Planning and wilful community action: Epistemological considerations

Abstract

While individual accounts vary, most planners would agree that their calling, historically, has been bound up with the idea of bringing an increased measure of rationality to collective human activities. Since the late 1960s, however, traditional neo-positivist models of scientific problem solving and systematic administration have come increasingly under the gun. Urban riots, ecological disasters and the failure of the first UN Development Decade proved a damning indictment. By the early 1970s, new voices were being heard, calling for a different, more certain method of linking knowledge to action. Planning for turbulence through social learning was suggested as an alternative approach, and its emphasis on learning from practice has led to an ever increasing identity on the part of many planning theoreticians with the materialist concept of praxis. Both radical and liberal thinkers have come to endorse quite similar epistemological positions.