Making Planning Theory Matter: A Lacanian Encounter withPhronesis

Abstract

Traditional social science often fails when deployed to explain complex human action. In each specific social field of human endeavour, including planning, experienced actors draw on a range of conscious and unconscious performative knowledges to act with effect: the experts simply 'know' what to do. Flyvbjerg suggests that to understand these complex human dispositions framing practice requires a detailed understanding of the particular, not the universal. Drawing on Aristotle's intellectual virtue of phronesis, Flyvbjerg refers to this as a phronetic social science model. This article suggests that Lacan's theoretical insights and conceptualizations pertaining to the split human subject, divided between symbolic consciousness and unconscious affect, can help to empower this phronetic model. The article argues that a Lacanian inspired phronetic model is particularly useful for understanding spatial planning and related urban policy discourses, for it provides insight as to how desire and resultant ideological fantasies shape our shared social reality and spaces of habitation in our globalized world.

Organization, Society and Politics

“…For instance several authors inexplicably state that Aristotle specifies three intellectual virtues: epistēmē , technē and phronēsis (Flyvbjerg, 2001;Gunder, 2010;Halverson, 2004). This leads to some confusion.…”

“…(Poste, 1850: iii) Other people have recruited Aristotle in a similar fashion, and some others seem to have misunderstood him. A recent example is a clutch of writers who suggest Aristotle's account of phronēsis refers to procedural or tacit knowledge, or some kind of intuition or unconscious facility (Flyvbjerg, 2001;Gunder, 2010). More generally, an array of different beliefs and positions has been attributed to Aristotle, and these beliefs are certainly incoherent as a set.…”

“…Reeve (2006: 202) identifies that for Aristotle, 'theology is both the best or most estimable science' (in Metaphysics , 1074b34). And both Flyvbjerg (2001) and Gunder (2010) place too much emphasis on intuition as a form of knowledge that is phronēsis .…”

The politics of adaptive climate management: Scientific recipes and lived reality

“…Rooting AM in everyday performance puts the spotlight on professionals' practical wisdom (Frerks et al, 2011;Sharma, 2008;Warner & Boas, 2017), or phronesis, a concept coined long ago by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (cf. Gunder, 2010).…”

Exploring the usefulness of structural–functional approaches to analyse governance of planning systems

“…More recent developments in planning theory have focussed on further developing these 'post' perspectives by drawing on the ideas and concepts of philosophers such as Lacan (Gunder, 2010;Gunder andHillier, 2009), Foucault (Harris, 2011) and Deleuze and Guattari (Hillier, 2011;Purcell, 2013). Parallel to these explorations, there has also been an emerging discussion surrounding ideas of complexity theory (Chettiparamb, 2014), critical pragmatism (Forester, 2013), actor network theory (Rydin, 2012) and institutional theory (Neuman, 2012).…”