The Practice Movement and Planning Theory
Watson
10.1177/0739456X02238446
䉴 Instruction
Do We Learn from Planning Practice?
The Contribution of the Practice
Movement to Planning Theory
Vanessa Watson
Abstract
This article examines a central assumption
that underlies what has been termed the
practice movement in planning theory. The
term refers to the great diversity of recent
writings that focus on the activity of plan-
ning and the practices of planners. It is as-
sumed that empirical accounts of
planning practice can help to build a more
useful and pragmatic kind of planning
theory than can the generalized proce-
dural or normative models that previously
constituted planning theory and that they
have a pedagogical role to play in relation
to practicing planners and planners in
training. This article asks questions about
how we learn from practice, how we learn
from other people writing about practice,
and therefore what kind of writing about
practice will be most conducive to a learn-
ing experience.
Vanessa Watson is a professor in the School
of Architecture and Planning, University
of Cape Town, South Africa.
178
here is a growing consensus in planning theory literature that there has been an
T emergence of a distinct and identifiable approach to the theorizing of planning.
Broadly termed the practice movement (Liggett 1996), this new approach is character-
ized by the study of individual planners and planning practice: the documentation and
analysis of the many and varied activities of planners, their products, their interactions,
and their impacts. The assumption is that it is possible to learn from practice to inform
practice. This raises some central questions: Can documented accounts of experience
contribute to learning? What theoretical and methodological approaches to the
understanding of practice can best fulfill its pedagogical potential? and What form can
“practice writing” most usefully take? Different forms of practice writing are evident in
recent literature, and this offers an opportunity to assess the usefulness of this kind of
work.
The article reviews, first, the emergence of the practice movement within planning
theory and some of the products to which it has given rise. It then examines some
assumptions about learning from practice by drawing on ideas from the fields of expe-
riential learning and cognitive psychology. The article draws conclusions about the
kind of approaches and textual strategies that can best promote a learning process.
䉴 The Practice Movement: What Planners Do When They Plan
In the 1950s and 1960s, planning theory was dominated by the rational planning
model, which was concerned primarily with procedural planning issues. It had origins
in writings by Meyerson and Banfield (1955), who in turn were operating within a posi-
tivist epistemology (Faludi 1996) rooted in the enlightenment tradition of modernity
(Healey 1992b). In keeping with its intellectual informants, the rational planning
model assumed that through “the application of scientific knowledge and reason to
human affairs, it would be possible to build a better world, in which the sum of human
Journal of Planning Education and Research 22:178-187
DOI: 10.1177/0739456X02238446
© 2002 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning
The Practice Movement and Planning Theory
happiness and welfare would be increased” (Healey 1992b,
145) and that this can be achieved by the application of a scien-
tifically rational method by rational individuals (planners).
While the rational planning model can still claim defenders
(see Faludi 1996; Alexander 1996, 1998) and there have been
suggestions that it might be making a cautious comeback
(Yiftachel 1999), the disillusionment with this approach
among planning theorists and practitioners has been widely
documented. From the early 1970s, the inability of the rational
model to direct or explain planning activity satisfactorily led to
the posing of numerous counterpositions in planning theory.
Some of these attempted to address the inadequacies of the
rational model (e.g., incrementalism), some attempted to pre-
scribe different roles for planners (advocacy- and community-
based planning), and some analyzed and questioned the role
of planning within capitalism (the political economy
approach). The highly fluid nature of planning theory since
this time has provided fertile ground for the emergence of new
thinking and space for the ascendancy of new theoretical
domains.
Liggett’s (1996) term practice movement is a useful generic
descriptor for the great diversity of writings that are now begin-
ning to occupy this space. What distinguishes these contribu-
tions from earlier work in planning theory is that they focus on
planning as an activity and on the actual practices of planners
as they undertake work that is now accepted as fundamentally
political in nature. To quote Mandelbaum (1996) in the intro-
duction to the volume that was a first attempt to define the
shape of this new territory, there is “a pervasive interest in the
behaviour, values, character and experiences of professional
planners at work” and in the practices of these planners, which
encompass “ways of talking, rituals, implicit protocols, rou-
tines, relational strategies, character traits and virtues”
(p. xviii). Judith Innes (1995), in her oft-quoted attempt to
define practice movement writings as a new planning para-
digm, describes the “new type of planning theorist” as those
who “take practice as the raw material of their inquiry.” As
opposed to their armchair-theorizing predecessors, they
ground their theorizing on a “richly interpretative study of
practice” in an attempt to understand both what planners do
and to reflect critically on that practice (p. 183). And John For-
ester (1997), a leading writer in this field, states simply, “Prac-
tice can lead theory, and in planning, the practice of astute,
sensitive and skilful planners can sometimes lead the more
abstract theories of planning academics” (p. 1).
Practice movement writers have asked both analytical and
normative questions of planning practice. Thinking in the
social and political sciences is drawn on to help structure this
documentation and analysis, giving a wide variety of
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intellectual lenses (Harris 2000) through which the activities
of planners are viewed. Some use this understanding to
develop normative positions about planning; others focus on
analyzing and evaluating planning processes. The outcomes of
this work are sometimes difficult to recognize as theory: those
writing within the practice movement do not necessarily pro-
duce generalizable truths or theories about planning. But they
claim that their highly specific, context-bound accounts of
planning activity are able to bridge the gap between theory and
practice and are able to give better insight into the nature and
possibilities of planning practice than previous theories were
able to do (Innes 1995).
While this type of work has been referred to in some writ-
ings as a new position, it is generally recognized that as an iden-
tifiable approach, it has been in existence for fifteen years or
more (Beauregard 1996). A 1974 article by Martin Krieger sets
out many of the basic concepts that were later to inform the
practice movement, but these ideas do not find their way into
other published work until the end of the decade. Krieger
questioned the desire for formal generalized models of plan-
ning that remain at the level of generalities and that are
acontextual. He goes on to argue that a model that is not for-
mal, but rather one that incorporates people and that makes
sense, is the model of the everyday life of the community. He
suggests sources of theory that could be drawn on to develop
this model: phenomenology, language philosophy
(Wittgenstein), linguistics, ethnomethodology, pragmatism,
and ideas put forward by Habermas. John Forester, later to
become a leading contributor to the practice movement, was a
student of Krieger’s when he introduced Habermasian ideas to
his planning students in the early 1970s (Martin Krieger, per-
sonal communication, 14 September 1997). Howell Baum
(1983, 1986, 1996) was another central figure in the develop-
ment of this approach. Breakfast meetings in a Cincinnati res-
taurant were initiated and organized in 1980 by Howell Baum
with the purpose of bringing together researchers studying
planning. Along with Charles Hoch and John Forester (Hoch
1994, vii) participants soon included Jerry Kaufmann, Richard
Bolan, Helen Liggett, Jim Throgmorton, and many others.
This became an informal Association of Collegiate Schools of
Planning research group, which had an important impact on
thinking and publishing in the field. In the early 1980s as well,
Donald Schon (1983) was developing a critique of professional
knowledge based on technical rationality and arguing for the
development of “an epistemology of practice implicit in the
artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring
to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value
conflict” (p. 49). This he termed reflection in action. To support
this new form of professional knowledge, he argued for the
180
development of reflective research in which research takes place
in the context of practice to enhance the practitioner’s capac-
ity for reflection in action.
By the late 1980s, there were indications on both sides of
the Atlantic of a growing interest in the activities of planning
practitioners. By this stage, however, planning theorists were
increasingly drawing on the work of social and political think-
ers to help them formulate analytical and normative ideas
about planning. It is these intellectual roots that have tended
to influence the formation of distinct “camps” within the prac-
tice movement and vigorous debate between adherents to dif-
fering theoretical positions.1
Within the practice movement, the communicative plan-
ning theorists appear currently to hold a dominant position,
largely inspired by the writings of Habermas. Although writers
within this position (Forester, Healey, Hillier, Hoch, Innes,
Mandelbaum, Throgmorton, and others) often follow signifi-
cantly different lines of argument, this approach focuses
broadly on processes of communication and knowledge pro-
duction in planning. A central assumption is that no act of
communication is ever purely technical and neutral: all techni-
cal knowledge is “inevitably infused with biases reflecting par-
ticular interpretative predilections and normative values”
(Healey 1992a, 9). Communicative acts cannot therefore be
taken at face value but have to be interpreted to uncover the
meanings, values, and motives that lie below the surface of
“technical talk.” A focus on discourse is therefore usually of
importance to these writers. Also frequently distinguishing
these writers is a normative (as well as analytical) purpose to
their work. Forester’s landmark book of 1989 draws on
Habermas’s critical communications theory of social action to
develop a normative approach to planning, to guide progress
toward more democratic decision-making processes. This
work seeks to give guidance to public-serving planning practi-
tioners who are trying to act ethically and responsibly in the
face of hegemonic powers. Healey’s (1997, 1998, 1999) most
recent work shifts to an interest in governance processes
through which conflicts around spatial and environmental
issues are managed. She draws on the ideas of “new institu-
tional” thinking within the social sciences to “focus the institu-
tional terrain of the communicative approach in planning the-
ory” (Healey 1998, 4).
The kind of practice writing evidenced by Forester and oth-
ers located within the communicative approach to planning
has drawn comment from a variety of sources.2 Beauregard
(1999) has criticized the “microsociological” approach to
planning at the expense of “institutional understandings”
(p. 99). Fischler (1998) has made this point as well and has
called for a planning theory that contextualizes planning his-
torically (and suggests that genealogies form a basis for this)
Watson
and in relation to the play of political and economic interests.
Lauria and Whelan (1995, 9) have termed the communicative
approach substantively vacuous, and they, together with
Feldmann (1997) and Lauria (1997), have called for an under-
standing of planning within the context of theories of urban
political economy. Fainstein (1995) has criticized the focus on
process at the expense of a concern with outcomes.
Sandercock (1995, 1998), concerned with the substantive
ethic of respect for diversity and difference, has called for alter-
native “ways of knowing” as well as the drawing in of “voices
from the borderlands” to build progressive planning practices.
In a particularly significant challenge, Bent Flyvbjerg
(1998a, 1998b) has taken issue with the understanding of
power used by those drawing on the writings of Habermas. His
own work, using a Foucaultian concept of power, understands
power as always and inevitably present (in either or both pro-
ductive or dominatory forms) and that cannot be done away
with by a communicatively rational process. The purpose of
understanding planning practices is therefore, for Flyvbjerg,
to uncover the tactics and strategies of power so that its abuses
can be countered.
䉴 Different Methods, Different Products
Practice movement writers have used different methods to
understand what planners do and have presented the results in
different ways. From the earlier efforts to survey planners, on
the part of writers such as Baum and Hoch, they and others
later shifted to a more ethnographic approach that relied on
in-depth interviews with individual planners.
The tendency in some of this later work has been to “sur-
face the planners” by using direct quotes, and some of For-
ester’s (1997) recent work, in particular, relies heavily on first-
person narratives. What is important for Forester is the nature
of the discourse that occurs in particular situations and the
interpretations that he can draw from it. The style of his many
writings on this issue reflects this particular interest: they
include snippets of interviews with planners describing their
experience or transcripts of meetings, together with his own
commentary and interpretation. It is not always clear who
these planners are, why they are arguing a particular position,
or what the circumstances are surrounding the issues they
debate. But these details lie beyond the immediate concern of
Forester, who wants to use planners’ discourse to illustrate
more general theoretical points. Other writers, including
Hoch (1994) and Healey (1992a), have, at times, followed this
approach.
Other writers have placed their understanding of planning
practices within the context of fully elaborated case studies,
The Practice Movement and Planning Theory
where time and place become important informants of what
planners do. James Throgmorton (1996) is also interested in
discourse, and his intentions are also pedagogic: his book on
electric power planning seeks to “help planners and others
learn how to argue coherently and persuasively about contest-
able views of what is good, right and feasible” (p. xiii). He too
makes extensive use of what his planners and those they inter-
act with have to say. However, he also does a great deal more
than this. He situates the reader within the history of nuclear
power expansion and within the contemporary economic and
political environment affecting power provision. He sketches
in the local political milieu and consumer and community
dynamics. Planners and other central actors in the book are
presented “in the round,” and the reader comes to know who
they are and whether they can be believed. One learns a lot
about the role of discourse from reading this book but not only
from Throgmorton’s directed interpretations. The material is
presented in sufficient detail to enable the reader to draw addi-
tional or even different conclusions about what these planners
say.
The same comments could be made about Bent Flyvbjerg’s
(1998b) book Rationality and Power. Like Throgmorton, his
story of the Aalborg project is placed thoroughly in context,
both in time and space; in fact, Flyvbjerg finds it necessary to go
back centuries in time to understand the institutional power
relations within which the planners are operating. His actors
are described, introduced, and allowed to speak. He presents
the minutiae of the Aalborg case quite explicitly to “provide
(readers) with the basis to form their own judgements about
the case and its implications” (p. 1).
Significantly, it is Flyvbjerg’s Foucaultian method (of power
analytics) that leads him to take this approach: an understand-
ing of power cannot be derived from a theory; it must be “eluci-
dated via examples.” Thus, both communicative planning the-
orists and those drawing on Foucault focus on agency but in
different ways and for different reasons. For writers such as
Forester, the focus is on the individual planner, to make clear
how he or she is helped or hindered in a process of communi-
cation. Fischler (1998, 45) argues that this is ethnographic
enquiry, the aim being the elucidation of the communicative
act. For Foucault, and consequently Flyvbjerg, however, the
focus on agency is part of his historiographical methodology.
His genealogies raise questions by explaining how the prac-
tices we observe came about. As opposed to the Habermasian
aim of explaining what planners do, a Foucaultian approach
seeks to explain why they do what they do—why planners
engage in the specific practices of analysis and regulation that
characterize modern planning.
Both communicative planning theorists and those drawing
on Foucault are also concerned with discourse but again in
181
different ways and for different reasons. Communicative plan-
ning theorists are interested primarily in discourse, whether in
speech or text. Writers such as Forester acknowledge the insti-
tutional contexts within which these discussions take place, but
they are not interested in analyzing them. Throgmorton’s
(1996) story of electric power planning inevitably draws him to
consider the context in which his actors are operating, but he
acknowledges that Foucault would have problems with his fail-
ure to account sufficiently for the “discursive formation” cre-
ated in the course of the project (p. 268). For writers drawing
on Foucault, practices can be both material and discursive.
Flyvbjerg’s work presents what is said and written, but it also
shows how ideas and concepts are produced, reproduced, and
changed by the practices of those involved in the Aalborg
project.
The point of this article is to provide further argument for
contextualized practice writing. If practice writing is to achieve
the pedagogic purposes to which many of its advocates refer,
then it is particularly important, first, that the pedagogical
value of telling planning stories is recognized, and second, that
these stories be told in a way that maximizes their contribution
to learning and hence to a practical and useful planning the-
ory. It is to these issues that the article now turns.
䉴 Learning from Practice:
Seeking New Meanings in Old Experience
Most practice movement writers—some more, some less
explicitly—see the purpose of their focus on the doings of
planners to be the building of some kind of understanding,
which can in turn be of help or guidance to practicing plan-
ners and, presumably, to students of planning as well. The
notion of learning from practice to assist practice is therefore a
central one.
Schon and Rein (1994, 196)3 are very clear on this point.
They argue for collaborative research between academics and
practitioners, which benefits the academic both through the
satisfaction gained from helping practitioners generate usable
knowledge and through giving the academic better insights
into practice than could otherwise be gained. If policy academ-
ics disregard what practitioners already know or are trying to
know, then they will neither grasp what is going on nor succeed
in getting practitioners to listen to them.
The “learning from practice in order to improve practice”
theme is evident in other writings as well. Yiftachel (1999)
notes that “communicative scholars analyze planning with a
clear normative task of reforming and improving planning
from within” (p. 268), and communicative theorist Innes
(1995) believes that “the planning theorists’ goal should be to
182
help planners develop a new type of critical, reflective practice
which is both ethical and creative” (p. 185). Writers who would
not regard themselves as communicative theorists also have
pragmatic ambitions. Flyvbjerg (1998a), for one, has been
clear that he sees the analyzing of relations of power in plan-
ning processes as a precursor to the development of strategies
that can counter the negative exercise of power.
An important assumption underlying this thinking is that
learning takes place on the basis of experience and, further,
that experience can yield a more useful learning process than,
for example, learning from general theories or rules. There is
a growing body of writing that supports this position. From
within the planning field, Schon and Rein (1994) argue that
the purpose of understanding policy practice is “not to draw
from it rules of effective policy making” (p. 193). Policy design-
ers, or planners, they suggest, do generalize from particular sit-
uations that they have been in but not to produce “covering
laws.” They build up a mental “usable repertoire of unique
cases” (p. 205). When confronted with a new situation, they
scan their repertoire of cases looking for points of similarity,
and from past experience they construct an understanding
appropriate to the new situation. In this process of “reflective
transfer,” both the pattern carried over from the previous situa-
tion and the understanding formed in the new one are trans-
formed. Rather than applying abstract and decontextualized
rules, they are using judgment based on experience.
Flyvbjerg (1989, 2001) argues a similar point based on his
understanding of the Dreyfus Learning Model (Dreyfus and
Dreyfus 1986). This phenomenological account of skill acqui-
sition posits a five-step learning sequence that starts with the
level of novice and progresses to the levels of advanced begin-
ner, competence, proficiency, and, finally, expertise. Novice
learning is characterized by the mastering of a set of context-
independent, generalized rules relating to the skill or exper-
tise in question. The novice can follow these without the bene-
fit of any prior experience, and performance can be judged on
the basis of how well the rules are followed. For the novice to
progress to subsequent stages of learning, it is necessary to
begin to understand how the rules can be applied under differ-
ent conditions or in differing contexts. As Flyvbjerg points out,
exposure to a growing number of cases or situations allows stu-
dents to recognize different features or aspects and apply the
rules accordingly, adapting their application rather than fol-
lowing the rules rigidly. With increasingly complex cases, stu-
dents learn to organize the information by adopting a “per-
spective” and responding to the features and aspects that the
perspective makes important. Expertise is achieved only on the
basis of a great deal of experience of real-life and varying situa-
tions. Ultimately, the response of the expert becomes intuitive
rather than based on a consideration of which rules to apply.
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Significantly, within the field of education, experiential
learning has become an important thrust. Current leading
writers in the field (Boud, Cohen, and Walker 1993) argue that
it is “meaningless to talk about learning in isolation from expe-
rience . . . learning builds on and flows from experience. . . .
Learning can only occur only if the experience of the learner is
engaged” (p. 8). Echoing the position of Schon and the
Dreyfus brothers, they suggest that the challenge of new expe-
riences can be juxtaposed with the “seeking of new meanings
in old experience. . . . We do not simply see a new situation
afresh—what is before us—but in terms of how we relate to it,
how it resonates with what past experience has made us.” Cog-
nitive psychologists use the term recursion to describe this: the
mind loops back on the output of a previous computation and
treats it as an input for the next operation (Bruner 1986, 97).
There is, therefore, support for the idea that the ability to
perform (a professional task) depends on the practitioner’s
being able to bring past accumulated experience fruitfully to
bear on the problem in hand. For the practice movement,
however, two important questions remain.
The first is, Can learning, and particularly practitioner
learning, be fostered by indirect experience in the form of
texts and reports of practice experiences, that is, through
“mediated learning,” as well as by direct encounters with real-
ity? Can academics or planning theorists thus play a role in
improving practice by documenting, analyzing, and reflecting
on the experience of practitioners?
The second question, following from the first, is, If this is
the case, what kind of accounts of practice will be most useful
in generating learning, both among practitioners and also in
the context of planner training?
䉴 Mediated Learning: No Lonely
Voyage of Each on Their Own
There would seem to be general agreement from the expe-
riential learning field that direct, firsthand, contact-with-
reality kind of experience is very important in fostering learn-
ing. Some argue that it is the most powerful source of the
changes that affect an individual’s cognitive and emotional
functioning (Feuerstein, Klein, and Tannenbaum 1991). This
may be true as well, although to a lesser extent and qualitatively
different, for simulated learning experiences of the kind
offered to many planning and architectural students in a stu-
dio setting. Schon (1987) felt strongly about the value of this
form of teaching: “However much students may learn about
designing from lectures or readings, there is a substantial com-
ponent of design competence—indeed, the heart of it—that
cannot be learnt in this way” (p. 157).4
The Practice Movement and Planning Theory
But there are forceful arguments within the field of cogni-
tive psychology to the effect that direct, contact-with-reality
experience may not be enough to foster mental development
or learning. This idea first appeared in the work of the Russian
psychologist Vygotsky, who argued that conceptual learning is
a collaborative enterprise. We should stop thinking about the
growth of the mind as a “lonely voyage of each on his own.”
Rather, intelligence is the readiness to use culturally transmit-
ted knowledge and procedures as “prostheses of the mind”
(Bruner 1986, 141-42). Vygotsky coined the term Zone of Proxi-
mal Development to describe the distance between a person’s
actual development level as determined by independent prob-
lem solving and his or her level of potential development as
determined through problem solving in collaboration with
more capable peers. These ideas have been developed in more
recent work by those concerned with the mediated learning
experience (see Feuerstein, Klein, and Tannenbaum 1991).
They argue that some individuals are exposed to certain expe-
riences throughout their lives without being affected by them
in the direction of higher levels of functioning, understand-
ing, and adaptation. Rather, we can explain human growth
and cognitive development only by the two-modalities hypoth-
esis, in which both direct experience and mediated experience
are involved. In their terms, learning is mediated by the “impo-
sition of an initiated, intentional human being who mediates
the stimuli” (Feuerstein, Klein, and Tannenbaum 1991, 7).
Reinforcing this notion of the necessary relationship between
direct and mediated (in this case, textual) experience, Usher
(1993) argues that “learning from experience is conditional
on counterpoising experience to something that is not experi-
ence . . . a point outside experience” (p. 177).
Mediated experience can be imparted in a wide variety of
ways: verbally, through direct teaching or tutoring; through
the studio-based mode of teaching; in text, through the docu-
mentation of experience; through art, film, literature, and
photography, and so on. Documented cases of planning expe-
rience must therefore have a crucial role to play in the intellec-
tual development of either practicing planners or planners in
training, as a supplement to real life or simulated experience.
In certain other teaching fields, in which schools of public
management appear to have become leaders in this regard,
teaching on the basis of case studies has long been the norm
(see Christensen, Garvin, and Sweet 1991; Schutte 1997).
The question that needs to be raised, however, is whether
indirect learning from texts or reports of experience needs to
be as intuitive or random as some of this writing suggests. The
work of Niraj Verma (1993, 1995) suggests ways in which this
process can be made more rigorous. Verma argues that plan-
ners can and should learn by making connections between dif-
ferent fields of inquiry (and presumably between different
183
experiences of planning), but they need to be able to identify
the nature of the similarity between entities. This requires that
reference classes be made specific, where these refer to ways in
which X and Y are similar, or under what circumstances the
similarity is valid (Verma 1993, 15). The metaphor, which
unites ideas that do not necessarily belong together, can be
thought of as a useful tool to form these connections where the
nature of the relationship can be made explicit. Also impor-
tant to his argument are the kinds of similarities that should be
sought for when comparing different fields or cases. He is insis-
tent that planners focus on teleological similarities, where this
refers to common purpose between fields, as opposed to mor-
phological similarity, which refers to common forms (some-
times physical) or structures (Verma 1993, 19), while not deny-
ing that teleological similarity can give rise to morphological
similarity. Planning, he argues, is a teleologically driven disci-
pline and can find different ways of addressing the same prob-
lem. Getting stuck on morphological similarity can interfere
with creative choice and freedom.
䉴 Writing about Practice:
The Value of Planning Stories
This section addresses the second question posed above: If
documented accounts of planning practices can play a devel-
opmental role in relation to the practice of planning, what
kind of accounts of practices will be most useful in generating
this learning? How can practicing or training planners be
offered information about and interpretation of instances of
planning practice that they might find practically useful in the
forming of judgments about new situations? The ideas raised
by writers concerned with learning processes offer some direc-
tion in this regard.
Schon, the Dreyfus brothers, and experiential learning the-
orists all seem to be making a similar point in relation to the
learning process. The practitioner will mentally carry a “usable
repertoire of unique cases” (Schon and Rein 1994) or “experi-
ence of real-life and varying situations” (Dreyfus and Dreyfus,
in Flyvbjerg 2001). In a new (planning) situation, practitioners
will “scan their repertoire of cases looking for points of similar-
ity, and from past experience construct an understanding
appropriate to the new situation” (Schon and Rein 1994, 205).
Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) talk about how
experience-based holistic recognition of similarity pro-
duced deep situational understanding. . . . The mind of the
proficient performer seems to group together situations
sharing not only the same goal or perspective but also the
same decision, action or tactic. At this point not only is a sit-
uation, when seen as similar to a prior one, understood, but
184
the associated decision, action or tactic simultaneously
comes to mind. (P. 32)
Experiential learning theorists believe that the “challenge
of new experiences can be juxtaposed with the seeking of new
meanings in old experience,” or the mind does a recursive
loop. Verma (1993) has put forward a possible method to
guide such a loop. So one role for practice writing is to help
planners (through mediated experience) to build up their
mental repertoire of past experience, which in turn will be
interpreted into thinking about new situations or problems.
But it is important not to treat this position uncritically. In
learning from the experience of others, it is necessary to ask,
Whose experience is this? Under what circumstances was it
gained? Is “higher ground” better ground? And how do I evalu-
ate another’s experience or interpretation of experience?
Experiential learning theorist Robin Usher (1993) probes fur-
ther. As he points out, “Accounts are, of necessity, discursive,
they are cast in and communicated through language and are
understood by us in terms of our discursive frameworks”
(p. 169). Experience does not have its own intrinsic meaning
waiting to be discovered: experience is understood from a par-
ticular standpoint and through the preunderstandings that sit-
uated the person exposed to this experience. Furthermore,
writing about this experience occurs in and through language.
The discourses within which we operate, the textual strategies
we use, create a particular world that is a truth but not the truth.
In the end, meaning is in the hands of the readers of the text.
For practice movement writers, then, it can be accepted
that there is no simple translation of an experience (of a
planning-related problem or situation) from the practitioner
to the writer, to the reader of the text, and to the user of its
ideas. Framing and reframing of this experience, interpreta-
tion, and reinterpretation take place at a number of stages in
the process. And this should not necessarily be regarded as
some kind of interference or imposition of authority: it can
provide perspectives or counterpoints that add to learning.
These ideas do, however, have implications for the kind of
research and writing that is useful if it is to fulfill the type of
learning function described above:
• Case studies of planning, which lend themselves at least
to partial demarcation (spatially, temporally, institution-
ally, organizationally, experientially, etc.), potentially of-
fer a framework for interrelating actors, circumstances,
contextual settings, and sequences of events. The case
study, Fischler (1998) suggests, is the primary weapon of
the planning theorist. Research methodologist Yin
(1994) argues that case studies are the preferred re-
search method “when ‘how’ or ‘why’ questions are be-
ing posed . . . and when the focus is on a contemporary
Watson
phenomenon within some real-life context” (p. 1). This
is not to suggest that other kinds of writing about plan-
ning—general reviews or surveys of planning across a
range of contexts, conceptual explorations of planning
issues and problems, recommendations for strategies of
certain kinds, and so on—are any less useful. But case
studies, which by definition are contextually grounded,
comprehensive, and empirically detailed, can poten-
tially address the basic practice movement assumption
that planning theory (and not a planning theory) can
be built on a better understanding of planning prac-
tices.
• A crucial aspect of this contextualizing has to do with pro-
5
cess, or history. If the aim is to produce mediated accounts
of experience that can be interpreted, incorporated, and
mobilized in the practitioner’s mental repertoire of cases,
then history is a crucial dimension of these experiences. As
Fischler (1998, 2000) has suggested, history is a source of
good case studies of planners in action as it provides instruc-
tive precedent, and it is of great value in explanatory plan-
ning theory when we want to understand why planners act
6
in particular ways, as well as understand what they do. In
Foucaultian terms, such inquiry takes the form of docu-
menting sequences of actual events rather than focusing on
the history of discourse or theories (Flyvbjerg 1998a). It ad-
dresses the question, How did the practices that we can ob-
serve come about? It also addresses the development of
professional modes of thinking and acting, or practices of
analysis and action that have been developed to address
particular problems, and how particular planners operate
within and against these practices. For Fischler (1998),
there is a further need to take into account the evolution of
the institutional and legislative context within which plan-
ners operate, bringing together “the ethnographic analysis
of planners’ behaviour, the geneological analysis of plan-
ning practices and the political-economic analysis of plan-
ning institutions” (p. 27).
• Accounts of planning practices that are rich in contextual
detail also allow readers to add to their mental repertoire of
unique instances of planning and to judge the extent to
which there are sufficient points of similarity with a current
problem for it to be useful. Perhaps one of the most difficult
problems that have to be faced when trying to draw on un-
derstandings or ideas developed in a different context is
that of how transferable they are: What is unique to a partic-
ular time and place, and what is more general? It is only
depth of contextualizing detail (thick description) that will
allow this kind of judgment to be made. Deep situational
understanding is essential input when dealing with new
problems and circumstances.
The Practice Movement and Planning Theory
• Hoch (1996, 43) has suggested that planners become “sto-
rytellers of practice,” and several recent examples of plan-
ning case study writing (Flyvbjerg 1998a; Forsyth 1999;
Throgmorton 1996; Watson 2002) have indeed adopted
the narrative approach. Narratives have a number of char-
acteristics that separate them from history, although there
are clearly many overlaps. Narratives have a temporal or se-
quential framework, they have an element of explanation
or coherence, they have some element of the general in the
particular, and they recognize generic conventions relating
to the expected framework, protagonists, and modes of
performance or circulation (Finnegan 1998, 9). Bruner
(1986, 1996) has argued that “ordinary people go about
making sense of their experiences” (Bruner 1996, 130) by
construing their reality through the narrative mode. Re-
lating (planning) experiences through narrative may thus
be the most effective way of communicating and transfer-
ring this experience to others. This is particularly applica-
ble given that the aim of relating experience is less to
provide the reader with universal truths or generalizations
about plans or planning (the existence of which in any
event is questionable, in the highly particular and context-
bound situations in which much planning occurs) but
rather to give insight into how messy problems involving
values, judgment, multiple interpretations, planners’ par-
ticular identities, and personal and group agendas have un-
folded in particular contexts. Any one narrative on its own
cannot provide the definitive guidance that planners seek
in their daily work. But as the literature on learning re-
ferred to above suggests, the building of a mental reper-
toire of many such narratives and cases can provide the
basis for the kind of expert judgment required in the day-to-
day work of planners.
• Linked to the above, actors or practitioners need to be por-
trayed in text as richly and transparently as possible. Baum
(1996) has argued that we need to “discard reassuring but
simplistic notions of what planners do” (p. 378). Rarely are
they neutral, technical, rational beings. They think and feel
about their work, experience pleasure and anxiety, have ir-
rational feelings, operate on the basis of particular values or
ethics, and, importantly, they function in a context in which
they try to exert power and are affected by power.
Beauregard (1999, 93) has demanded that planning theo-
rists report on more than just the activities that comprise
practice but that they also “write the planner who will carry
out these actions” and “address the identity of their plan-
ners” and hence the often-implicit assumptions that under-
lie what they do and say. Such advice is important but needs
to recognize that individuals can be complex and conflict
ridden and can assume different identities in different situ-
ations. The tactic of allowing actors and practitioners to
185
speak through the use of direct quotes has been used
effectively by most practice movement writers. But it is also
necessary to understand this discourse in its context of a se-
quence of events if the reader is to move beyond a partial
and simplistic view of who is doing the talking.
• In the same vein, writers of planning texts—documenters
of planning experience—are also rarely, if ever, neutral,
technical, and rational beings. The greatest possible trans-
parency in terms of who is doing the writing, for what rea-
son, under what circumstances, and with what conceptual
baggage can allow the reader greater scope for interpreting
the meaning and usefulness of the material. This requires a
degree of self-reflection and the writing of the author into
the text.
䉴 Conclusion
This article has argued for the value of the new focus in
planning theory: on planning practices. It has examined the
assumption that documented planning practices provide a
vehicle for learning and has found support for this from the
disciplines of education and experiential learning. Fulfilling
the learning potential of practice writing, however, seems to
require that practices are documented in particular ways, and
the article calls attention to the value of in-depth, case-study
research that takes the form of fully contextualized stories of
planning practice.
Author’s Note: A previous version of this article was presented at the
Planning Research 2000 Conference, London School of Economics (March
2000). It has benefited greatly from the comments of three anonymous re-
viewers, one of whom in particular I would like to thank for information on
Baum’s breakfast meetings.
䉴 Notes
1. These debates have taken place within journals (particularly
Planning Theory) and at conferences, with the Third Planning The-
ory Conference at Oxford in 1998 providing an important plat-
form for discussion.
2. Yiftachel (1999) identifies practice movement writers falling
outside the communicative-pragmatist school as Beauregard,
Fainstein, Feldman, Flyvbjerg, Friedmann, Hajer, Huxley, Lauria,
Marcuse, Richardson, Sandercock, and himself, but he recognizes
that there is also great diversity in terms of their areas of interest
and lines of argument.
3. Schon (1983, 1987) develops these ideas in earlier work as
well.
4. The word design here, as used by Schon (1987), reflects broad
problem-solving activity rather than physical design in the narrow
sense.
186
5. In using history, it is obviously important to be wary of the
simplistic use of precedent and stressing superficial similarities at
the expense of fundamental differences between one age and
another, as well as historicism, which holds that each age is entirely
unique and that there is no continuity (and hence the possibility of
learning) between past and present.
6. Neither Habermasians nor Foucaultians have been necessar-
ily concerned with explaining why planners do what they do. The
former have been concerned with how planning works (for better
or worse) and the latter, following Foucault, with how events have
come about rather than causation.
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