ABSTRACT
The strategic planners of the mid-twentieth-century planning movement were well aware of the need for ‘knowledge’ about the areas they were concerned with. They collected data about all kinds of phenomena and incorporated these in their reports. In Amsterdam, Milan and Cambridge, fired with a new social-scientific understanding of urban relations, planning teams in the 1970s undertook major surveys and analyses of urban conditions. In Amsterdam in the 2000s, the importance of a strong in-house research function in the planning department was stressed yet again. But the discussion of strategy-formation processes in Chapter 6 and of the multiple spatialities of urban areas in Chapter 7 raises significant questions about the nature of the knowledge being accumulated in this way. What kind of ‘epistemologies’ (that is, ways of knowing) are reflected in how ‘knowledge’ is accumulated and used in spatial strategy-making processes? How are encounters between different understandings and meanings negotiated? What kinds of learning go on in these processes of accumulation, encounter and negotiation, and how far do these encourage the kind of creative discovery processes through which new policy frames become recognised and new meanings of an urban region are ‘summoned up’? Such questions raise issues about the relations between
knowing, imagining, discovering and acting; about the linkages between formal ‘research’ and systematised ‘knowledge’, as in scientific papers or technical practice guidance, and knowledge which is implicit in techniques and procedures, in the day-today routines of policy practices. They focus attention on the relation between information and the frames of reference through which ‘bits of information’ are ordered into meanings and understandings. They raise issues about whose knowledge counts, what ‘sources’ of knowledge are drawn upon and about the relations between ‘experts’ in a particular area of knowledge and ‘the rest of us’. Although spatial strategies focused on urban areas may often involve little more than minor revisions to well-established conceptions, all episodes of explicit strategy-making involve some kind of creative assemblage of what is ‘known’ and what is ‘imagined’, synthesising from myriad sources an idea of an urban area as a place, as it may be imagined now and as it could be in the future (Fischer 2000).
