Reinventing planning and planners: Ideological decontestations and rhetorical appeals

Abstract

This article contributes to the debate about ideologically motivated planning reforms. It aims to advance the debate by exploring how change is legitimised through forms of rhetorical persuasion. It shows how political ideologies become embedded in planning policies and practices through strategies of legitimation aimed at justifying specific ideas, beliefs and values as self-evident and inevitable. These legitimation strategies rely on distinctive rhetorical appeals to steer planning discourses, policies and institutions. By using short illustrative examples of ‘ideology in action’ from Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands, the article shows that various combinations of rhetorical appeals to logos, ethos, pathos and doxa (logic, character, emotion and identity) are often simultaneously at work to naturalise contested planning reforms.

Narratives of power: Bringing ideology to the fore of planning analysis

“…For example, Davoudi et al draw on the work of Michael Freeden (1996 – see also Shepherd, 2018) to present ideologies as being ‘socially and historically constructed bundles of contested and contingent ideas, values and beliefs with recurring, yet fluid and dynamic, patterns’ (Davoudi et al, 2020: 32) and which provide ‘the framework in which political struggles in and about planning concepts and institutions are discursively played out’ (Davoudi et al, 2020: 20). Sager (2020) in his analysis of the relationship between what he calls ‘authoritarian populism’ and planning theory also presents ideology as a recognisable framework of political ideas oriented towards political change.…”

“…For Davoudi et al, ideologies therefore serve to organise and frame material conditions and policy dilemmas in different ways depending on the distinctive ideological and cultural legacies of these three countries. However, they also argue that in all three contexts, culturally variegated incarnations of neoliberalism have come to be ‘embedded in planning practices, and embodied by planners through strategies of legitimation’ (Davoudi et al, 2020: 32). In this conception, the ‘dominant ideology’ of neoliberalism acts to frame certain planning policy problems and solutions as natural and self-evident while obfuscating or de-legitimising competing visions.…”

“…Or it might mean diagnosing a shift in the ‘Overton window’ through which more progressive ideas regarding the proper function and priorities of planning might be articulated in mainstream political discourse (Inch and Shepherd, 2020). Exploiting such opportunities could mean deploying various combinations of rhetorical appeals to character, emotion and identity (Davoudi et al, 2020) linked to property and place in order to agitate for progressive change.…”

“…Inch and Shepherd's article is an attempt to place ideology in a broader yet specific historical and political context without unduly privileging the ideational over the material. This is also the approach taken by Davoudi et al (2020) who explicitly acknowledge that 'ideological shifts are not just a matter of ideational struggle over abstract concepts, they are also responses to material conditions and policy dilemmas' (p. 21). They therefore pay attention to the constraining and enabling influence of cultural contexts to trace how these condition the (re)configuration of the conceptual morphologies of political ideologies as they relate to planning in different historical periods in Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands.…”

Ideology in practice: the career of sustainability as an ideological concept in strategic urban planning

“…Recent times have witnessed a rekindled analytical interest with regards to ideology dynamics in planning (see e.g. Zanotto 2020; Inch and Shepherd 2019; Davoudi, Galland, and Stead 2019). Nonetheless, an overwhelming majority of planners do not appear to consider themselves ideologically driven, let alone ideologues (Lauria and Long 2017).…”