Planning has been too scientific

Planning and science

Planning has been 'too scientific' in the sense of trying to project trends and deduce policies from empirical studies of what exists. It is right that diagnosis should come before treatment, but prescriptive plans cannot be derived from scientific studies of what exists. David Hume, the empiricist philosopher, declared that ought cannot be derived from is. His subject was morality. His point has continuing importance for planning: In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with I have always remarked that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find that, instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. The change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence (Hume, 1974 edn. III(i) 1). Take the case of highway planning. Surveys will show the trend in vehicle movements to be rising. Analysis of origins and destinations will show where vehicles come from and whither they are bound. Alternative alignments for new roads can be mapped. Public consultation takes place. The best route is chosen. The road should be built on this alignment. Money will be allocated next year. By imperceptible degrees, highway planners develop the case for new roads. If this mode of reasoning is accepted, similar studies will go on leading to similar conclusions until all the cities in all the world are blacktop deserts with isolated buildings surrounded by cars - standing as bleak monuments to the folly of pseudo-scientific planning [Fig 1.2]. Caption: this is the type of landscape which results from 'scientific' transport planning: predicting demand and then trying to cater for it. In origin, 'to plan' means to make a two-dimensional projection on a plane surface. Science is characterised by the application of reason and observation. They are matchless tools, but of limited efficacy. Plato's analogy of The Cave dealt with the limits to human knowledge and understanding. Men, he suggested, are like prisoners in a cave, able to look only at shadows on the wall: never at the objects which cast the shadows. [Fig 1.3] Plato's Cave Analogy suggests that we live as prisoners, chained in an underground cave, only seeing shadows cast on the cave wall. Nor is modern science able to reach beyond the walls of the cave, though our cave is larger. In the absence of certain knowledge as to why the human race exists and how its members ought to behave, it is necessary to rely on judgement and belief. Can science, for example, advise on whether it is right to let a species of animal, say the Tsetse Fly, become extinct? Our descendants may come to see the twentieth century as the Age of Science. It opened with widespread confidence in the Enlightenment belief that scientific reasoning would usher in a golden age. With ignorance, poverty and disease banished, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse should have been confined to their barracks for evermore. But our confidence was unseated, by two world wars, some 300 lesser wars between 1945 and 1990, and a century of environmental despoliation, in which science and technology saddled the Horsemen [Fig 1.4]. Many people now feel that we live in what George Steiner described as Bluebeard's Castle (Steiner 1971). We keep opening doors to gain knowledge, and in so doing we draw nearer and nearer to that fatal final door which, once opened, will lead to our own destruction. The remedy is not to destroy the Castle of Knowledge. It is to restrain Bluebeard. We must assert the pre-eminence of human values over spurious facts. In planning, rationality must be guided by morality and imagination. Lack of imagination has been a significant failing of scientific planning. The UK government's Chief Planning Inspector wrote that: In particular, at the regional and strategic level, [planning] has been very tentative. Few regional plans or structure plans examine imaginative options for the future, or try to consider in any meaningful way what life in the twenty first century will be like. (Shepley 1995) The plans lack imaginative content.