Introduction

It is frequently repeated that planning is much an art as a science. So why look at it through the lens of Science and Technology Studies (STS)? In brief, and as I will develop throughout this chapter, STS concepts and approaches are particularly well-suited to help us think through the kinds of issues raised by planning scholar Leonie Sandercock in the opening quotation. Sandercock highlights that ‘the facts’ are never just that, never simply objective truths standing apart from interpretation or value judgements. And by the same token, evidence and policy are never as clearly separated as conventional models of planning would have us believe – as a minimum, because the evidence is always shaped by an author telling a story, when other stories could also be told, and policy is shaped by which stories are made visible in policy-making processes. STS methodologies open up questions of fact and value, of how facts are made and how stories are told with and about them, of whose knowledge is trusted, of how decisions about what is relevant and what is important are shaped, of what and who should be counted and how.

As discussed in Chapter 1, interest in participatory processes and deliberative democracy has flourished over the past decades. STS scholars have made a significant contribution to this ‘participatory turn’, both as advocates and critics (such as Fiorino, 1990; Latour, 2004a; Wynne, 2007; Callon et al, 2009; Marres, 2012; Chilvers and Kearnes, 2016). They have mobilised powerful arguments for increasing public engagement and plurality in making evidence and policy, in order to ‘uphold the standards of democratic society; test the framing and direction of expert-led processes; subject institutional interests to public scrutiny; establish cultural bases for knowledge and decision making; and enhance civic capacity to reflect on the challenges of modernity’ (Leach et al, 2005: 38).

Introduction

This is a book about neighbourhood planning, a ‘community right’ introduced to England by the Localism Act 2011, which allows community groups to write their own land use planning policies for their towns, villages or parts of cities. This means that they can now do what previously only credentialled experts working within the machinery of government could, a move which has been described as ‘arguably the most radical innovation in UK neighbourhood governance in a generation’ (Wargent and Parker, 2018: 379). As the opening quotation from the Planning Advisory Service (a government-funded programme providing support to Local Planning Authorities [LPAs] to help them understand and respond to planning reform) highlights, neighbourhood planning emphasises the importance and centrality of the knowledge and care that local people have for the place where they live, derived from their experience of living there.

Portrayed as an antidote to a planning system that was too complex, technical and exclusive, proponents of neighbourhood planning claim that it promotes local democracy by widening and deepening participation in planning, one of the most controversial aspects of local life in the UK. As the government's flagship initiative for local engagement with planning, and for localism and community control more widely, it was intended to extend and pluralise the range of voices and sources of knowledge that can be influential in planning: enabling the people who know and care about a place to make their own decisions about how it changes. This book charts some of the challenges faced by two neighbourhood planning communities and how they responded to them, told from the perspective of someone working closely with them.

But it is also a book about the dilemmas and potentials of participatory governance more widely, in the context of an increasing, international perception of democratic deficit, in which citizens feel disconnected from and distrustful of those who make public decisions on their behalf (Foa et al, 2020).

Introduction

In this chapter I introduce neighbourhood planning in more detail. I sketch out how the English land use planning system is intended to function regarding public participation in decision making. I then highlight some criticisms of the system, contrasting the participatory ideal with people's experience in practice, as exemplified by the opening quotation. Alok Sharma, the speaker, was at the time a Conservative MP and had been Minister for Housing and Planning in 2017– 2018. This quotation is from a debate in the House of Commons on the Localism Bill, the legislation that brought neighbourhood planning into being, and exemplifies the rationales given for the introduction of neighbourhood planning. I then set out some of the reforms introduced by the Conservative– Liberal Democrat Coalition government of 2010– 2015, which, in part at least, were intended to address these criticisms. Prominent among these reforms was the introduction of neighbourhood planning. I provide an overview of the requirements for preparing a neighbourhood plan, and some of the key aspects of the wider suite of reforms introduced at the same time, in relation to how they affect the abilities of the public to participate meaningfully in the system.

I then go on to situate neighbourhood planning in relation to the wider turns to participation and localism. I explore how it is subject to criticisms levelled at participatory and localist initiatives more widely, while also recognising a counter-current to this critique which suggests that it does introduce potential for real progressive change. I note that neighbourhood planning looks set to remain a significant part of the English planning system for the foreseeable future.

Introduction

This chapter is about the production and use of evidence – of knowledge claims. As Oakley NPG member Martin identifies in the opening quotation, what the NPG and the neighbourhood know about their neighbourhood, and why they care about it, must be codified into acceptable material forms of evidence to justify their policy proposals. However, as observed in previous chapters, government guidance on what this evidence might consist of is loose and light-touch, stating that ‘there is no “tick box” list of evidence required for Neighbourhood Planning. Proportionate, robust evidence should support the choices made and the approach taken. The evidence should be drawn upon to explain succinctly the intention and rationale of the policies in the draft neighbourhood plan’ (DCLG, 2014b).

In Chapter 4 I set out three distinct identities enacted by and for NPGs, associated with three distinct kinds of knowledge and sources of legitimacy, then briefly explored how these identities were also enacted in different participatory settings. In this chapter I examine one of the central mechanisms through which these identities are enacted and come to dominate or be suppressed: the translation and inscription of particular types of knowledge into evidence. I outline the requirements on neighbourhood plans to be evidence-based, sketch out what is conventionally counted as evidence in the planning system, and then suggest why the kind of evidence produced to support a neighbourhood plan might be expected to be more expansive, inclusive and varied. Next, I document two instances of evidence production, one from each of my case studies, exploring how NPGs interpreted what counts as evidence. I discuss the implications of these findings, analysing how what counts as evidence rests upon assumptions about the legitimacy of different kinds of knowledge, illustrating the performativity of ‘evidence’ as a concept. I then consider how the production and presentation of knowledge claims, and their associations with different relational identities, varies across other participatory settings.

In this chapter I summarise the arguments made in the previous chapters, and then go on to discuss some of the practical and theoretical implications of those arguments.

Cat's cradle: weaving the threads together

Planning is supposed to be an inclusive arena that engages a wide range of stakeholders, knowledges and ways of knowing. Yet it has consistently been perceived by communities as exclusionary and inaccessible. The decades of reforms intended to address this problem are, on the whole, perceived to have failed, as demonstrated by each successive set of reforms intended to yet again promote inclusivity in the face of a system that militates against it, and as the opening quotation from Nick Raynsford bears witness to. Raynsford was a former housing and planning minister, commissioned to conduct an independent, root-and-branch review of the English planning system on behalf of the Town and Country Planning Association, which reported in 2018 (Raynsford et al, 2018). This quotation was taken from his remarks on launching the findings of his report, and highlights the ever-more urgent need to address this issue.

The challenge highlighted by Raynsford remains so intractable at least partly because the knowledge and ways of knowing that citizens bring to planning, in particular their cares and concerns based on lived experience, are not able to be meaningfully heard in planning institutions. They tend to be expressed by citizens and understood by planners as knowledgevalue hybrids that emerge from the phenomenological experience of ‘emplacement’ – of lived and practical entangled engagement in and with place. In contrast, through all its reforms the planning system has only been

Introduction

Neighbourhood planning is framed by its promoters as a straightforward transfer of power from state to existing communities. In this chapter I examine the experience of two case studies in order to problematise this framing, drawing on some of the approaches outlined in the previous chapter to ask questions about identity, representation and legitimacy. As planning scholar Quintin Bradley observes in the opening quotation, ‘the neighbourhood’ has become a significant participant in the world of English planning. And as he says, this ‘precocious actor’ is new: it is not simply the case that ‘the neighbourhood’ is straightforwardly equivalent to the community to which the state is supposedly devolving power. This chapter thus engages with one of the central dilemmas in participatory experiments in democracy – in the absence of formal representative democracy, what legitimises the actions of citizens or groups that claim, or are implied, to represent others? How do they come to be legitimate intermediaries between community and state? And, given that the landscape and experience of participatory democracy is diverse and fragmented, is there anything that can be learned from the situated construction of legitimacy in neighbourhood planning that might be made to travel to other locations – and vice versa?

In this chapter I describe how neighbourhood planning produces two new, mutually dependent ‘actors’: local communities as ‘neighbourhoods’ and neighbourhood planning groups (NPGs) as their spokespeople. I then focus on the fluidity and multiplicity of the NPGs’ identity, tracing their performance of three distinct identities or versions of themselves in relation to the neighbourhood. I draw attention to the ways in which each identity confers a different kind of legitimacy on the NPG, by enacting different relations with the neighbourhood through different kinds of knowledge practices and modes of representation. However, there are also tensions and conflicts between the different identities. I suggest that holding these identities together in different ways will lead to different enactments of neighbourhood – will make different worlds visible to be acted upon. I then consider the ways in which the enactment of these multiple identities can also be seen in the other modes of participatory democracy described in Chapter 1.

From 2006 I have led policy and campaigning work for a variety of environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community groups – primarily the Campaign to Protect Rural England. I often represented these groups in the planning system and other forums that were ostensibly intended to widen public and stakeholder participation in decision making and incorporate a wide range of knowledges and values. I found that much of what I was doing was acting as a translator, taking the lived experiences of individuals and groups and transforming them into technical jargon and instrumentalised arguments that would fit into particular policy pigeonholes: turning them into something other than what they were presented to me as, to enable them to have traction in formal and sometimes intimidating settings.

I also observed members of the public and community groups representing themselves, particularly in formal spatial planning settings. They often expressed themselves eloquently and passionately, to apparently sympathetic planning inspectors who listened carefully, ensuring that everyone felt that they had had the opportunity to fully contribute. However, that testimony would often then be all but discarded because it didn't fit easily into the scales with which the ‘planning balance’ was weighed. Even in these theoretically inclusive forums, the things that really mattered to people were often excluded and made invisible: what Science and Technology Studies scholar John Law describes as being ‘othered’. Representing community groups and NGOs in other technocratic locations, such as the North West Regional Assembly, Regional Development Agency and Government Office, I found debate foreclosed because the questions and problems to be considered were framed in particular ways, and there were unofficial but taken-for-granted restrictions on the types of knowledge and value considered valid. The discourse of neighbourhood planning emphasised local, experiential knowledge – people were portrayed as being qualified to plan for a place because of their experience of living there.

Then, in 2011, the government introduced neighbourhood planning through the Localism Act, enabling community groups to write their own land use planning policies, to decide what evidence was needed to support them, and to produce that evidence.

Introduction

This chapter addresses some of the neglected things in neighbourhood planning: the affective, relational, experiential knowledges that previous chapters have shown often get excluded.

As the opening quotation from Oakley NPG member Martin articulates very eloquently, the NPGs felt that rather than neighbourhood planning leading to planners (and the planning system) engaging better with their world of lived experience, it instead drew them, the neighbourhood planners, into a situation in which they had to adopt the language, norms and conventions of a professional community of practice. And within this community, they often felt that they had to defer to the practices of the professionals, even when this conflicted with or excluded their understandings of situations, simply because of their accredited status: “they know that they know what they’re doing, even if they don’t”.

The chapter begins by describing some of the attempts that the NPGs made to engage with experiential knowledge and care for place, and the difficulties they encountered in articulating, capturing and translating them into evidence. I suggest that if a process that is intended to be driven by the community's knowledge of and care for place struggles to engage directly with those matters, then some change of approach is needed. I then draw on the concepts of matters of concern (Latour, 2004b) and matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) to develop a theoretical reflection on what such a change of approach might involve. I propose operationalising these concepts in the production and evaluation of evidence for neighbourhood planning.

Introduction

As exemplified by the opening quotation from Open Source Planning, the Conservative Party Green Paper that formally established the concept of neighbourhood planning, this was promoted as an initiative to transfer power from state to communities. In this chapter I further problematise this characterisation. In Chapter 4 I distinguished neighbourhood planning groups (NPGs) from their neighbourhoods, and described them as enactments of three distinct identities in relation to those neighbourhoods. In Chapter 5 I reviewed one of the key processes through which those identities are enacted, and by which one specific identity comes to dominate the representations produced and performed by the NPG. In this chapter I explore the effects that these enactments have on relations of power. I consider power here not as something that is held (and can therefore be straightforwardly transferred) but as something that is done. And it is done collectively, enacted not by individuals or institutions acting alone, but by the particular configuration of the social and material, human and non-human elements of neighbourhood planning assemblages.

In this chapter I suggest that the creation of the two new actors – the neighbourhood and the NPG – disrupts existing patterns of relations. I show how this disruption enables the NPGs to have effects on policy and decision making that would not otherwise have been possible. However, I then go on to show that the same processes that enable this disruption also reproduce the category of ‘the expert’ and the ‘expert– agency coupling’, which restricts the ability to have effects to those enacted as having expertise. While the NPGs are partially able to inhabit the figure of the expert, they are also decentred from it by accredited professionals in a variety of ways. As the power to act is manifested through the capacity to be enacted as expert, the NPGs are heavily constrained as well as enabled by the disruptions of neighbourhood planning.