ABSTRACT
Reading across the body of work John Friedmann has produced, I have always been struck by the hopefulness intrinsic to his thinking. This is more than merely optimism, and certainly not empty of critical analysis or considered strategic action. Instead, John offers, through the multiple dimensions of his work, an honest, constructive, radically open hope that is at once inspiring and politically engaging. “Resistance is never wasted,” as he says in Planning in the Public Domain (1987, p.390). This dimension of his work is, to my mind, a rich and important one for planning theory, practice, education and research. I first met John in Melbourne, just as I embarked on my graduate research
journey. I had of course met him “intellectually” during my undergraduate planning studies and so I already had a perspective of him in that fascinated, awe-inspired way that perhaps most students feel about the “names” they enjoy reading. John ran the PhD colloquia and it was there that I gained insight into the politically grounded and hopeful dimensions of his work, aspects I had not, up to that point, fully appreciated. And so, in this brief essay, I offer a reading of hope across a selection of
Friedmann’s work, with the aim of providing an account of this important contribution to the field of planning and urban studies, particularly his linking of hope with resistance and struggle. Along the way, I also provide some brief personal reflections and some thoughts about the enduring legacy of his guiding principles for our field in the future. First, then, to the dimension of hope in Friedmann’s work. John has
argued that there are three central tasks of planning theory: tasks of philosophy, adaptation and translation. The philosophical task might also be read as a normative one: to provide a human-centred, or humanist, philosophy for planning action based on guiding values. To my reading, this central philosophical task is the spark that lights a fire across Friedmann’s body of work, for it ignites a drive that is inherently hopeful: hope for what else might be possible and the different alternatives that might be imagined, and hope as a commitment to pursuing those alternative, transformative possibilities in the face of painful, unjust realities. Others have called this a “curse” (Flyvbjerg 2001), but Friedmann casts it quite differently. As he writes in The Good
Society, planning is intrinsically engaged with a future that “rises up in our mind as a transcendent possibility, a challenge, and a hope” (1979a, p.xi). Neither these challenges, nor hope, arise, however, from abstract theorizing
or generalist norms. Across his work, John both urges and practices a politically aware and critical engagement with the world, with actual realities and events. There is evidence across his writing that he is profoundly moved by desolation and destruction, by poverty and injustice, by the “horror of placelessness” (Friedmann 2010, p.152)—moved to write and to think, to suggest actions and alternatives, and to find solutions through a hopeful engagement with those very horrors. Perhaps this arises from his early decision, as he recalls it in a biographical essay (Friedmann 2014), to refuse to see planning as a narrow, technical endeavor and instead to situate it as a practice, action and aspiration about possibility. Or, in John’s more eloquent words, as “always engaged with and in the world” (ibid., original italics). It is perhaps also shaped by the influence of Chinese philosophy on his thinking, where dialectic is not a confrontation but always a productive tension, enabling the transformative possibility to be always near-at-hand. Consequently, his work displays a tireless motivation to provide the basis for fundamental and transformative change, always looking “beyond the visible horizon” (Friedmann 1998, p.16), to ask: “what shall we hold out as a vision, so that political practice (and planning) do not merely chase after problems, making small improvements here and there as opportunities arise, but move coherently towards an agenda of a truly human development?” (ibid., p.16). It is instructive, then, to look at how he achieves this across his work.
One important dimension might be that he always situates his writing in response to key world events and conditions. The writing of Retracking America (1973) was an attempt to not only find appropriate theories for explaining the major social and political upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but also to provide normative “guiding beacons” to orient those upheavals to socially just practices. Or in other words, giving hope (see Friedmann 2011, Introduction). Empowerment (1992) was written to present a vision of alternative development that was explicitly anti-poverty, turning upside-down the standard categories used in development theory. He has written in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US (Friedmann 2002) and as a critique of what he saw as the emergence of a violently regressive economic order (Friedmann 1979b). The site for such hopeful thinking and action in Friedmann’s work has
always been the city. Long convinced of the centrality of cities and urban life to the articulation of a just society, John’s work seeks to connect broader and more fundamental socio-economic injustices and problems with the daily work of planning: place-making and city-building. As his focus came to rest in the “small spaces of the city” (Friedmann 2010) where everyday life is practised, I believe we can find ever clearer evocations in his work of the pursuit of certain hopeful values: cherishing, centrality, civility, identity, emplacement.
