ABSTRACT
I was introduced to the notion of territory as a basis for regional planning in a course that professors John Friedmann and Clyde Weaver co-taught at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) while they were writing Territory and Function: The Evolution of Regional Planning (1979). At the time, their description of the tension between planning that draws its priorities from within the territory, and planning that integrates spatial entities on the basis of external functional priorities, such as national economic growth, struck a chord in me both personally and professionally. As a South Asian student of Indian origin living in southern California, I was acutely aware of the emotions evoked when thinking about my native Bengal-its landscape, language, music, art, cuisine, and, of course, politics1-and I understood intuitively that territorial allegiance and regional identity were not mere academic ideas. Before joining the planning program at UCLA, I had completed my
undergraduate education and two years of professional practice as an architect in India and had developed a particular liking for built environments that incorporated locally available building materials, were sensitive to the natural particularities of the region, such as monsoons, and respected local cultural practices. When looking at buildings, I always searched for architectural motifs that were specific to the region-certain types of entrances, internal courtyards, windows, decorative elements, and so on. Through both the cultural identity I inherited at birth as a Bengali and my chosen identity as a student of architecture, I was immensely drawn to Friedmann’s and Weaver’s formulation of planning based on territoriality. Planning from within a region seemed to me a more authentic and meaningful way of making decisions than the conventional style of regional planning, which allocated resources for sectoral activities primarily based on enhancing national economic growth. From the very beginning of my interest in the idea of territoriality, I was
cognizant that the concept was contested from both sides of the ideological spectrum. The new-neoclassical economists treated regions as mere subnational administrative entities whose primary function was to serve the nation-state (Richardson 1979). In contrast, the neo-Marxist geographers
viewed territories according to the spatial distribution of conditions under which capitalism unfolded, unevenly, as dictated by the power of local as well as global actors (Massey 2005; Soja 1980). Friedmann had emerged out of the ranks of the new-neoclassical regional economists but was now more critical of their ideological assumptions (Friedmann & Alonso 1975; Perloff 1968). In 1974, while I was a student at UCLA, he offered a new year-long course: the fall semester was titled “National Approaches to Regional Development”; the spring semester presented an alternative, “A Regional Approach to National Development.” Friedmann’s intellectual sympathy for the alternative approach was vivid. It was built on a serious critique of conventional theories of economic growth, which led to his advocacy for the recovery of territorial life (1978a), the importance of local autonomy in decision-making (1983), and the development of communal wealth (1992). Friedmann had decided that progressive planning required a basis in social movements and resistance from below, and clearly saw this movement from below as resulting in a better form of planning than the conventional, technocratic way bureaucratic hierarchies produced comprehensive plans (1978b). By then, Friedmann had also developed the notion of transactive planning,
in which he called for dialogic deliberations among small groups of citizens as an alternative to the way public concerns were incorporated in traditional planning (1973). He described the need for transactive planning processes and territorially based governance in “good societies,” which should be selfreliant and provide for the basic needs of all, particularly the poor who lacked “access to the social bases of power” (Friedmann 1979b). In proposing such a new approach, he referred to the problem of urbanization and lack of rural development in newly industrializing countries; but his prescriptions had relevance for the U.S., which he saw as connected in more than one way with “theaters of actions” around the world. Though somewhat similar to the neo-Marxists in his reliance on the core-periphery model, Friedmann varied widely from them in his suggestions for action. While the neo-Marxists advocated class struggle, Friedmann proposed that external cultural and economic domination be opposed by territorial units committed more to sustaining local life forces than to acting as small cogs in the gigantic wheel of global economic flows. Yet Friedmann was neither a romantic communitarian nor a naïve traditionalist. He never argued for a total victory of small communities and territorial regions in their fight against national governments and/or external capital. Friedmann urged us to think critically about the relationship between
territories and external forces imposed, for example, by the global movement of capital or the national government. He preferred that relationships between territories and external forces be negotiated, not dictated, and hoped that such negotiations would lead to more equitable outcomes (Friedmann 1985). If not, he was willing to go one step further and propose that under certain circumstances some territories might “selectively delink”
themselves from the larger set of globally linked social forces. Unlike the Marxists, who called for the workers of the world to unite against structural exploitation via global linkages, Friedmann, building on the sentiments of Karl Mannheim-and later, the Frankfurt School-proposed decentralized opposition from below sustained by the reciprocities of human relationships which could only be nurtured in small territorial communities. Though my cultural upbringing as a Bengali and my education in archi-
tecture had drawn me to the notion of territoriality, in neither of these contexts had I been concerned much about social inclusion-or the lack of it. As a doctoral student at UCLA, however, I was exposed to the concept of social inclusion in multiple ways-by Friedmann, Soja (1980), Marris (1996), Hayden (1981) and others,2 who explained, each in their own way, why certain groups of citizens were consistently excluded from receiving their share of the economic pie that they had helped to create. There was very little doubt among the UCLA planning faculty that the outcomes of the dominant economic and social processes were unfair and that the unfair status quo was not to be accepted. The consensus was that grassroots-based social opposition from below had more potential to rectify the situation than traditional, top-down public planning (Sanyal 2008). There was uniform opposition to the negative consequences of global flows of capital, labor, commodities, and the dominant ideology of modernization and economic growth. This overarching critique of the status quo and of traditional planning, led by Friedmann-in which he was joined by his colleagues-created a unique intellectual climate at UCLA to deliberate, freely, about alternative ideas of development and planning with great concern for gender, race, and income inequalities. As Friedmann proposed (1979a), the time had come to rethink the role of planning not simply as an allocative mechanism, but as a catalyst to create new types of innovative institutions, small in scale, but more accountable to the people in territorial communities that would serve as the democratic cells of the larger social formation.
