The authors of the Frankfurt School maintained that a radical change in society was necessary; however, they always refused to suggest any practice. The role of the thinker, as famously argued by Adorno, was not to engage with society and politics in a direct fashion, because this would imply being caught in a stream of cause and effect relations. This compromise would eventually jeopardise their subjectivity and the ability to critically consider reality. Jürgen Habermas, the last author to be associated with the Frankfurt School, shifted his object of analysis from the immediate social reality to the level of language and communication, increasingly detaching the terms of the question from his immediate historical circumstances.
Habermas’s collaborative action theory takes communication as its main object of analysis following the author’s sustained interest in the public sphere as a dimension where democracy can happen through participation. The public sphere is fundamentally a linguistic construction, created and maintained by language. The study of communication is therefore crucial to the theory in order to recognise the obstacles and the constraints that prevent individuals from participating and contributing their ideas to the debate. The theory is based on two elementary concepts. The lifeworld is the ever-changing network of connections established between individuals, which can have a communicative or normative nature. The lifeworld is continuously colonised by abstract systems. These can be described as pre-emptive networks, structures that are constructed with the purpose of staying fix, of providing some frame to the human interaction, like the economic order with the market place or the political or administrative order with the bureaucracy. They are based on instrumental rationality, and are superimposed to the lifeworld to constrain its ever-changing nature.
The core of Habermas’s theory contribution to the debate on good practice in planning is in the distinction between lifeworld and system, between planning imposed because of functional rationality and planning that emerges from and through communicative rationality. To instrumental rationality, Habermas opposes communicative rationality. From this point of view, among the many sources from which the German social theorist borrowed, Sigmund Freud is an important one. Rather than in his formulations and terminology, Habermas is simply, selectively interested in psychoanalysis as a method based on language. Conversation is used in psychoanalysis both as a method to reveal and heal disorders. Psychoanalysis, if successful, provides the patient simultaneously with emancipation and rational understanding of their issues. Similarly, Habermas with his theory wanted to provide an intriguing tool to both explain the relation between language and repression and solve it. Unbalances of power affect social structures, which in turn affect individuals. For Habermas, language is both a way to reveal and to heal them, i.e. to change the understanding of the world and to augment control of the subjects on their reality.
Reality is formed through interaction between actors and actants, a collective process that combines objective and subjective knowledge: as Judith Innes put it, ‘Information that influences is information that is socially constructed in the community where it is used.’ Another important element of the theory from this point of view is the idea that ‘social illness’ emerges from the fragmentation of symbolic contents. Again, language allows for the re-symbolisation of isolated symbolic contents, by conveying them into the public sphere. Communicative action brings people together, because it allows to rescue isolated pieces of content (a spatial distortion) through acquisition into the public domain. Issues emerge and are understood by verbalisation: this is the hermeneutic value of communication. This part of the theory was particularly important in the formulation of the practice of placemaking in urban planning and design, i.e. the process of finding a rationale to new elements of the built environment by associating them to former desires, symbols and narratives of an existing or imagined community.
Also the built environment has a twofold nature and is both a text and a medium of communication. Its basic blocks are units of information and its structure is a syntax that connects them. Communication is constantly required because of the collective dimension of the human effort to colonise and inhabit the environment. Cities and neighbourhoods come into being at the point where all forces involved reach a balance, and the planner’s aspiration is to transcribe and inscribe these processes into the built environment.
Since the nineteen-sixties, planners and urban designers have created innovative, participative approaches and methodologies to encourage stakeholders to take part to the planning process and let communities emerge through consensus-building. The Team 10 left the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) as early as in 1953 in disagreement with the then hegemonic model of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. The architect and planner Giancarlo De Carlo founded the International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design (ILAUD) in 1976 to make extensive use of methods as public consultation and open debates in most of his projects. Today the charrette methodology is particularly popular in land use and urban planning. It consists in short, intense periods of consultation and design, to which all stakeholders are invited. Communicative rationality is a crucial element to these approaches and Habermas is often quoted by planners and scholars who report and comment on similar projects. However, what Habermas’s theory should suggest to planners who adopt these approaches is not only to set aside emotion and ownership of ideas, and most importantly to avoid consensus thinking.
‘Open form’ is a term sometimes used for flexible or polyvalent forms of creative expression, where the arrangement of the parts or sections is indeterminate or left up to interpretation. Some open artworks can appear structurally incomplete, either because meant to be representing an unfinished activity or because hinting at spaces and concepts outside their own limits. Similarly, planners who want to act as facilitators and allow for the participation of all stakeholders must include in their work aleatory, extemporary elements. It is this very openness that creates opportunity and means of critical reflection through language and premises truly collective action on the basis of the validity of propositions and lines of argument rather than established power relations.
Of course, as long as planners are involved in the process, truly open planning remains an imagined ideal, because the very opportunity and means for stakeholder participation must be designed or designated and is subsequently implicitly limited and possibly susceptible to external influences. Nevertheless, at least from a conceptual point of view, stakeholder participation allows planners to soften the boundary between the output of the planning process and its context, subsequently creating a linguistically more homogeneous system.
The charrette methodology has been in recent years very often used by proponents of ‘New Urbanism’, an alternative to traditional low-density urban sprawl. Sophie Bond and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett in 2007 wrote a detailed examination of a charrette process in a small town in New Zealand and noted how the use to a single type of participatory tool can represent a constraint in itself. Another limit to participation is the fact that professional designers and planners openly and inevitably pursue a New Urbanism agenda, despite the fact that they present themselves as facilitators. Charrettes and similar processes are hardly truly neutral and inclusive and in the worst case scenario they can easily be ‘hijacked’ used by authorities or interest groups simply to provide an aura of legitimation for their agenda. Moreover, local administration or private sector actors can dilute the power of participatory planning by creating ‘artificial’ or ‘redundant’ stakeholders in the form of partnerships or local groups. Tore Sager, on the other hand, in 2005 pointed out that the role of dialogue in communicative planning does not necessary ensure the best outcome, because ‘results are generated not only by amalgamation of preferences but also by the amalgamation of argument’. When different externalities or incomparable preferences are involved, dialogue does not easily result in a balance of all interests through communicative rationality and in accordance with democratic criteria: ‘Usually, only some of the pro-and-con arguments about a plan refer to impacts measured on comparable scales, like a monetary scale’.
The model of the planning process based on the communicative action theory, with its emphasis on components of discourse and deliberation within a group, does not take into account how individual actions are affected by rules, community and the physical environment. From this point of view, planners interested in creating theoretical models to explain and present findings, should integrate elements of theories that deal with the social construction of knowledge and the Actor-Network Theory, which largely focuses on the interaction between human and non-human actors. However, a major contribution of communicative action theory has certainly been to stimulate debate about the nature of the planning profession, giving practitioners the opportunity to think of themselves as facilitators. Alternatively, planners can reclaim their role in researching and interpreting what solution grants the most positive externalities, by identifying with the user and defining what would be desirable, usable and useful. Also this approach adjusts the top-down strategy introduced by modernist planning and brings the user to the negotiation table from which the built environment emerges. As a task it includes addressing a range of desires, physical and emotional issues that go beyond the simple functional needs summarised by the notion of instrumental rationality. Such an approach requires a great effort of identification with the user/citizen, an effort perfectly symbolised by the image of the planner exploring the territory in person rather than analysing it through maps and models.