Planning as scientific discipline? Digging deep toward the bottom line of the debate

Abstract

One of the oldest questions of spatial planning is about the profession itself. Because of the direct fields of application on the urban or regional scale, or on sectorial fields like transport or environmental planning, scholars in planning sciences always quarreled with themselves whether their approaches can be seen as discipline itself. Regardless of the different answers and outcomes of this question, it becomes clear that the debate triggers more than just the acceptance as a discipline. One might think that the scientific nature of spatial planning and thus the raison d’être of planning sciences are under general suspicion. This requires a deeper discussion about the definition of sciences and the demarcation problem as discussed in classical (Popper, Kuhn) and more contemporary approaches (Hoyningen-Huene, Park) in the philosophy of science, and what this means for the discussion about spatial planning as a science as well as a discipline. Therefore, various conclusions to regard planning sciences not as one discipline but as multiple disciplines are possible. In this sense, let us dig deep toward the bottom line of the debate.

The right tools for the job: The case for spatial science tool‐building

“…Urban science, sitting at the intersection of city planning, geography, and computational data science, aims to advance our knowledge of cities' fundamental patterns and relationships by modeling spatial big data (Alberti, 2017;Acuto, Parnell, & Seto, 2018;Batty, 2013Batty, , 2019Barthelemy, 2019;Kang et al, 2019;Kitchin, 2016;Kontokosta, 2018;Lobo et al, 2020;Mattern, 2013;Sallis et al, 2016;Solecki, Seto, & Marcotullio, 2013). Despite urban science's recent bold claims to a "new kind of science," urban geographers, sociologists, and planners have of course long investigated cities' patterns and processes through spatial data, mathematical models, and the scientific method (Batty, 1971(Batty, , 1980Behrend & Levin-Keitel, 2020;Bertuglia, Bianchi, & Mela, 1998;Branch, 1966; Burgess, 1925;Derudder & van Meeteren, 2019;Hoyt, 1951;Johannesen, Olaisen, & Olsen, 1998;Lee, 1973Lee, , 1994O'Sullivan & Manson, 2015). Computational geography itself now has a long history, yet, too often, geographic science and domain theory fail to fully permeate our computational tools (Arribas-Bel & Reades, 2018;Gahegan, 1999Gahegan, , 2018Gahegan, , 2020Harris et al, 2017;Singleton & Arribas-Bel, 2019).…”

Southern Theory without a North: City Conceptualization as the Theoretical Metropolis

“…These abstracted representations of the city are then used to plan for the future, which may claim itself to be objective, however, the rendering of the future itself is subjective and exclusionary (Peters 2019). This brief outline describe what a city is or what it ought to be, planning is merely a tool that at best, uses (even if scientific (Behrend and Levin-Keitel 2020)) methods to make a city, which has already been conceptualized for it. Furthermore, the narrative on what a city is/ought-to-be, in turn becomes a planning tool for public communications (Sandercock 2003;van Hulst 2012), while understood to be hegemonic in nature (c.f.…”