Editors' Introduction

Editors' Introduction John Friedmann and Mike Douglass Mike Douglass and John Friedmann, eds., Cities for Citizens: Planning and the Rise of Civil Society in a Global Age (London: John Wiley, 1998).

Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local. The space of power and wealth is projected throughout the world, while people's life and experiences is rooted in places, in their culture, in their history." Castells (1996:415-6) According to Manuel Castells, the elites of wealth and power of the new global economy -who probably amount to less than 10 percent of the population even in industrial countries and to less than 1 percent in the predominantly rural societies of the poorest countries -- hold no special allegiance to local culture and history. Their primary interest is in the unlimited accumulation of profit and influence. The disempowered great majority of the world's population value local traditions and inhabit specific places, but their voices have been rendered silent. The Castellsian human landscape is thus occupied by a pacified proletariat of consumers and semi-consumers of what the global shopping basket holds. This proletariat is subordinated to the global culture of capital and to structures of elite power that control and commodify its penetration into local spaces. In this representation of the elitist world, politics are a matter of arrangements between states and corporations; popular resistance is meek; and emergent counter-movements are easily finessed before they gain substance. Such is the imaginary of the boardrooms of capital. By contrast, the chapters of this book are focused on the local arena of region, city and neighborhood -- local not in the sense of being closed off from global influences, but as the effective terrain for engagement in civic life beyond the household and in relation to the state and the corporate economy. Substitute "citizen" for "people" in the citation above, and a very different imaginary from the one painted by Castells emerges. Whereas people is a generic term that conveys little of substance, citizen is a political term that acknowledges (a) a territorial unit organized for a life in common -- a political community; (b) the rights and obligations of members of this polity --the citizens -- and their claim, legitimated by democratic theory, to be the sovereign of this polity to which the state must be accountable; and (c) the right of citizens to claim new rights for themselves. Citizenship in this view implies a theory -- a normative theory -- of political organization. This political imaginary is of an inclusive democracy whose primary practice is specifically at the local level. Though not necessarily in opposition to the extra-political rule of global elites, it asserts a fundamental right to human flourishing. In all quarters of the world, struggles to secure this right and to translate it into socially just outcomes have moved to the center of popular concern. Citizenship is political and thus a concept in the public sphere. It pertains to only a

segment of social life which itself is deeply rooted in what we call, for want of a better term, civil society. Civil society is that part of social life which lies beyond the immediate reach of the state and which, we would argue, must exist for a democratic state to flower. It is the society of households, family networks, civic and religious organizations, and communities that are bound to each other primarily by shared histories, collective memories, and cultural norms of reciprocity. Civil society in this sense has of course always existed alongside the state, even where its political voices have been silenced by the state’s use of violence against its citizens. Although civil society and state precede the complex economy of capital, its corporations and financial institutions, both require an economic system to reproduce their material existence. But the obverse is also true. No complex economic system can be sustained without continuously being buttressed by the state and shored up by manifold forms of social and cultural cooperation. Although for much of the time, civil society exists for itself alone in its splendid diversity, there are historical moments when it asserts itself massively in the public sphere. The current era is one such moment, confounding the imaginery of the boardrooms fo global capital. civil society is the ghost in Castells’ network society. For good or for bad, the rise of civil society has toppled entrenched regimes and has changed political geographies in ways that were unthinkable only a decade ago. Citizens have remained committed to expanding their rights even in the face of faltering economies and severely weakened structures of government. Alongside a corporate economy seeking global hegemony, struggles for collective empowerment committed to this social project will usher in the next millennium. The tensions between the globalization of accumulation processes and the many localized contests to gain access to and control the powers of capital will continue to be the wellsprings of political life in the coming age. This historical assertion, this new awakening to citizen rights, revolves around three interconnected claims: the struggle for the right to voice, the struggle for the right to difference, and the struggle for the right to human flourishing. The first is a democratic struggle for inclusiveness in democratic procedures, for transparency in government transactions, for accountability of the state to its citizens and, above all, for the right of citizens -- all citizens -- to be heard in matters affecting their interests and concerns at the local level of lifespace and community. It is thus as much about the process and form of engagement of citizens in the making of their world as it is about the ends they seek to achieve. The second is a social struggle for public policies that acknowledge and assert the value of socially constructed differences in the collective identities of groups living side by side in the increasingly multicultural cities of our world economy. It is a struggle against the homogenizing influence of commercially produced popular culture and for an approach to public policy formation that is responsive to differences in need and material interest by groups, including indigenous peoples, women, and minorities, who have been historically marginalized and disempowered. Finally, it is a struggle for increased access to the material bases of social power-- for housing, work, health and education, a clean environment, financial resources -- in sum, for the basic conditions of livelihood and human flourishing. All these are claims and struggles against the state, but not to overturn the state, nor to replace it, but to transform it in ways that will serve all of its citizens, and especially the least 2

powerful, as a matter of ideology and intention as well as actual practice. In the final analysis, they are struggles for a rebalancing of power relations between "elites and people" in Castells' formulation and, as this volume makes clear, they are struggles that simultaneously take place in many different parts of the world. They are local manifestations of a worldwide social movement, a rising of civil society in all of its forms. While the refusal to retreat from gains made toward establishing democratic forms of government is one of the most pronounced phenomena of our times, countervailing forces compelling state power to be used in defense of transnational economic interests have become more powerful and less apologetic -- even in the face of widening social and economic disparities within and among nations. This is a major dynamic of the crisis of the state in securing its own survival. As part of the state apparatus, planners are inescapably caught up in this dynamic. They are enmeshed in a complex of political institutions that are already changing in response to the urgings of civil society and to pressures from the corporate sector. It is planners, and local planners in particular, who must make room for active citizen participation in deliberations, allow for difference in the construction of the built environment, and cooperate with local groups and communities for increasing their access to the bases of social power. Planners are no longer exclusively concerned with the "central guidance" of market forces, or planning regulation. The new planning is more entrepreneurial, more daring, less codified. It is participatory, concerned with projects more than with the whole system of relations in the city; it seeks to forge limited consensus through negotiated and mediated settlements among contesting parties; it is a provider of strategic information to all participants in the planning process. Planning in these terms moves ever closer to the surface of politics as a mediating hand within society as a whole. In this role, its expertise is increasingly sought not only by the state, where planning powers formally reside, but also by the corporate sector and even by groups within organized civil society itself. In the emergent local-global setting, the profession of planning is thus undergoing a profound shift in its identity. The local planner as a government functionary who makes and implements plans by applying expert technical skills through regulatory powers will undoubtedly continue to be used, but as a profession, planning has already begun to relocate itself in the nexus of the interplay of state, civil society and corporate economy. This shift has also necessitated a new raison d'être for the profession. For many this has led to a revival of older but, in practice, previously marginalized concepts of "radical" planning, including advocacy of the disempowered, sustaining the environment, and, more generally, joining in struggles for social justice. For others it is principally a matter of facilitating a process of finding common ground and collaboration across the widening social, political and economic divides that are undermining the capacity for purposeful action in the public domain. Whatever direction is taken, it will no longer be centered on the idea of professionals having privileged knowledge of what constitutes the public interest. And, as it is more difficult to define as a state-based process of intervention, planning itself will become less identifiable, but will instead find expression through a variety of forms, including social mobilization and community activation for citizen rights. Although old-style statutory planning continues to be practiced and taught at the university, its methods and techniques are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Claims for citizen rights gain special relevance when seen against the background of the new planning in which not only the 3

state and corporate economy, but also actors from within civil society are engaged in city and region building. To bring civil society to the table, then, is not merely a question of inserting into the ongoing negotiations technical points that might have been overlooked by business and state planners, but to raise fundamental moral issues that are effectively summarized by the concepts of voice, difference, and human flourishing. Forcing the state and corporations to confront this challenge and to respond to it in collaborative processes that involve ordinary citizens is the task that the new political economy of planning shoulders as its awesome responsibility. This volume brings together fourteen essays that, each in its own way, address the issues of democratization, multicultural/gender difference, and human flourishing as the universal claims in our time. The contributions of Rebecca Abers on Porto Alegre, Francisco Sabatini on environmental planning in Chile, and Roger Keil on counter-planning in Los Angeles are primarily concerned with what we have called the claiming of voice. Abers' Brazilian case study will probably be the least familiar to the reader, and the most astonishing. Here is a story of orderly citizen participation that over a five-year period, actively involved more than 60,000 households in the capital budgeting process of Brazil's southernmost provincial capital, a process that is normally regarded as the exclusive domain of the backroom politics of influence. The circumstances that gave rise to it -- the election of the Brazilian Workers' Party in 1989 -- had historical antecedents which Abers quickly sketches in for us. The importance of this experiment in local democracy--and it is far from being the only one in Brazil, though possibly the most successful--is that it is having practical outcomes that actually favor the so-called popular sectors for the first time in the country's history. Sabatini focuses on environmental conflicts in a micro-region of fishing villages on Chile's central coast. The results of this process of resistance and negotiation are not nearly as spectacular as in Porto Alegre; nevertheless, they represent progress towards citizen involvement in a country saddled with a long history of authoritarian government. Democratic planning that reaches all the way down to include the poor is best viewed as a process of social learning. Although it is always in danger of being reversed by changes in the political environment, memory traces remain, as they have in Chile, and the start of a new round of democratization does not return to ground zero but incorporates what has been learned in earlier periods of struggle. Roger Keil's account of citizen planning in Los Angeles is different, focusing more on what might be called counter-planning by the heretofore excluded sectors of civil society. Its value for the overall planning process is clear: counter-planning not only provides a channel for marginalized populations to be heard but opens up new possibilities and, as in this case, new ways of thinking about "nature" in the urban environment suggestive of "less policing, more greening." Planning for cultural and gender diversity is addressed in two essays. Friedmann and Lehrer's case study of Frankfurt-am-Main's extraordinary attempt in the early nineties to integrate that city's foreign migrant population into a multicultural metropolis on equal footing with its German citizens raises a host of ideological, theoretical, and practical issues that all "global cities" will sooner or later have to confront. At their core is the question of citizenship and what it has come to signify. On a more theoretical plane, Leonie Sandercock argues for "diversity" as an operational principle in the postmodern metropolis. Some authors, such as 4

Martha Nussbaum (1995), would perhaps object to this principle on grounds of a Kantian universalism of ethical commandments. But, as we have suggested, universalism and difference can be reconciled in practice. Whereas human needs are universal, it is in their responses to these needs that planners must pay particularly close attention to the cultural forms in which needs are embedded as well as to the backlog of unmet needs that always characterizes the life of the poor. An even-handed approach--as the pretense of color blindness in the current discourse on affirmative action in the United States--may simply reinforce past patterns of inequality and exclusion. In his study of poverty and the environment in emergent world cities in Asia, Mike Douglass focuses on the most fundamental aspects of human flourishing and the claim of citizenship, namely, access to an environmentally safe life space. Access to land, housing and a life-supporting environment is a primary good for which even very poor households will make exceptional effort and sacrifice to secure (see Pezzoli, forthcoming, for a detailed account of a similar struggle in Mexico City). It is a primary good because without it, human flourishing is not possible, even when, by itself, it is not a sufficient condition. Yet state actions to move up the hierarchy of world city status involve increasingly intrusive mega-urban projects and urban restructuring that undermine the daily struggles Leaving aside the introductory and conceptual essays by Peter Marris and John Friedmann that set the terrain for the essays which follow, the remaining chapters collected in Part III tackle different aspects of the problematic of "planning in the face of civil society." Bent Flyvbjerg and John Forester confront each other on the role of the planner in the new configuration, using surrogate warriors to do battle for them. Flyvbjerg calls on Foucault's insights into the microrelations of power and on Machiavelli's Prince for the uses of power, while Forester enters the lists with Martin Buber's "dialogue" and Jürgen Habermas' "communicative action." Both draw on empirical case studies to support their views. As is almost always the case when perspectives diverge, the truth is not the via media of the golden mean, but an acknowledgment that all positions, reasonably argued, have perhaps a small corner on the truth, but a truth that is always bigger than any attempt to describe it. Janet Abu-Lughod, always suspicious of the idealism behind "do-gooding" professions such as social planning, warns us to take a sharper look at civil society. Like any collective concept, civil society is not a good to be celebrated unequivocally. She argues that people organize themselves "beyond the reach of the state" for all sorts of reasons, and some of them-the Ku Klux Klan, libertarian militias, and anti-abortion terrorists, to name only a few--would certainly be rejected by a majority of the readers of this book as representing unacceptable positions and practices. So, as planners, we must guard against the deification of civil society as the latest of intellectual fashions. And insofar as we do so, we cannot escape moral judgments. The "content" of civil society is always more important than its "form." Michael Storper urges a similar caution upon planners, raising three closely related groups of questions about civil society as a concept in planning thought. Echoing Abu-Lughod, he asks: Does civil society need a normative content? The second set of issues involves the varied relations between civil society, the state, and markets, and how we interpret them. And the third, most subtle issue has to do with "how we represent civil society to ourselves and shape it through its representations." 5

In the final chapter, Lisa Peattie, much of whose professional and intellectual life has been with and about oppositional social movements, reminds us that these movements, for all the seriousness of their intent, persist not so much by the intensity of their claiming, but the joy people experience when they link arms, acting together, and by the moral support they give to each other. It is not so much their straining for the official acknowledgment of their needs nor their justified resentment of a prepotent state that nourishes their activism, but the mutual pleasures of sharing and of celebrating a life in community , however transient this might be.

References Manuel Castells (1996) The Rise of the Network Society Vol. 1 of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Keith Pezzoli (forthcoming) Human Settlements and Planning for Ecological Sustainability: the Case of Mexico City. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Martha Nussbaum (1995) "Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings" Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities. Eds. Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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