ABSTRACT
My personal mindset is very much infl uenced by the incredible “Golden Sixties”. They brought me hope, despair, openness and a changing world view. Hope and a changing world view as I graduated in this period in three different subjects: social sciences (1965), study of developing countries (1966) and planning (1971). Social science provided me with tools for analysing and understanding structural issues in society. But it fell short in providing answers. My study in developing countries pushed me to go beyond Western realities and practices. Planning turned the focus of analysing for the sake of analysis towards analysing for the sake of providing answers. Despair came as my hometown was shaken by the shutdown of the traditional coal industry which had dominated its economy, its physical layout and its social tissue for more than 60 years. The reaction of the miners was fi erce, and two of them were killed in a protest rally. In the aftermath of May ’68, together with some students at the university, I chose the side of the miners. I became inspired by fascinating experiments in the former Yugoslavia, 1 where extensive group interactions in self-managed fi rms promoted greater communication and worker commitment. It made me focus on the way in which people are excluded or included and the way relationships between people are organised. I fully realised that this needed a focus on the structural problems in society. This urged me to construct a type of planning that provides a critical interpretation of the structural challenges and problems and that thinks creatively about possible answers and how to get there. With my PhD (1974) I constructed, as a fi rst step in this direction, a voluntaristic planning model. Over the years, my thinking and acting evolved to a more radical type of strategic spatial planning (Albrechts, 2001, 2004, 2006a, 2013, 2015) with a clear focus on structural issues such as future (uncertainty, creativity, envisioning); diversity (race, class, age, religion); equity (unequal
development); inclusivity (inclusion, exclusion); action (implementation, selectivity). Strategic implies for me that some decisions and actions are considered more important than others and that much of the process, which is inherently political in nature, lies in making tough decisions about what is most important for the purpose of producing fair, structural responses to problems, challenges, aspirations. I defi ne strategic planning as a transformative and integrative public sector-led, but co-productive, socio-spatial process through which visions/frames of reference, justifi cation for coherent actions and the means for implementation are produced that shape and frame what a place is and what it might become. Transformative change is about systemic change (deep change) in society that cannot be undone. For me it is based on equity and social justice. I view raising awareness of the structural problems and challenges our cities and regions are facing-building new ideas and processes, broadening the scope of the (im)possible, and an active engagement in arenas that matter-as the main purposes of strategic planning. It is not just a contingent response to wider forces but also an active force in enabling change, and it cannot be theorised as though its approaches and practices were neutral with respect to class, gender, age, race and ethnicity (Sandercock, 1998; Albrechts, 2002). Strategic planning must symbolise some good, some qualities and some virtues that the present lacks (diversity, sustainability, equity, spatial quality, inclusiveness). My experiences in practice taught me that the capacity of a strategic spatial planning system to deliver the desired outcomes is dependent not only on the legal-political system itself, but also on the conditions underlying it. These conditions-including political, societal, cultural and professional attitudes towards spatial planning (in terms of planning content and process) and the political will on the part of the institutions involved to set the process in motion (and, even more diffi cult, to keep it going)—affect the ability of planning systems to implement the chosen strategies. For me, strategic planning points to implementation. I see this as the pattern of visions, policy statements, plans/strategies, programs, actions (short-, medium-, and long-term), decisions and resource allocation that defi nes what a policy would be in practice, what it would accomplish (and for whom) and why it would do so from the points of view of various affected publics (see Bryson & Crosby, 1992, p. 296). My international involvement (AESOP, foreign PhD students, sabbaticals, visiting professorships, a research project in Ecuador, UN-Habitat) provoked in me a more radical type of planning and pushed me to focus even more on the ways in which people are excluded or included and the way relationships between people are organised. This took me to the concept of co-production (as a political strategy) and working with confl icts (Albrechts, 2013, 2015).
