Rigour and rigour mortis? Planning, calculative rationality, and forces of stability and change

Abstract

A defining feature of planning is that it is informed by sound evidence. An ever more diverse range of decision support tools is available to help achieve this, a trend that is set to accelerate along with the rise of Big Data and Smart Cities. At the same time, planning is frequently requested to improve the urban and environmental outcomes it helps deliver. This research draws upon intellectual resources from Science and Technology Studies, and empirical data from actors across the science–policy–practice interface, to analyse critically issues connected to the design, application and wider effects of calculative practices within planning. It finds that these practices selectively open up or foreclose discourses and play important political roles relating to ordering complexity and mitigating professional risk. They are also revealed as underpinning a stability and certainty within decision making that not only maintains the power of established calculative agencies but also serves to replicate an ideology of urban form that is in tension with more normative calls for change. More broadly, the findings help unsettle the planner and planning policy as the key agent able to change planning outcomes, which is instead revealed as more contingent on the political, institutional and professional culture, and the ways human and non-human objects align and combine to create internal stability when there are external calls for change.

规划的一个决定性特征是它应当是依据可靠的证据进行的。有越来越多样的决策支持工具可以帮助实现这一目标，这一趋势将随着大数据和智慧城市的崛起而加速。与此同时，人们经常要求规划改善城市和环境成果。本项研究利用了来自科学技术研究 (Science and Technology Studies) 领域的智力资源，以及来自科学-政策-做法界面的参与者的经验数据，以批判性地分析与规划中计算实践的设计、应用和更广泛影响相关的问题。研究发现，这些做法有选择地打开或取消话语，并在整理复杂性和降低专业风险方面发挥重要的政策作用。它们还被揭示为决策过程中的稳定性和确定性的基础，这不仅保持了既定计算机构的力量，而且还复制了一种城市形态的意识形态，这种意识形态与更规范性的变革要求相矛盾。更广泛地说，这些发现挑战了规划者和规划政策作为能够改变规划结果的关键因素的地位，并揭示了规划结果更依赖于政治、制度和专业文化，以及当有外部变革呼声时，人和非人的目标如何协调和结合以创造内部稳定。