ABSTRACT

The work of Habermas has had a transformational impact upon contemporary planning practice and theory. Habermasian thinking has sparked a reconceptualisation of urban planning as a mechanism through which the co-production and use of knowledge can inspire and shape action. To plan the city is to both intervene (to make decisions about development proposals, land uses and the siting of infrastructure) and to create spaces for discussion and debate to occur about the future city. This wicked tension between ongoing decisions and discussions has provoked considerable urban planning scholarship. Habermas’ communicative rationality and deliberative democracy have inspired much of this empirical engagement and critique (Bond, 2010; Flyvbjerg, 1998; Forester, 1999; Hillier, 2003; Hoch, 2007; Legacy, 2010; Purcell, 2009). However, in the field of urban planning, less attention has been paid to Habermas’ work Between facts and norms as an inspiration for a critique of city-making processes. Between facts and norms offers a lens to investigate the nuances of knowledge formation and exchange within the institutional landscape of planning practice and policy making. This work provides an analytical tool to study the planning practice processes that steer the translation of knowledge into action and the common barriers to this. Habermas’ theory on facts and norms also offers a framework to question how these processes are shaped by, or restricted through, the ‘fixity’ of planning’s institutions and the broader regulatory context. We argue in this chapter that it is here where the work of Habermas possesses the greatest potential to advance planning theory and practice. By drawing upon a case to redevelop an underutilised car park called the St Kilda ‘Triangle’, located within the inner city suburb of Melbourne, Australia, we draw attention to the challenges of achieving public legitimacy in planning and how the context of planning can serve to undermine these processes. Through this case we offer critical engagement with our own work with Habermasian thought, but also more generally how communicative rationality and deliberative democracy and then facts and norms have shaped the theoretical debate around planning process and legitimacy formation. We argue that through

the analytical lens of Habermas’ theories we have encountered insufficient theorisation of the dynamic way in which the rationality of planning can also shape and influence planning’s communicative and transformative potential. Addressing this limit requires broader engagement with the work of critics of communicative rationality and of deliberative democracy more generally (Mouffe, 2000, 2005; Purcell, 2009, 2013). This chapter shows how engaging with this critical body of literature can potentially broaden the usefulness and strengthen the relevance of Habermas’ theories in contemporary urban planning research. Here we consider future applications and the analytical potential of Habermas’ theories within planning and urban scholarship and we explore possible new directions and research questions that could situate Habermas within contemporary planning research. The first section of the chapter briefly sets up the St Kilda Triangle case as an example of a project having lost public legitimacy. We then turn to a discussion of some of the ongoing challenges and traditions that relate to the legitimacy of planning as a collective act. Third, we explore how Habermasian theories of communicative action and deliberative democracy have been used in planning scholarship, arguing that Habermas’ communicative action has had a transformational impact on the procedural planning literature, and on how power between actors can be ‘managed’, rhetoric questioned and contextualised and stakeholder interests brought to the fore. Finally, we introduce Habermas’ work contained in Between facts and norms, which has the potential to provide a framework to consider and assess the norm-shaping prospects of communicative action within fixed institutional landscapes. We argue in our concluding section of the chapter that this work is more attuned to the realpolitik of collective decision making than consensus alone offered through a communicative orientation, and that it reveals why the St Kilda Triangle redevelopment ended in a significant dispute.