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Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies P. Healey
Macmillan Press, London, 1997 ISBN 0 333 49573 X hbk 14-99 pbk, ISBN 0 333 49574 8
No summary can do justice to the complex substantive argument of Patsy Healey's new book nor to her inflected and restrained but, nevertheless, passionate rhetoric. Alas, however, there is no critique without summary and, it surely follows, no interpretation without injustice.
Healey argues that there has been a sea change in the ways theorists think about planning and (less surely) in the formal structures of planning 'systems' and the practices of professionals. While her argument has been largely forged in struggles over urban and regional development in the UK, she writes with confidence about a global community of theorists and experiences on the ground across the European Union, North America, Australia and New Zealand.
The change that engages her is composed of two major intellectual shifts. The first is marked by the abandonment of the notion that institutions or social systems can be understood as if they were 'structures' governed by 'laws' outside human agency. Instead, as exemplified for Healey principally in the work of Anthony Giddens, theorists now see themselves, planning practitioners and, indeed, all human beings as living within, creating, maintaining and transforming 'structures'. The acts of 'intelligence' that (she tells us) we once thought provided an objective platform for planning are reframed as interactive ways of world making. The second shift alters the conventional distinction between speech and other forms of action; between the content of a message and the social performances in which meanings are shaped and destroyed. With Jurgen Habermas, Healey asks us to transform institutions by cultivating settings in which communication is sincere and uncoerced.