This is a not proof edited version
For published version:
Savini, F., Majoor, S. & Salet, W. (2015). Dilemmas of planning: intervention,
regulation, and investment. Planning Theory, 14 (3), 296-315.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1473095214531430
Dilemmas of Planning: Intervention, Regulation and Investment
Federico Savini
Stan Majoor
Willem Salet
University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research
Center for Urban Studies
Plantage Muidergracht 14 – 1018TV – Amsterdam, NL
Corresponding author
f.savini@uva.nl
Abstract
Planning through processes of ‘co-creation’ has become a priority for practitioners,
urban activists, and scientific researchers. However, urban development still shows a close
instrumentalism on goal-specific tasks, means, and outcomes despite awareness that planning
should enlarge possibilities for social change rather than constrain them. The paper explores
the dilemmas of planning agency in light of the contemporary need to open spaces for
innovative practices. Planning is understood as a paradox; a structural tension between
organization and spontaneity. The paper provides a detailed profile of three specific
dilemmas stemming from this condition. We distinguish and conceptually explore the
dilemmas of intervention, regulation, and investment in current practices. The paper provides
a specific understanding of today’s planning dilemmas, exploring the key notions of ‘space
and time’ in the intervention dilemma, ‘material and procedural norms’ in the regulation
dilemma, and ‘risk and income’ in the investment dilemma. We suggest that planning practice
today needs to make sense of these dilemmas, navigating through their extremes to find new
contextualized forms of synthesis.
Since the 1990s, approaches oriented to co-creation and collaboration in planning have
been extremely fashionable in all dimensions of spatial planning policy, from strategic
visioning to urban management and from strategic area transformation to neighborhood
regeneration. Major European planning interventions are initiated with the explicit aim to
address economic efficiency and growth on the one hand, in combination with ideas of
ecological and social sustainability and principles of socially responsive planning and coproduction on the other. Examples of this complex mixture of intentions are found in the
original proposals of Forum in Barcelona, La Défense and La Rive Gauche in Paris,
Potsdamer Platz and Adlershof in Berlin, London Docklands, South Axis Amsterdam, and
Ørestad Copenhagen. However, the legacy of these large-scale projects all reveals the same
fundamental problem: although planners and engaged politicians are fully aware of the
1
importance of inclusionary and responsible planning, their practices are criticized for being
exclusive, unresponsive to demands, and over-standardized. While most of these projects start
with open processes, they turn out to be too inflexible to adapt to the ever-changing context of
new socio-economic circumstances in the long run (Gualini and Majoor, 2007; Salet et al.,
2012). The current economic downturn and the rise of austerity-driven public policies have
further sharpened these inherent contradictions between ideals of sociocratic discovery and
modernist urban transformations. However, it has also provided a great opportunity for
reflection and radical innovation in the discipline (Feindt, 2010). Facing new sources of
uncertainty and a diffuse sense of ‘failure’ in such interventions, policy makers, civic society,
and academics start to question consolidated planning methodologies.
This paper is rooted in our perception of a certain dissatisfaction over established
models in planning practice, but current theory has not yet achieved a lucid definition of the
problem at stake. This is due to a problematic understanding of the relationship between
urban changes and approaches to urban transformation (Campbell, 2012). When confronted
with failing projects, most planning agents (from planners to development corporations) point
at issues of inefficient performance, thereby neglecting the complexity of underlying social
order. They strive to discover tools and methods to boost projects and finally realize planned
objectives. This approach does not question the content of long-term urban agendas or the
fundamental understanding of socio-spatial patterns and the main concepts driving planning
action. In Moroni’s terms, ‘many land use planning systems continue to be modeled on a
traditional notion of planning based on the belief that social systems are simple […] and
controllable by way of a directional set of (mainly concrete and specific) rules’ (Moroni,
2010:142). On the other hand, new streams of radical thinking strongly underline the need to
integrate logics of self-organization and adaptability in planning. There is a move towards
more inclusive theoretical frameworks, able to make sense of socio-spatial practices that do
not correspond to the linear logics elaborated in the last two decades but that entail problems
with a higher complexity of order, often difficult for planners to identify (Innes and Booher,
2010; de Roo, et al. 2012).
The questioning of dominant teleocratic planning models (Moroni, 2010; van Rijswick
and Salet 2012) offers an opportunity to reflect on some fundamentals of planning theory and
practice that have wider societal implications. We argue that it requires a new understanding
of an old problem, which is the contemporary articulation of the paradoxical nature of
planning. While planning has always been a practice that constantly attempts to exercise a
degree of control over a fundamentally complex reality, the conceptual tools that drive
practical responses through this paradox are context and time dependent (Rittel and Webber,
1973). Post-positivist thinkers consider planning a task performed in order to open
opportunities for context-dependent forms of spatial organization, providing (controlled)
spaces for spatial change and market responsiveness rather than pre-constituting them
(Allmendinger, 2002; Andres, 2013; Holcombe, 2013). However, at what point does planning
become a practice of control rather than enablement? What are the limits that planning
intervention poses to social dynamics? These questions require a clear down-to-earth
theoretical understanding of the major dilemmas that planners face every day.
In this paper we propose a particular conceptualization of the paradoxical nature of
planning action. We come up with an analytical framework to heuristically profile this
paradox; even if planning is and will be paradoxical and contradictory by nature, everyday
practices of urban development entail more specific and concrete dilemmas. It is by
addressing these dilemmas that new planning methodologies can be designed and tested. This
paper sets an agenda for empirical studies over the next three years (the international research
project <name project>1), elaborating a selection of exemplars in the context of strategic area
development practices. We conclude by saying that the notion of dilemmas helps both to
embrace the dualism of today’s planning and to open space for pragmatic, contextualized
navigation and exploration of the complementary values of both guidance and selforganization.
1
http://jpi-urbaneurope.eu/project-aprilab/
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Dilemmas and Paradoxes
Portugali (2008, p.250) characterizes the main discrepancy in the domain of urban and
regional planning as its focus on the (usually implicit) assumption of predictability of
development – codified in plans, laws, and regulations – while current urban theories,
particularly complexity theories, are suggesting that cities are complex, self-organizing, and
non-linear systems. These aspects make their future, in essence, unpredictable. Planners have
used different tactics to cope with this discrepancy in the past. At one extreme are radical
modernist streams of thinking that have mainly denied it, or at least identified it as ‘solvable’
by creating better forecasts and more advanced behavioral models (Scott, 1998). The other
end of the intellectual spectrum is occupied by pragmatic models that reason for taking
smaller steps in planning and creating feedback cycles of learning and adaptation (Lindblom,
1959). The latter strategy, although realistic, has always had a difficult relationship with the
demands that come from the institutionalization of planning in government bureaucracies and
political systems, which condition rational comprehensive decision making.
Upcoming practices of ‘bottom-up’, participatory, and adaptive planning put this
classic discrepancy in a renewed spotlight. Treating complexity and the emergent activity of
the market and society as the source of urban change rather than government ideas is often
perceived as a radical change, particularly in countries that have a strong history of
government controlled planning. To conceptualize how these new practices can be advanced
we have to analyze forms of cohabitation between demands for control and self-organization
in processes of urban transformation.
The isolated logic of control is much of the raison d'être of planning in Western
democracies as it attempts to provide (juridical) certainties to help and protect (potential)
property owners, investors, and residents, and safeguard public goods. At the same time, the
energy and input for area development comes from a continuously developing ‘landscape of
opportunities’ filled with sets of initiatives, changing demands, and emerging practices of
(potential) owners and users of spaces. These activities of control and self-organization are
not in opposition but form a paradox. The two propositions are part of one unified whole, the
practice of area development. They are completely logical in isolation but only apparently
inconsistent when juxtaposed (Lewis, 2000). This ontological relationship between control
and self-organization is evident in many concrete practices of land-use planning or even urban
management. For example, many bottom-up initiatives are welcomed by planners for their
ability to creatively transform urban spaces towards new usages, generating innovation.
Planning can be geared to enable such creativity by limiting its pressure on individual
behavior or through regulatory release. Yet, those self-organized activities are themselves
dependent on the capacity to control negative and positive externalities. It is this need of
control that is at the same time a necessary condition and a limit to self-organization.
It is therefore important to move beyond the notion of the paradox to establish practical
situated forms of cohabitation between the two demands. Poole and van de Ven (1989:563)
criticize contemporary theory construction for being too focused on building internally
consistent theories of limited scope to understand reality. They argue that if situations are
characterized by tensions then these tensions should be central in theory development to
create more encompassing explanations. In this way theories will not be statements of some
ultimate ‘truth’ but alternative cuts of a multifaceted reality. The notion of dilemma is central
here to operate the shift from an interpretative analysis of planning towards a more heuristic
explanation of planning practice and its effect on cities. Coping with a paradoxical situation
means dealing with the different operational dilemmas that planners are confronted with. The
notion of ‘dilemma’ better illustrates how decision making is ultimately situated in a context
of confronting positions where attempts to achieve a compromise between the different
extreme positions have to be made. If planning is considered a practice of collective
organization, then networks of actors will operate according to their preferred visions (of the
costs and benefits) of each dilemma (Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967; Morgan, 1997). The
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concept of ‘dilemma’ sheds light on the role of agency within the paradoxes of planning. It
provides a space to understand planning as a set of choices, practices, and actions to cope with
these paradoxes within contextually different situations.
Although the paradoxical nature of planning is recognized, we are interested in
profiling the notions that make it possible to theorize over contextual expressions of urban
development. From a theoretical viewpoint, Clegg et al. (2002) emphasize that in situations of
such tensions, the relationship between the two poles should be the point of departure to find
fertile ground for synthesis. The features of the changing relationship between these poles,
and the role of planners in managing and addressing the problems emerging from it, are the
core of today’s planning theory. The specific connection between paradoxical extremes is
found in daily planning practice, constituting context-specific planning cultures and methods.
Therefore, our argument is that, due to its paradoxical nature, the understanding of planning
change requires a close look at the different ways of generating synthetic agency between
concrete dilemmas that emerge in planning practice. Such synthesis is always temporary, sitespecific, and in continuous tension, but it reveals the practice of dealing with complexity
(Clegg et al., 2002: 489). Ideally, this synthesis is more than a compromise in which each side
is partly forsaken. In the above mentioned example of controlling bottom-up initiatives,
temporal synthesis between control and creativity could, for example, be found by regulating
which activities would not be allowed in a certain place – to prevent nuisance – or by
allowing certain functions within a limited timeframe. To do this it might be necessary to
follow contradictory and counterintuitive strategies (Smith & Lewis, 2011). In the next
sections we will further profile the fundamental dilemmas to be addressed, and the most
problematic planning concepts that underpin them. We call them intervention, regulation, and
investment dilemmas, while proposing a detailed explanation of the key concepts in changing
urban development practice in times of complexity.
Intervention, Regulation, and Investment Dilemmas
It is not possible, or even desirable, to oversimplify the paradoxical nature of planning
practice. However, a theoretical understanding of paradoxical planning action requires a more
profiled distinction of the key dimensions that affect planning practice. The question is: how
do planners cope with these contradictions in organizing collective actions and spatial
policies, and what are the concrete matters that they deal with? Early understandings of urban
development may be useful to distill the key dimensions at stake (DiGaetano and Klemanski,
1999; Flyvbjerg, 1998). These studies provide useful tools to explain how ‘planning agents’
(broadly defined as major stakeholders in a planning process, including political elites)
organize themselves to cope with often-conflicting demands from society (e.g. market
demands vs. social demands). In these fields, planning is understood as a product of the
capacity to generate determined political pressures on certain spaces and to mobilize key
resources to ‘enforce’ development agendas (Stone, 1993).
Profiling the composition of urban development policies and detecting the key features
of spatial policy processes is important in understanding how and why specific developments
are preferred over others, the locational choices of projects, and their socio-economic
ambitions. These choices are at the core of different policy sectors (e.g. environmental, social,
and economic policies) in so far as they all entail three main policy considerations that policy
makers have to deal with: first, the capacity to establish territorially bordered areas of
intervention in order to target specific interventions; secondly, the capacity to control the
‘rules of the game’ that govern a certain policy implementation, binding individual action;
and lastly, the capacity to mobilize financial resources to achieve determined output and
promote specific trends (Fainstein, 1994; Harding, 1997). These dimensions have been
constitutive in spatial planning throughout modern times, as planning attempts to govern the
geographical allocation of different types of resources. Today, even the most open and
participatory processes of decision making entail a selective operation of targeting, regulating,
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and mobilizing resources. In all three dimensions, involved actors face the underlying
tensions between control and self-organization, and situated responses have to be formulated.
Spatial planning entails these dimensions and it exists as a practice of organizing
locational, legal, and economic resources across space and time. All different planning
policies operate along these three dimensions, be it strategic visioning at a regional level or
local land-use planning. Accordingly, it is along these three dimensions that experimentation
and innovation can occur, respectively by a) the manipulation and creation of borders and
spatial targets of action as a natural practice of prioritization that establishes hierarchies of
intervention in urban spaces; b) via the regulatory requirements of policies, which control and
establish, mobilize, or manipulate frameworks of spatial policy making (Frug, 1979); and c)
in the adaptation of the way public and private resources are combined in driving spatial
policy design and implementation. This is the inherent capacity of spatial policy to make
different resources converge towards established objectives. Each of these dimensions poses
fundamental dilemmas for planners. We call them intervention, regulation, and investment
dilemmas.
Intervention dilemma: open and closed notions of time/space
Spatial planning is firstly a practice of intervention as it intrinsically depends on a
definition of spaces and times of action within the plan-making process, such as areas,
territorial targets, situated networks, and programs. As a practice of intervention, and in a
context of limited resources, planning is selective. This selectiveness stems from its spatial
and temporal dimensions that enable planners to distinguish different qualities of places,
which are constitutive of any spatial planning policy. The intervention dilemma is today
demarcated by two distinct trends that lead spatial intervention: on the one hand, the increased
desire to guide urban change towards desirable future scenarios; on the other, the belief that
planning has to enable self-organization and ensure that urban space will be tailored to the use
of current and future inhabitants. After almost a century of debate over the risks of modernist
and interventionist planning, the latter has become an imperative in policy making. The
intervention dilemma entails a dialectic between control and spontaneity, not in general terms,
but concerning the specific definition of time and space in shaping urban interventions. This
dilemma juxtaposes the inherent inclination of spatial plans to concretize space as a locational
object with the aim to keep these choices open, flexible, and subject to consensual debate.
Time and space are the fundamental qualities of intervention in urban development,
being the specific cognitive and practical tools over which visions, projects, and ideas are
contextually designed. They are used to make crucial transformations from general spatial
visions towards (the conditions for) concrete combinations of real-estate investment, public
facilities, and un-built spaces. However, most urban development practice still expresses
traditional conceptions of space and time despite the contemporary imperative of facilitating
social change (and avoiding its constraints through selective actions). Time and space are still
often geometrically defined and objectified, conceived as ‘containers’ of social action. In the
last 20 years urban projects and area-based interventions have become a dominant mode of
policy intervention in many cities, using time and space only as tools of selection and
implementation (Andersson and Musterd, 2005 ). Space and time provide the coordinates to
engage in a process of scenario making, which can be more or less rigid. However, the major
problem with objectified notions of time and space occurs when the fixity of spatial
boundaries and time programming becomes an unamendable condition in planning processes
that excludes flexibility. What we see today is that the space-time variables of specific
interventions are (a priori) fixed as a condition for interventions, while they could be the
object of participatory processes. Fixing boundaries is constitutively exclusionary. In all
large-scale projects mentioned in the introduction, strict boundaries of time and space were
the fixed variables of intervention, turning the city space into a patchwork of prioritized realestate developments (Fainstein, 2001; Swyngedouw et al., 2002).
Despite the mass of work done on developing new vocabularies, it is difficult to detach
from an objectified notion of time and space (Graham and Healey, 1999). This is because
5
space and time have always provided, and will continue to provide, the coordinates to
organize collective action. Planners thus translate interests and objectives into objects in space
and time to provide desirable visions of the future state of the city and to condition concrete
real-estate investment projects. However, recognition that space and time are based on nonEuclidean forms of knowledge (Friedmann, 2000) has created new planning concepts that
provide a more flexible, communicative, and open definition. Adaptive management (Innes
and Booher, 1999), argumentative and communicative planning (Fischer, 1993), relational
planning (Healey, 2007), and the actor-relational approach (Boelens, 2010) have attempted to
avoid the enclosing effects of time-space conceptualization by employing more open
processes to define them. They all transmit the idea that the time-space boundaries of
interventions are relationally defined, permanently fluid, fuzzy, or perceived in different ways
at different scales (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2009; Thrift, 2000).
At the base of these works is recognition that space and time are always an expression
of exclusive powers if they are not collaboratively constructed. A less material definition of
space and time thus becomes a tool to emancipate planning processes from the rational
structures of teleocracy. Communicative rationality underlines that it is important to open up a
reasoning process when working to define space and time, with open processes improving
results. Whenever plan making consolidates areas and programs of intervention within
selected zones and time frames it is executing a coercive power, as enclosing time and space
means some target groups are excluded (for their living location for example) or that specific
possibilities for future spatial change are excluded. This is where conflicts also emerge.
Opening up space and time coordinates does involve undertaking risky practices of
contextualized planning, which might even exclude ‘plans’ as a product (Boelens 2006). In
practice this is hardly conceived as an option by planners. The problem is that the dilemma
between open and closed cannot be uniquely addressed by looking at one or the other
extreme: pursuing complete openness can turn into adventurous, disorganized processes while
defining parameters has proven to be a technical exercise unresponsive to urban change.
Planning is per definition an action that entails a link between a present situation and a desired
one (Campbell, 2012). This is why deconstructed and communicative views on space and
time cannot be realistically considered as prescriptive patterns of action (Mäntysalo, 2002).
The problem with opening up conceptions of space is that it fails to consider the need to
establish frameworks of reference to enable collective action (Hillier, 2003; Huxley, 2000).
Yet, these frames often inhibit collective action. Despite the different examples, the
intervention dilemma thus stems from the fact that a) if planning pursues an open view of
space and time in an intervention it is unlikely to impact on wider urban and regional
dynamics; and b) if it defines space and time in an intervention it becomes selective and thus
excludes unpredicted possibilities. The risk posed by openness is planning becoming an
endless understanding of spatial problems and relations without actual impact (Mazza, 2002).
Actual planning challenges in the Amsterdam metropolitan area give an example of the
intervention dilemma. Due to the rapidly changing real-estate market, the city is rethinking
the management of several large-scale interventions underway since the 1990s. Projects like
the business district Zuidas, the peripheral residential development of IJburg, and the
redevelopment of the northern industrial harbor have been rethought in terms of their
boundaries and programming. However, the uncertainty related to their realization and spatial
outcomes has generated debate over this re-programming’s risks to long-term planning of
housing and office production in the whole Amsterdam metropolitan area. The Amsterdam
Zuidas, a major intervention to realize a new mixed-use business district next to a major
transportation hub, had clearly defined boundaries (both in its subsectors and general area)
and programming of investments. In response to the recent economic crisis, new initiatives
for temporary usages proposed by the inhabitants have been included in the project, but they
have a difficult relationship with the existing plans that do not allow for such spontaneity.
Similarly, IJburg residential development, whose building program was already established
and formally agreed in the 1990s, is today attempting to redefine new temporary usages of
unbuilt plots. This has generated reconsideration of the overall master plan and led to
discussion over the importance of the area to the long-term supply of houses in the region.
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The looser development of the NDSM area in the northern harbor has not been bound to a
general master plan, to guarantee flexibility in view of different proposals from market actors
and civic society. Yet, it is still identified as a major area of economic development by
established long-term plans at different scales. The dilemma regards the future management
of the more or less spontaneous activities that have been added to these projects, and the
implications of localized flexible programming on expectations of regional development.
Temporary functions might turn into permanent functions and the boundaries of the project
might be constantly adapted (for extended explanations see Van der Heide and Majoor, 2013;
Savini, 2013a).
Our argument is that the problem lies in the way open and closed notions of space and
time are actually encapsulated, combined, and linked with each other in the planning process.
Planners face an intervention dilemma whenever they need to choose when and where to
intervene in cities. Addressing this dilemma may require a new thinking able to combine
interventionist notions of planning with ideas of non-interference in social processes. It means
intertwining moments of inactivity and non-intervention with more defined interventions in
the city-space. Ultimately, these questions revolve around the potential of uncontrolled and
unmediated organization in planning. They problematize contemporary conceptions of
planning as a practice of intervention that needs to be performed. Concepts of de-planning
ultimately advance hypotheses of inactivity in certain areas, which are likely to impact on
desired futures of cities (often by governmental agents), to control the interdependency
between different projects in cities, and to eventually ‘govern’ the urban space. This also
entails risks of inequality due to the uneven distribution of resources in cities. What type and
degree of control do spontaneous processes of urban development need?
Regulation dilemma: general and particular uses of material/procedural norms
As expressions of political will, spatial plans are normative constructs aiming at a
presumed improvement of spatial order. In the practice of contemporary planning a regulation
dilemma stems from the particular nature of planning action, which is intrinsically normative
as it binds freedom of action. The regulation dilemma stems from the simultaneous objectives
of planning practice to open spaces for self-management while limiting opportunist action
through specific regulatory frameworks. On the one hand, planning is based on generic norms
that condition, in general and durable ways, the autonomous performances of governmental
and civic actors (without regulating the purposive ways of performance as such). These
generic conditional norms provide codes for the behavior of subjects without pre-determining
their particular choices to deal with these norms (e.g. property rights, liabilities, compensation
rights, and general codes of spatial quality or sustainability). On the other hand, planning is
often regulated with detailed norms and instructions that aim to specify action towards a
specific output. While the general norms focus on universal principles and rules that fulfill an
orienting and normative role, the concrete tendency of most regulators in spatial planning is to
define elements and resources that produce a particular target in space and time.
Legal regulation consists of material norms and procedural norms. ‘Material norms’
refers to the use of substantive norms to manage, mitigate, and defend against the potential
conflict between different claims on space. Examples of these rules are the ‘areas of respect’,
noise and pollution contours, buffer zones around industrial areas, as well as the whole
system of building regulation. As a result of increasing instrumentalism, the problem is that
these rules have built a solid apparatus of restrictions and prescriptions that tend to work
‘against’ creative urban change. The designation of zones was conceived to protect the natural
growth of specific urban functions, mitigating their conflicts. Land-use regulations eventually
‘inherently prevent the natural evolution and adjustment of urban form with respect to
consumer preferences between land consumption and accessibility’ (McLaughlin, 2012,
p.52). Instrumental uses of regulation create ‘obstacles’ rather than conditions to leverage
individual freedom and creative thinking in collective action making (Coglianese & Kagan,
2007). Consequently, both zoning and growth prevention regulations (i.e. impact fees, growth
7
boundaries) are often used instrumentally by parochial governments for the consolidation of
political power (Feiock, 2004).
The notion of procedural norms is similarly problematic. These norms are geared to
orient and stabilize potentially complex and fragmented processes of decision making to
increase the legitimacy or representativeness of planning processes (e.g. public hearings, etc.).
In the 1990s, planners realized that relying on legalism as a form of spatial intervention was
no longer suited to accommodate complex socio-economic change, and started to employ
informal or softer formal tools of orientation (Turner et al., 2012). Instruments like strategic
plans, strategic visions, and orientation maps have started to be largely employed in order to
explore future directions of development in a more open way. Softer tools to enable and boost
urban development have been designed to address these problems and are provided as
standard devices to endow flexible or participative local governance (Savini, 2012).
Procedures and guidelines have been widely exploited to design more effective policy-making
and implementation processes by providing pathways for a better ‘management’ of spatial
planning (Howlett, 2005). Yet, in practice they have tended to become highly standardized
and overlapped with, rather than substituted for, more stringent legal norms governing land
use in specific areas.
The regulation dilemma lies in the paradoxical evidence that spatial planning exists as a
combination of two different components: legal certainty to avoid undesirable outputs and to
define desirable usages of land, and, on the other hand, the need to provide grounds for
unplanned innovation. While there is a search for general norms able to orient particular
choices, planning tends to codify particular targeted outputs through land-use regulations and
standardized decision-making models. The paradox of general norms (e.g. property rights,
liabilities, sustainability, spatial quality, etc.) and particular norms (e.g. environmental zoning
and building regulations) is inherent in the logic of plan making to prevent opportunistic
behaviors. Governments provide specific indications to planners to ensure effectiveness, but
also claim to open up possibilities for self-regulation within a framework of generic norms. At
one side of this dilemma is the fact that governments have developed regulations that indicate
precisely how different actors should behave and define the processes of decision making in
order to ensure that specific spatial qualities will be achieved (e.g. protecting green spaces).
This is often attached to political expectations of regulations, which require legitimization
from electorates (Alexander et al., 2012). In this way the agreed upon general principles of
spatial and urban quality (i.e. sustainable, secure, and durable environments) are
presumptively reduced into implementation-oriented legal instruments (van Rijswick & Salet,
2012). The dilemma stems from the need to keep a balance between protecting certain values
in land-use planning and the need to enable innovative solutions and bottom-up ideas that
could achieve these same objectives but may be inhibited by particular regulations.
Examples of this dilemma can be found in several European cities. In Amsterdam, there
is debate over the need to develop flexible regulation by promoting bottom-up ideas and
alternative residential-productive mixes in order to enable certain spatial qualities (see, for
example, the area of Buiksloterham or the western harbor redevelopment). However, the city
governments are challenged by rigid research requirements and detailed restrictions on future
zoning, which tend to constrain responsive and creative spatial design. In Buiksloterham, for
instance, the city prepared a global zoning plan to enable the transition of an industrial area
into a mixed area. During three years of preparation, the global plan was detailed in adherence
to research requirements, environmental and traffic norms, and so forth, while being
unresponsive - already at the time of its legal establishment – to the changing conditions of
the market (Dembski, 2013). Alternatively, the city now makes use of a more case-based
approach, attempting to achieve mixed-usages within same building, but it has to manage
compatibility with the original land-use plan. In Italy, the reform of planning regulation is
fundamental to enable a more effective negotiation between private and public subjects in
urban development and to ensure the realization of projects (e.g. the implications of general
land-use plans). Milan has, for example, recently attempted to develop a system of
exchangeable building rights to enable market initiatives and densification beyond the rigidity
of governmentally-designed plans (Fedeli, 2008). This is an example of a framework rule that
8
fixes the boundaries to private initiative. However, in this case the achievement of a higher
degree of flexibility clashes with the need to establish certain definitions of spatial qualities
and with a series of layered legal constraints (specific conditions regarding internal living
spaces, living densities, and the regulation of hybrid residential-productive spaces)
The regulation dilemma entails the tension between the need to establish general legal
conditions and open procedures versus the aspiration to create legal certainty in particular
performances. Our argument is that consideration of alternative options needs to start from a
new navigation between these two fundamental sides of planning. This is necessary to
progressively problematize the detailed and instrumentalist ways of codifying land-use
control and procedures to manage complexity. The ability to condition and enable
spontaneous processes of spatial change and to stimulate practices with unpredictable results
is imperative. Yet, how can this be ensured without relying on the same regulatory tools that
have restricted self-regulation in a first place?
Investment dilemma: supply- and demand-led strategies of risk and income
management
Large-scale development projects have become a consolidated practice of urban
transformation (Fainstein, 2008; Oosterlynck et al., 2011). Despite the different models of
process management, these projects are driven by what can be defined as a supply-oriented
attitude towards urban development. Supply-led urban development is focused on increasing
land values; an approach oriented to the production of urban spaces that encourage a
programmed social and economic condition in the city (Jones, 1996). This approach is based
on a specific definition of an area, a (more or less flexible) programming in the mid and short
term that is justified by predictive models of economic and demographic growth and by the
marketability of the real estate. A supply-led approach generally views urban transformation
projects as an ‘investment’ in the future condition of the whole city.
Processes of financialization in urban and infrastructural projects and securitization of
land assets have led this logic at its apex. More credit, produced through complex financial
constructs, has released large sums of initial capital to start up larger projects (Rutland, 2010).
It also facilitates leverage of further investment capital, turning these planned interventions
into assets in the financial market. Urban development has tended to expand in size, with
projects becoming gigantic, combined, interdependent, and at the same time generally
standardized in their programming and aesthetics (Ponzini and Nastasi, 2011). Financialized
supply-led urban development has turned into a constitutive component of city-regional
planning based on the redistribution of the gains of certain projects into other areas (as well as
city incomes). Projects generate initial debts for both private developers and cities; their
returns are partly reinvested to compensate more risky and less profitable intervention, with
part of the generated capital returned into public finances to support collective services. Along
this logic, both land-use planning and strategic planning are instrumental in managing the
prices of land, manipulating earnings, and strategically governing the urban land market to
control both public and private investment returns (Adair et al., 2003).
The 2008 global economic downturn has generated a critical point for this model. The
increasing uncertainty of urban economies has hindered the capacity to estimate these trends
according to which real-estate supply is programmed. The difficulty to grasp exact demands
of urban spaces has led planners to rethink the position of planning in the production of urban
spaces. A demand-led logic radically reverses the supply chain of urban production. It
proposes solutions that shift attention towards the existent and variegated local demands to
incentivize urban transformation rather than perpetuating supply-led strategies to re-boost
supply through cost-reduction (Aalbers, 2013). It means approaching planning as a practice
oriented to grasp and mobilize locally generated demands for development before establishing
9
financial arrangements. It involves a policy of attendance, invitation, and mobilization of
local questions, and a planning attitude highly differentiated and responsive to individual
needs.
The notion of demand-led development has already been investigated in the context of
labor policies, housing policies (Galster, 1997), and welfare policies (Gilmartin et al., 2013),
but it has rarely been applied to the planning field, where there are few reflections on postrecession approaches to economic arrangements in land development (Raco and Street, 2012).
Nonetheless, an experimental move towards more responsive models of land development is
more evident in countries with strong planning traditions. These new models are pinned over
individual household demands, with the aim to decrease costs and boost demand with more
tailored and personalized forms of development (i.e. self-developed houses, temporary and
local usages, personalized architectures, etc.) (Tisma et al., 2007). They often constitute a
radical change in the organization of urban projects, bypassing intermediate steps of realestate development, marketing, promotion, and sales in an aim to restore financial
sustainability.
The investment dilemma entails the tension between supply- and demand-led
development logics, and it relates to particular understandings of two notions of city-regional
policy making: risk and income. Supply-led models have been based on a quantified, linear,
and generally negative perception of risk (Goldin and Vogel, 2010). Urban projects are
packaged in a way to control risk factors, combining profitable and less profitable
interventions into complex packages. Economically riskier projects are (supposedly)
connected to less risky interventions, whose returns compensate potential losses in other areas
of development. Supply-led policies have been based on a quantified and econometric
definition of income. Despite the increasing importance assigned to spatial quality, urban
environment, and landscape design, urban projects have been conceived as tools to produce
urban wealth, intended to be redistributed into poorer urban areas. The income is generated
through betterment fees, value capture, and collective benefits agreements, which are
expressions of the practice of proactive planning (Glenn, 2005; Sagalyn, 1997). Financial
tools have consolidated this instrumental view on development, providing opportunities to
turn planned real estate (or incremental perspectives) into tools to leverage further capital to
reinvest in city services (Du Gay et al., 2012).
The problem with a quantified notion of risk and income is that the real-estate supply
chain works as far as it can ensure a permanent inflow of city income with low public and
private risk over time. On this base, new plans and new projects are produced to govern urban
change. A demand-led development model proposes a less econometric notion of risk and
income, based on an idea of valuable urban space that includes non-material components
related to specific local demands. In demand-led planning the risk of interventions is not
distributed, diluted, or manipulated, but internalized in the expectation of city-users.
Similarly, expectation of financial income for cities becomes less certain in the long run. A
demand-led approach attempts to increase the environmental and social value of space that is
self-managed and self-promoted by local households. It focuses on the gains brought about by
spatial quality, place attachment, and social cohesion, which are hardly quantifiable. The
deconstruction of quantitative notions of risk and income entails problems for a planning
system that is pinned over a distribution of costs and redistribution of benefits at an urbanregional scale.
Examples of the investment dilemma are found in Amsterdam and Milan. The
Amsterdam metropolitan area is today attempting to develop more user-based forms of
residential development. This shift was a response to the crisis of the traditional model of
active land policy used by the municipality for a long time. The city government has generally
taken an active role as developer of publicly owned land in order to transfer the profit
generated by selling building rights into projects of public utility (e.g. social housing, spatial
qualities, and public facilities). However, the sustainability of this model is dependent on
planned developed areas guaranteeing a sufficient money stream to cover the costs of other
public investments; the security that the supplied developed land will be responsively built by
private or semi-private actors (Janssen-Jansen 2012; van der Krabben and Jacobs, 2013).
10
Milan is a different example of the same problem. Large-scale development projects,
especially in the outer part of the metropolitan area, are carried out as big packages of realestate production (Savini, 2013b). However, their realization is bound to the leverage capacity
of big private investors, which is bound to the increase of portfolios and access to bank credit.
Most of the large developers have thus bound their projects to the sale of programmed
investments in other areas, which are now suffering from market downturn.
The investment dilemma in planning stems from the need to cope with the problems of
a pure supply-led approach by achieving more demand-responsive plans, but without
sacrificing the capacity of developers and investors to generate revenue streams that could
sustain other projects. Supply-led development certainly offers a certain degree of control in
the programming of urban production, while demand-led development appears risky,
uncertain, and could bear limited results in respect to major objectives of urban change. Yet,
the global economic crisis has once again shown that the former can be biased by oftenunrealizable expectations that may not be fulfilled. The capacity to allow self-managed urban
interventions thus depends on the risk-tolerance capacity of cities (Sagalyn, 1997). This is the
ability of cities to adopt policies of maintenance, attendance, and slow-growth without
hindering the necessary production of social services and urban functioning (Kirkpatrick and
Smith, 2011). The investment dilemma entails the paradoxical reality of economic resources
in planning. On one hand is the need to mobilize urban production to address emerging
demands; on the other is the desire for self-produced space, tailored to contextual demands
and development needs. What risk can spatial planning bear in enabling urban development?
Figure1: Dilemmas in the three dimensions of policy action
11
Navigating the dilemmas
Intervention, regulation, and investment dilemmas are at the core of daily planning
innovation and they are hardly detachable in the daily work of planners. This is an analytical
distinction of a complex state that may even go beyond spatial policies. In the practice of
spatial policy making, planners are confronted with the task of achieving a pragmatic
compromise between their need to control urban change and the contemporary imperative of
embracing self-organization. As the examples have shown, this does not uniquely affect landuse planning but it addresses major issues in the articulation between project realization,
strategic planning at a larger scale, and long-term urban development policies. Despite the
long history of conceptual and theoretical work that explores and recognizes the paradoxical
nature of planning, today’s practice does not seem to recognize the urgency for the inclusion
of openness and complexity in generally linear planning processes. Under the threat of delegitimacy and budget cuts, practice is instead attempting to rationalize goals and instruments
as a defensive strategy against economic uncertainty.
Our critique is rooted in an understanding that today’s practices of urban development
and planning look for a simplification and rationalization of these fundamental dilemmas.
Facing larger uncertainties, planners start to rethink the space and time boundaries of a project
without questioning its nature. Interventions tend to be rationally readapted, redefining
parameters by annexing other interventions and/or rethinking the expected programming
(often by reducing it to a manageable degree). A project may turn out to be an undesirable
intervention in areas that require time and space to flourish and mature. Planning is still
instrumentally conceived as a practice that can restore and reboot sleeping projects by
adapting instruments and design strategies. Instead, projects might need more fluid processes
of discussion over key objectives. Recent planning regulation reforms reveal a similar
problem. Regulatory reform seems excessively oriented to enhancing the efficiency of
existing regulations (e.g. streamlining existing norms). However, less attention is being given
to a new approach that focuses on logics of underlying general norms that are less restrictive
of creativity in different contexts; an approach that requires different reflections on the
normative objectives of planning in uncertain times instead of new regulations to enhance
project performance. Lastly, when facing issues of economic resource management, planners
and developers still need to achieve a high degree of precision in calculating risk and income
streams to adhere to established (often pro-growth) urban development policies. City planning
today seems increasingly tailored over (wishful) calculations of city income increase and risk
reduction.
Planning will always deal with perspectives of certainty. In our view, analyzing
concepts of space and time, material and procedural norms, and income and risk is a
conceptual task that can make practice more aware of its limits (and potentials) than the
normative mission to revolutionize current practice. These concepts are not new to the agenda
of critical thinking and it is not possible, or even desirable, to provide solutions to these
dilemmas. However, our initial assumption is that it is still useful to think about these
fundamental dimensions of planning action because of new contextual conditions. The way
planners address fundamental practical dilemmas changes in context and in time. New
compromises can be found to old problems. The intellectual challenge for planning practice is
to understand it as an experience that valorizes, rather than refuses, its paradoxical nature.
Any radical solution towards one of the extremes would amputate planning of one of its major
capacities, either that of controlling potentially disruptive events or to endow virtuous social
change.
Conclusive remarks
Post-structuralism’s critique of rational planning has largely discussed the value of
contextualized understanding of the dilemmas we have here discussed. Planning scholars have
proposed that planning be a situated practice of navigation and exploration that eventually
12
leads to multiple alternative views on the dilemmas (Balducci, 2011; Balducci et al., 2011).
Today’s planning theories might need, more than ever, space for such different
understandings of contextual practices and clear analytical lines of interpretation. These ideas
have been discussed before, but our contribution forms an addition to this thought with three
specific valuable arguments for theory and practice:
First, innovation in planning practice can be enhanced by a better understanding of a set
of fundamental dilemmas. The idea of ‘dilemma’ provides conceptual openness to make sense
of contextual differences regarding political systems or cultures of planning. In this paper we
emphasized how each dilemma poses a fundamental question to any planning innovation:
What type and degree of control do spontaneous processes of urban development need? How
can this be ensured without relying on the same tools that have limited self-regulation? What
risk can spatial planning bear in enabling urban development? To answer these questions we
provided a set of heuristic concepts, which we think are crucial to move in the right direction
of change. Whatever the context, our main argument is that the relationship between the two
poles of each dilemma should be central in thinking and decision making: the combination of
planning tools that entail close definitions of space and time (e.g. zoning and land-use plans)
with more open and less defined practices; the articulation of the legal infrastructure in a way
that certain space for civic initiative is not inhibited; and the definition of plans whose
financial sustainability is not dependent on long-term programming.
Second, we argue that planning theory can benefit from a framework of analysis that is
interpretative, inclusive, and open. We propose a three-folded interpretation of major
dilemmas that planners face in order to better profile a problem at stake. This profiling can be
useful to inform directions of radical innovation in planning or larger systemic reform of
planning regulations. Our arguments underline that despite the general agreement over the
paradoxical and contradictory nature of planning (i.e. planning is about controlling
complexity), it is fundamental to better profile the elements that constitute such paradoxes and
the way they are interrelated. This paper ultimately suggests that the potential of innovation
does not lie in a separate treatment of each dilemma. Although we analytically distinguish
them, we have shown that their problems are related to each other. Inserting more open
concepts of space obviously requires a better management of resources and investments.
Regulations also provide the boundaries for investments and design practices. Research on
such interactions can be built over the three-folded analytical framework proposed here.
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