ABSTRACT
The past decade has witnessed a reinvigoration of theoretical discussion within the discipline of planning. Inspired by postmodernist cultural critique and by the move among philosophers away from logical positivism toward a substantive concern with ethics and public policy, planning theorists have reframed their debates over methods and programs to encompass issues of discourse and incl usiveness. In the 1970s and 1980s, proponents of positivist scientific analysis battled advocates of materialist political economy. Although the divide between positivists and their opponents persists, other issues have come to define the leading edge of planning theory. Contemporary disagreements concern the usefulness of Habermasian communicative rationality, the effect of physical design on social outcomes (an old debate resurfaced), and the potential for stretching a postmarxist political economy approach to encompass a more complex view of social structure and social benefits than was envisioned by materialist analysis. Although discussions of
The big question for the pragmatic analysts is how practitioners construct the free spaces in which democratic planning can be institutionalized. The idea ... is to uncover examples of planning that are both competent and democratic, and then to explore who the practitioners were who did it, what actions they took to make it happen, and what sorts of institutional conditions helped or hindered their efforts. (Hoch 1996, 42)
A communicative conception of rationality ... replaces[s] that of the selfconscious autonomous subject using principles of logic and scientifically formulated empirical knowledge to guide actions. This new conception of reasoning is arrived at by an intersubjective effort at mutual understanding. This refocuses the practices of planning to enable purposes to be communicatively discovered.
