Invitation to planning practitioners, academics, geographers, students, environmentalists, community activists and individuals to establish a Planners Network Chapter for Ireland.
The Planners Network – the Organisation of Progressive Planning – is a community of professionals, activists, academics and students in North America involved in physical, social, economic and environmental planning in urban and rural areas, and dedicated to ideas and practices that advance radical change in our political and economic systems, through planning.
Since its inception by Chester Hartman in 1975, it has been a voice for progressive professionals and activists who believe that decisions about how land is used, who benefits and who loses, matter profoundly, and that planning should be used as a tool to eliminate the great inequalities of wealth and power in our society, rather than to maintain and justify the status quo. Working with an eclectic mix of other progressives; including those with an interest in environmental justice, community development, housing, and globalisation; it seeks to be an effective political and social force to inform public opinion and public policy, and to provide assistance to those seeking to understand, control, and change the forces which affect their everyday lives. The network hosts regular events and has amassed a wealth of publications, including the wonderfully titled ‘Student Disorientation Guide‘ which should be required reading for all planning students. Outside North America, a Planners Network has been established in the UK who have produced their own manifesto for planning and land reform. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been an equivalent in Ireland.
Over the past ten years, contributors to this blog have documented the central role of planning in the pell-mell urban growth of the Celtic Tiger and the ensuing ruinous property crash, and offered a counterpoint to neoliberalism’s dominant status as political ideology in responding to the crisis. These were heady times, when the fallout from the crisis was visceral and raw and, from within the moment of economic wreckage, there was time, space and inspiration to write and debate transformative alternatives to mainstream urban planning. True to form, however, the economic recovery has been accompanied by an ideological ‘circling of the wagons’ and the swift resurgence of uncritical pro-market, pro-development discourses, inducing reassuring stimuli that the underlying structural problematic in the political-economy has been durably resolved. As blog contributor Cian O’Callaghan wrote back in 2014, for many of us it has been dispiriting to see the collective zeal of post-crisis grassroots civic action dissipate, which seems only likely to set the stage for the next inevitable crisis, with perhaps far worse impacts.
With the publication of the Project Ireland 2040 and the associated Draft Regional Spatial and Economic Strategies, the ideological continuity of neoliberalism has resurfaced more powerfully than ever. Meanwhile, the mainstream professional representative bodies, such as the Irish Planning Institute, have remained comfortably conformist despite a supply-side deregulatory onslaught and the emergence of a powerful, and largely unchallenged, YIMBY sophistry. In a sense, this is unsurprising, as it has never been the prerogative of planners to dwell on planning’s deeper ideological nature and their own political agency, preferring instead to view their role as neutral and routine that transcends politics in pursuit of the ‘common good’. As economic historian Karl Polanyi wrote: “Laissez-faire was planned, planning was not”. Meanwhile, the symptoms of neoliberalism and the irreversible damage inflicted by the politics of endless growth are increasingly writ large in spiralling homelessness; housing unaffordability; longer commuting; inadequate public services; uneven spatial development; rising inequality; growing rates of obesity; political alienation and, above all, climate change and the unfolding global ecological emergency.
If, like me, you believe that there is a renewed need for a platform for forward-thinking progressive voices, or ‘radical planners’, to work together along the lines of the principles of the Planners Network and speak out against the hidden planning rationalities that increase inequalities and injustices, and that contemporary planning practice in Ireland is in need of a thoroughgoing introspection which fundamentally questions its very purpose, get in touch. Such an endeavour may be a hopelessly naïve and quixotic call to arms, and may become more of self-help group, but optimism of the will and all of that!
If interested in collaborating contact me at: gdaly@liverpool.ac.uk and put ‘Planners Network’ in the subject line. You can also leave a comment below or contact me on Twitter.
Gavin Daly
Ireland after NAMA 
April 3, 2019 at 7:05 pm
I found this to be very interesting. Galway is on the cusp of major investment in redevelopment of significant brownfield and regeneration sites in the city centre. Galway City Council says it doesn’t have the resources to prepare statutory Local Area Plans for these areas. Instead, developers have been preparing Framework Plans and Masterplans for individual sites in a piecemeal fashion. In one case there was no public consultation on the developers Framework Plan prior to applying for permission for a major development within the Framework Plan area. In other cases developers are conducting a form of public consultation themselves.
In a presentation entitled “Planning for a Different Future” to the Sustainable Communities and Housing Conference in 2009, the chairman of An Bord Pleanála at that time, John O’Connor, having reflected on the lessons of the Celtic Tiger era, said that the “future must be different”. One of the means John O’Connor proposed to achieve a different future was that there must be “properly adopted LAPs [Local Area Plans] rather than ‘frameworks’ or developer ‘master plans’”. It would seem that we have already forgotten the lessons we should have learnt from the Celtic Tiger era.
April 3, 2019 at 8:31 pm
Gavin
Data doesn’t lie, so I am perplex with your conclusions above.
https://www.cso.ie/px/pxeirestat/statire/SelectVarVal/Define.asp?Maintable=MTM02&PLanguage=0
If you go into the above link and select:
In the top box: Mean Temperature (degrees C)
In the box to the left below, the the orange icon ‘v’, which then selects all the listed Irish weather stations
In the box to the right below, the orange icon ‘v’, which then selects all the monthly data over a period of some sixty years.
Then click the box at the bottom “Show Table”
This then opens a new window with data, on top of which there is a drop down box entitled ‘Graphics’.Leave this as “Line chart” and click the little blue arrow to its right.
Look and contemplate at what you then get opening in a new window. Do you find it surprising that I and others cannot simply take elements of your rhetoric above seriously? Any form of good decision making has to be evidence based and reasoned. Sadly I’m reminded of the Finnish economist Nyberg and his official report of the Banking Crises:
“It is clear that a widespread consensus formed in Ireland around trends, assessments and policies that participants should have realised to be unsustainable or unsound. This section briefly presents two concepts (“Herding” and “Groupthink”) that may help understand why and how so many institutions in Ireland simultaneously made imprudent decisions”.
“Groupthink occurs when people adapt to the beliefs and views of others without real intellectual conviction. A consensus forms without serious consideration of consequences or alternatives, often under overt or imaginary social pressure. Recent studies indicate that tendencies to groupthink may be both stronger and more common than previously thought”.
Simply put, those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat its failures.
April 4, 2019 at 6:13 am
Thanks Pat – but data can lie and can be made to lie! I prefer the term ‘evidence informed’ as data can never be neutral. How you interpret and deploy data inescapably involves the mobilisation of bias and value-rational truth claims and how these are justified depends on your ideological viewpoint e.g. the data you reference is about weather in Ireland, not global climate.
I doubt we will ever agree but you are free to disagree with me whenever you wish! Ultimately, as David Harvey states “the stick to measure what is right and what is not is the most abstract expression of right itself, namely justice”.
April 4, 2019 at 8:05 pm
“Evidence informed” – well now can you please provide me with the data of the global unfolding climate emergency you claim above is happening? I’ve looked at a lot of weather data and I understand the basis for the currently (and in some quarters popular) highly speculative climate hypothesis, which doesn’t remotely match the weather we have been having over the last decades. It is not just me, but many others are also pointing this out, i.e. that it is normal and no different to what our forefathers experienced.
It is also the mark of an educated responsible person that they can reason and provide supporting information for their position. So where is your data that there is an unfolding emergency in the global weather system, which by definition has to be characterised by a level of abnormality, which is outside the range of what we would expect based on historical knowledge? . Do not confuse your politics with evidence based decision making; either the evidence is there and can be provided. But most certainly consensus is not evidence, beliefs are not evidence and computer models are not evidence.
April 5, 2019 at 8:03 am
Hi Pat. I’m not sure if you read my reply. It is ontologically impossible to separate politics, evidence and interpretive ‘truth’. It is precisely the same for you as it is for me. I therefore tend to take a critical realist perspective towards science which acknowledges that human knowledge is falliable but that its effectiveness in explaining reality is not mere accident. I am very open and self-reflexive about my own politics – are you?
In any event, not to get too philosophical about it, I would defer to the work of colleagues in the Irish Climate Analysis and Research UnitS (ICARUS) at Maynooth University and the plethora of international research on the subject of human-forced climate change and global ecological destruction. However, I doubt spending time posting it will change your mind, so lets agree to disagree, politically!
April 28, 2019 at 1:34 pm
Thanks Gavin, I’d like to be included in the Planners Network. I am a corporate member of both IPI and RTPI, and chair the Northern Branch of IPI. I agree we should be more challenging in the profession. Currently working in Dublin on water infrastructure contact me at lauriejmcgee@gmail.com