ABSTRACT
A feature of modernity is self-improvement, and “planning” is modern society’s official approach to social “self-improvement” – whether improvement of the city or improvement of the decision and implementation process. In this skeptical post-modern world, such a statement sounds a little ludicrous. Yet, if in the late 1960s some French philosophers could tire of the endless appeal to social self-improvement of the Stalinist parties of the left – giving birth to postmodernism – it may be that today, faced with a world tumbling again into global war and the insidious creep of global environmental degradation, it is time to rekindle the flame of social self-improvement. What has to be rejected, though, are two nineteenth-century beliefs about society and its processes of change: that a small coterie at the apex of a representative parliamentary government can garner the wisdom to steer society toward a better future; alternatively, that a simple set of rules held in place by such a government can automatically mobilize the collective wisdom to steer society toward a better future. On the one hand the hierarchy, on the other the market. Useful though these two kinds of institutions have been in many ways, they do not exhaust the description of modern society. A third institutional form is the network, which is increasingly seen as a necessary supplement to hierarchy and market. We have Manuel Castells, among many others, to thank for the observation of the “network society.” Albrechts (2003: 264) observes that planning “forms knowledge, produces discourse, constitutes a productive network and builds
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but also continuity.
