it offers...

Harare, Zimbabwe

Lagos, Nigeria

The apartheid city reproduces itself in many different settings

Local survivalist knowledges

African planners, policy makers and development actors must engage with a number of foundational questions

Expert led

What are the assumptions which underpin 'rational,''participatory', 'collaborative', 'agonistic' or 'insurgent' planning theory and how relevant are they in context of the African city?

How much do we know about our cities, “the real economy and the real social practices and identities of the majority of urbanites?” (Pieterse, 2009:10)

How do we deal with the 'conflicting rationalities' which counterpose the normative agendas of planners with the survivalist imperatives associated with informality?

Cape Town stadium

Which urban narratives predominate?

'Community participation'

Collaboration

Local knowledge

Nairobi train

'Agonistic' - Conflict based

Port Harcourt meat market

'Insurgent'

Informality & the African city

The relationship between conflict and planning

• African cities bring together multiple development actors with competing agendas and hugely unequal access to power, resources and information.

• The rise of informality poses fundamental questions about the approach and agenda of planning and the potential for actor collaboration.

• How to address as “constituent parts of planning the conflict, ambiguity and indeterminacy characteristic of actual social life?”

• How to “include the ethnographic present in planning, that is, the possibilities for change encountered in existing social conditions?” (Holston 1998: 46)

The potential for actor collaboration, together with the profile of the actors, changes according to the nature of the locality and the planning scale

Rational planning theory

Insurgent planning

Modernist planning privileges ‘expert’ knowledge which conceptualises urban form and manages ‘development’ and its remedies for poverty.

Participatory development and collaborative/communicative action theory

Survivalist

Agonistic planning

Planning from below driven by local conditions and rationalities which inform “the strategies and tactics of those who are attempting to survive, materially and politically in the harsh environment of Africa’s cities." (Watson, 2003: 401)

“Under modern conditions we must have experts. If we want to utilise them to the full we must allow them a free hand and there should be as little interference as possible with their work" Nehru

Minimal consultation

Radical utopian

Premised on competition and contingency

Recognition of planning as troubled and contested

Value driven involving political action by organised groups who act with, without or even against the state (Friedmann 2000)

Assumption that consensus can be reached which overcomes conflict and results in 'win-win' solutions

Explicit recognition of weighted power and contingent solutions

Mediated deal making

Deliberation about public problems and solutions under conditions that are conducive to reasoned reflection and refined public judgment; a mutual willingness to understand the values, perspectives, and interests of others

If African planners are to “reengage the social” and to navigate the ‘deep difference’ which characterises the African city this will require expanding our thinking about planning “beyond its preoccupation with execution and design” (Sandercock ,1999)

We must begin to understand the lived experiences of the poor and the spaces of insurgent informality.

This requires a new grammar and methodology for actor collaboration which takes its starting point as conflict and works backward to negotiate adaptive solutions.