ABSTRACT
The contradictions that arise in the everyday practice of environmental planning have much in common with the problem positioning of Jürgen Habermas. The difficulty of environmental decision-making lies in the ambiguity of the commons: it is very difficult to define who has the right to speak up for the environment, what kind of arguments should be considered legitimate and how to design decision-making processes that ensure just and empowering relations between its participants. In this chapter I contextualise Habermasian ideals in the research of environmental planning, visualising how his theory can be applied to a research programme while also clarifying its shortcomings. The focus of my chapter is on the linguistic nature of planning processes, in which I address the differences between the linguistic practices of the lifeworld and the system, and the ability of the latter to provide participants with unconstrained and unified conditions of interaction. Habermas is used in the analysis of environmental planning processes to criticise them for their incremental nature. The growth of incrementality is an administrative practice of planners attempting to respond to the needs of system legitimation. However, my analysis of planning in Eastern Europe illustrates that the incremental growth of the prescriptions in planning debates may be deceptive and reflected only at the linguistic level of planning documents. Linguistic utterances in planning processes and documents that reflect the construction of legitimacy may not have a say in real life planning practice: people play linguistic games that legitimate planning dialogues per se but not their actual outcomes regarding the natural environment. This does not diminish the importance of Habermas’s ideas. The analysis of linguistic interaction and especially the use of abstract generality claims plays a role in building hidden power hierarchies. I show how ordinary language use in environmental planning processes can empower or colonise the lifeworld. I also explain that there are some shortcomings when applying Habermas in the analysis of social interaction in the context of environmental planning. For example,
Habermas equates linguistic interaction with meaning creation (as it is also done in everyday planning contexts). The comparison of Habermas’ and Luhmann’s approaches to social systems assists in understanding the distinction between participants’ linguistic expressions and their actual motivations behind them. This juxtaposition also assists in understanding how the planner and the participants in planning processes are interdependent in meaning creation and related conflicts. It is also misleading to assume that Habermas’ ideal discourse can be achieved in simultaneous interaction. When comparing the concept of ‘lifeworld’ (Habermas) to ‘habitus’ or ‘practice’ (Bourdieu or Giddens) it appears that the planner and the participants in planning processes are dependent on already established interaction practices that shape the seemingly simultaneous forms of meaning creation. Although the established tradition of planning interaction determines the time and space limits for the discussion, people need common systems of language use to make interactions possible.
