Planning by numbers: affordable housing and viability in England1

This chapter draws on the example of the English planning system to examine the role of lawyers and planning law structures and judgements in shaping local decisions. It focuses, in particular, on the growing reliance on quantitative evidence in understanding urban problems, which have an impact on how cities are governed. The chapter shows how the calculative approach to viability illustrates the technocracy currently so prevalent in the English planning system. A reliance on numbers runs throughout the framework: in objective assessments of housing need, efficiency targets for local planning authorities, governance by statistics, and annual reports. It is viability assessments, however, that are so dominated by commercial calculative practices, particularly profit and loss.

Smart cities, algorithmic technocracy and new urban technocrats

This chapter examines the technocracy of smart cities and the set of urban technocrats that promote and implement their use. It first sets out the new technocracy at work and the forms of technocratic governance and governmentality it enacts. The chapter then details how this technocracy is supported by a new smart city epistemic community of technocrats that is aligned with a wider set of smart city interest groups to form a powerful ‘advocacy coalition’ that works at different scales. In the final section, the chapter considers the translation of the ideas and practices of this advocacy coalition into the policies and work of city administrations. In particular, it considers the reasons why smart city initiatives and its associated technocracy are yet to become fully mainstreamed and the smart city mission successfully realised in cities across the globe.

Plurality of expert knowledge: public planners’ experience with urban contractualism in Amsterdam

This chapter focuses on the Dutch planning experience in understanding how planners, as government actors, learn to deal with contracts in complex partnerships with private sector actors. It does so in order to question the technocratic logics of contemporary public–private partnerships (PPPs) focusing on an institutional context where public governments still retain a major leading role in planning for urban development but increasingly operate by devising financial agreements with the private sector. This chapter specifically looks at the use of ‘contracts’ in urban development. Consensus building in the Netherlands is the key approach in any decision-making process, implemented through the ‘polder model’, which is defined as harmonious patterns of interaction between social partners. The Dutch experience demonstrates very clearly that the ways of deal making, and the mechanism of checks and balances in this process, are very dynamic and reflect the changing dynamics of urban governance. This also means that public planners, very consciously, try to reposition themselves to safeguard the public interest.

2 Planning, knowledge and technocracy in historical perspective

This chapter examines the planning histories associated with writings on technocracies. It highlights some of the core distinctions that exist between different schools of thought over the form, character, and roles of technical knowledge in the planning of cities and reflects on the extent to which we are now living in an era within which ‘new’ technocracies can be said to exist and what these might consist of. To make sense of the new technocracy, the chapter thus offers an understanding of the old. It puts the present critique of expert knowledge into historical perspective, looking back to the interplay of planning and technocracy in the century of two world wars, the New Deal, the Welfare State, and the Modern Project. It traces the roots of the technocratic critique to planning up to the mid-1980s.

Conclusions: the technocratic logics of contemporary planning

This concluding chapter re-assesses the core propositions set out in the first chapter. Succeeding chapters have drawn on these core characteristics to examine and assess the emergence of technocratic logics in contemporary urban environments and the interweaving of new modes of technocracy with political projects and agendas following the financial crisis. While the term ‘technocracy’ is associated with particular, and very specific, historical conjunctures, this chapter argues that by focusing on technocratic logics and conceptions of technocracy it is possible to develop more powerful insights into contemporary planning processes and governance dynamics. At the heart of this discussion lies a dialectical tension between political projects that seek to implement technocratic modes of governance in the pursuit of broader aims, on the one hand, and the complexities of places and place-politics that often lie beyond the limits of technocratic calculation and control on the other. The tensions between these dialectical perspectives are on-going, subject to multiple influences, and prone to forms of incompleteness and contestation at various scales.

Localism and the reconfiguration of planning’s publics in the landscapes of technocracy

This chapter explores the role of planning's publics within the emergent technocratic landscapes of planning. It does so by drawing on ongoing research into the localism agenda in England and in particular on neighbourhood planning. Neighbourhood planning was introduced in 2011 as a ‘community right’ to draw up a statutory land-use plan. The chapter explores the extent to which technical and ‘expert’ knowledge and the power of public and private planners is being challenged or displaced by the knowledge, emotions, and actions of citizen planners. As such, the chapter shows that technocratisation is a more varied and complex process than previously thought and that these seeming spaces of de-regulation are not immune to forms of re-regulation which seek to re-create local knowledge to align with technocratic language and purposes.

Professional lobbying in urban planning: depoliticisation or REpoliticisation?

This chapter argues that professional lobbying is turning out to be an important factor in the de- and re-politicisation processes of urban development. It describes the phenomenon of professional lobbying in urban planning in general terms. The chapter then draws on public affairs studies, outlining the broad spectrum of tasks of the lobbyist and identifying certain strategies and tactics of lobbying. To question the technocratic logics of contemporary urban governance, the chapter asks what the professionalisation of lobbying means and how it affects the planning process and the related decision-making process. The focus is on the Finnish context and especially on Helsinki.

Planning professionalism in the face of technocracy: ethics, values and practices

This chapter considers the extent to which today's planners and planning experts fulfil a key role: assisting in the protection of disadvantaged and marginalised groups. While discussing these professional principles, the chapter questions the extent to which contemporary planning expertise is increasingly internalising neoliberal logics of interventions. It starts by presenting examples of how planning is currently being provided in councils to highlight how the planning service has become more commercialised through increasingly technocratic practices. The chapter subsequently reflects on what this means for planning's professional credentials and right to intervene, and concludes that planning is becoming increasingly commodified. However, planning practitioners are not questioning their professionalism or their profession's status. When set against the planning and professional academic literature's concern for altruistic public service provision, this appears to be a narrowing down of planning's and professionalism's understanding of social concern that creates disquiet for those observing the direction of travel.

The rise of a new urban technocracy

This chapter discusses the rise of a new technocracy in urban governance. It further argues that the shift to a new technocracy is leading to the re-fashioning of planning's core objectives and purpose from an earlier focus on the value of input-centred forms of deliberation, place-making, and social justice to an enhanced concern with output-centred agendas premised on expedited development and growth. The rolling out of entrepreneurial planning requires the employment of new governance technologies, such as quantitative systems of managerialism and the implementation of a multiplicity of codifications and models that are used to define urban problems and their solutions. The rise of a new technocracy is also reflected and reproduced by the expansion of increasingly complex landscapes of knowledge production. This co-evolution has been given additional impetus as the presence of more technocratic modes of governance carries advantages for policymakers and governments struggling to maintain their wider legitimacy in contexts of growing crisis.

Towards an ‘information technocracy’: discourses of London’s post-referendum real estate markets

This chapter is a study of the ways in which property development elites use particular techniques and technologies of representation to create development real estate markets in the United Kingdom. It compares the construction of post-Brexit vote narratives of investment landscapes and opportunities in London and the North-East. London's real estate market is considered the leading destination for global capital flows into commercial real estate in the United Kingdom, and therefore it becomes the centrepiece of an evolving socio-technical system. The chapter specifically looks at the media narratives disseminated by real estate market agents in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum in London. It does so in order to question the role of media exposure and private consultancy firms and reflects on the way specialist expert knowledge is publicly disseminated to directly shape public opinion and, indirectly, real estate decision-making.