Power, virtue and hermeneutics : planning for difference and diversity

Abstract

This thesis considers the modern discipline of planning. It suggests that one of its greatest strengths lies in the application by its practitioners of phronesis (practical wisdom) for action towards nature and the human condition. After a case study - Auckland City Council's Britomart Development - where phronesis and local democratic debate is forgone in the instrumental seeking of bureaucratic efficiency, this thesis develops an argument for a discourse based approach to planning predicated on environmental phronesis and a virtue based epistemology for good practice. This thesis suggests that Habermas's critical theory, on which most communicative planning theory is grounded, has an underlying assumption that explicitly promotes European cultural imperialism. An imperialist consensus that lacks an ethic for respect for nature and the human 'other'. It is a modernist theory that disavows the intrinsic situation of different groups in modern society. It is a theory that does not fully address the issue of power. An alternative communicative planning approach is suggested. This approach draws on non-modernist European critical and post-structural thinkers. The text commences with a discussion of the hermeneutics of suspicion - Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault. The text then unwinds into a hermeneutics of tradition/necessity - Gadamer -and finally puts forward a hermeneutics of action. It also draws on aspects of the neo- pragmatic authors - Rorty, Bernstein, Harper and Stein from their source in Dewey and Pierce. It importantly draws on the feminist philosophical and planning thought of Benhabib, Hillier, Innes, Nussbaum, Plumwood, Sandercock, Young and Zagzebski. It also touches on the 'practice theory' of Giddens, Lyotard, Taylor and Mouffe; while trying to avoid their rigour of Platonic rules shaping agency. It is a hermeneutic planning approach that acknowledges Habermas's modernity, while pragmatically attempting to remove its constraints of universality and consensus by incorporating into it an acceptance of the enchanted play created by difference and diversity. It is an approach which also centrally draws on Foucault to address power. Finally, it is an approach that intrinsically values concepts of care, feelings and 'the other' as a part of nature.