Toward a Political Urban Planning: Learning from Growth Machine and Advocacy Planning to “Plannitize” Urban Politics

Abstract

This article examines Advocacy Planning through the lens of political–economic urban governance theories—primarily Growth Machine. The first part of the article engages Advocacy Planning and Growth Machine in a conceptual dialogue to search for new insights into the causes of, and potential solutions to, planning’s hitherto inability to significantly mitigate urban social inequity and injustice. The analysis corroborates long-standing assertions of planning’s ineffectiveness in redressing inequitable urban planning outcomes as being resultant of the unequal—and dominant—power held by the governing growth coalition. The second part proffers three lessons that Growth Machine offers to Advocacy Planning, specifically, and urban planning, generally. These lessons constitute the axes of plannitizing urban politics by way of bridging planning’s long-standing power gap through an evolved normative planning education and praxis—a political urban planning.

The just city. Three background issues: Institutional justice and spatial justice, social justice and distributive justice, concept of justice and conceptions of justice

“… 1. Considering the period since 2000, the issue of just cities has been discussed for instance by Visser (2001), Cardoso and Breda-Vázquez (2007), Thomas (2008), Irázabal (2009), Irazábal and Punja (2009), Dooling (2009), Pavel (2009), King (2011), Fincher and Iveson (2012), Steele et al (2012), Winkler (2012), Castán Broto et al (2013), Chung (2013), Talen (2013), Alfasi and Fenster (2014), Reardon and Dymén (2015), Song (2015), Basta (2016), Low and Iveson (2016), Davison (2017), Pierce and Martin (2017), Perry and Atherton (2017), Uitermark and Nicholls (2017), Williams (2017), Grooms and Frimpong Boamah (2018), Jonkman and Janssen-Jansen (2018), Larson (2018), Medved (2018), Reece (2018), Hyra et al (2019) and Kim et al (2019). Several authors have resumed discussion of the more general relationship between geography and questions of justice: for example, Smith (2000), Valentine (2003), Barnett (2011), Storper (2011) and Israel and Frenkel (2018). …”

The politics of co-implementation and their potential in shaping egalitarian cities

“…Hence, implementation manifests itself as a politically loaded process that is driven by various actors -including co-producers -with (a)symmetric power relations that are determined by a dynamically changing and multi-tier political climate and by the subsequent distribution of governance roles within urban systems. As stressed by Albrechts (2020), there is a renewed call in recent planning literature (Grooms and Boamah, 2018;Karki, 2017) for planners to play an active role in politics in order to steer the real implementation of their plans and the realization of their visions. As a consequence, planning theorists and practitioners need to know more about the actions and the political capacity of planners and co-producers when they interact with elected officials affecting the plan implementation process, and about how this interaction can have a serious impact on political decisions.…”

Neoliberalismo vs. Pós-Modernismo No Planejamento Urbano

“…Entretanto, o objetivo político pode ser abstraído do vínculo entre o poder público e os produtores da construção civil. Grooms & Boamah (2018) explicam que o "novo empreendedorismo urbano" constitui a Growth Machine, uma estratégia de planejamento e governança caracterizada por parcerias públicoprivadas em prol do crescimento econômico e da competitividade.…”

“…Nesse cenário de novo empreendedorismo, Grooms & Boamah (2018) entendem que o planejamento tem sido repolitizado (e desburocratizado). Zanotto (2020) diz que para entender como uma ideologia é reproduzida no planejamento, tornase necessário verificar como ela se manifesta nos discursos, os quais podem ser mediados por estruturas econômicas, como também institucionais, políticas e culturais.…”