Abstract
Laura Tates’s book, Post-Rational Planning: A Solutions-Oriented Call to Justice, is about modes of thinking, understanding and acting other than the rational one that can be used in planning and policy-making. She considers these other modes as ‘post-rational’. What she understands from rationality is basically reliance on scientific and neutral knowledge in decision-making.
Tate has a different style than academics are generally used to; she uses her own drawings, interesting practical examples, and brings together information from a very wide array of resources. Reading it has been an enjoyable experience and it is clear that she has written it with a very positive energy and enthusiasm. Drawing from a highly interdisciplinary research along with author’s own background -both a scholar and a practitioner, the book has a much wider scope than urban planning and is more about public policy in general. The geographical focus is North America, and the primary target audience is planning practitioners, while it may well be of interests for researchers in areas such as urban planning, public administration, public relations, communication, media studies and alike. On the other hand, reading the title of the book, the readers may expect some more in-depth and particularly planning related theoretical discussions on post-rationality as well as more radical suggestions about its adoption in planning. Tate prefers not to dive into such depths. Her literature reviews are rich but generally descriptive. In addition, as the choice of the target audience requires, she intends to be highly practice oriented. In that sense, she provides the reader with practical suggestions about different thinking patterns, practices and pragmatic techniques to supplement the rational approach, which can be used in planning and policy-making. Tate is quite reasonable in that sense and reminds the readers throughout the book that her call is not for a total abandonment of rationality, but for supplementing it. She finally aims to help planners and policy analysts improve their communication with the decision-makers and the wider public. Although these suggestions are useful and different than the conventional research methods used by planners, how far they are post-rational is questionable, since post-rationality is beyond that, including a radical critique to established modes of rational thinking and acting. More engagement with the existing knowledge, for example, of an agonistic approach and practices in planning (Bäcklund and Mäntysalo, 2010; Hillier, 2003; Matilla, 2020; McClymont, 2011, etc.), would further strengthen her contribution. On the other hand, it would be unfair to expect an exhaustive review of this literature from a practice-oriented book.
The book is divided into three parts including nine chapters in total. Each chapter includes information boxes coloured in grey and ends with a summary, again grey, including key lessons entitled ‘Summing up: Take-Aways from This Chapter’.
In the three chapters of Part 1, Tate basically discusses the reasons behind the need to supplement rationality. One of the reasons is the principle of justice. Accordingly, she argues that ‘planners and policy analysts could ultimately be more effective over the longer term (and have more satisfying careers) when also guided by justice, as opposed to neutral rationality alone’ (p. 11). Although Tate gives a literature review on the critique of neutral rationality referring to planning scholars such as Paul Davidoff, Charles Lindblom, John Friedmann and political philosophers such as Charles Taylor, as well as communicative rationality referring mainly to political scientist John Dyrzek and planning scholar Judith Innes, she is not convincing about why it is the rational approach that produces socially unjust outcomes. One question that comes to mind here is: did we not have more socially just outcomes thanks to rational planning in the Welfare State Era, while inequalities increased parallel to its fall in the neoliberal times? Another reason she gives for supplementing rationality is the changing societal needs and problems, such as the rise of populism, the growing mistrust of politicians, and ongoing questions about the future of globalization, which, create new contexts for planners. These new contexts, as she argues, render neutral rationality inadequate and post-rational ways of thinking necessary. This argument is more convincing than the former one, since changing needs will obviously require changing methods of thinking and acting. Chapter 3 is the most convincing one about the inadequacies of the rational approach. It is specifically on scientific evidence and how it might be not so neutral and error-free for it might support existing bias or create new ones using historical examples. It rightfully draws attention to how planning and policy work can purposefully misuse scientific methods and tools. A good example to such misuse from urban planning would be Flyvbjerg’s (1998) influential case study on how rationality of power superseded neutral rationality by misusing and manipulating scientific data for its own purposes. To counter this generation of bias and evidence misuse, what she suggests is using broader knowledge forms and a wider range of evidence sources in planning and policy analysis. Here she gives interesting and useful examples of such sources, such as psychographic research and market segmentation methods to have a better understanding of different societal needs, based on group differences.
Part 2, including 4 chapters, is more on practice and concentrates on learning, communication, and language use. She first discusses the cognitive challenges, such as cognitive busyness, hostility and anxiety that can arise during the interaction between planners, decision-makers and the general public and then provides suggestions for working with such challenges. Using emotionally supportive presentation and speaking approaches or using chunking technique -breaking decisions into more manageable and less intimidating chunks- are among her suggestions. In Chapter 6, Tate makes a rich discussion on metaphor, framing, and narrative construction as language tools of post-rational nature the choice of which, she argues, can improve the way the messages of planners and policy analysts can reach the decision makers. Tate also considers pragmatic techniques for conveying complex information quickly and impactfully, such as picking the salient information and omitting non-salient ones, presenting it through effective summarization and using graphic design techniques. Part 3 is dedicated to media, both social media and published media, as a crucial public communications channel. It has again practical suggestions and warnings for planners and policy analysts, against fake news, information pollution, online manipulations etc. which may distort the communication between the planners and the wider public. Here Tate rightfully draws attention to citizen journalists and local media that make impressive contributions to public knowledge and thereby to democracy. Interestingly, the book does not have a concluding chapter but just ends with the one on media. A concluding chapter with a summary of not take-aways perhaps, but of the main ideas in the book and suggestions for further research would be useful.
With all her suggestions, Tate hopes to help planners and policy analysts improve their public engagement performance for more democratic outcomes. In doing that, she skilfully combines concepts from different disciplines such as cognitive psychology, health, behavioural public administration, and media and gives doable suggestions. These discussions are generally useful and inspiring, and I believe she is obviously aware that it would be naïve to expect that these suggestions will lead to systemic changes, solving only partial problems. This is not a big problem since Tate already sets off with the intention of being rather pragmatic and solution-oriented, as her title suggests right at the very beginning. Yet, the weakness is, especially in Part 2, about her limitation of her focus very much on barriers to dialogue and watering down democratic public engagement into a problem of communication and mutual understanding. This is interesting because she also mentions the power insensitiveness of communicative approaches, referring for example to Jean Hillier and McGuirk, and to the concept of ‘productive tension’, similar to a Mouffean understanding of conflictuality. Moreover, she argues that ‘We must also acknowledge and thoughtfully address the power imbalances which continue to disadvantage marginalized groups’ (p. 168). In that sense, despite her overall aim to be solution oriented, at this particular point, she presents problems without offering solutions. Her suggestions to use of non-scientific sources of evidence, empowerment of the local media might work in that direction, but they are rather general. Be that as it may, we have to be fair to her. Offering solutions to power inequality needs systemic changes that cannot be tackled in a practiced oriented book. Power-sensitive approaches to planning or the proponents of the agonism in planning too hardly go beyond criticizing planners for being insensitive to power imbalances and give practical guidance to address them.
In conclusion, what Tate provides in her book is a wide variety of pragmatic techniques and approaches to improve the communication between planners, decision-makers and the wider public, along with warnings against, for example, the misuse of scientific data. In that sense, she does not present a post-rational alternative to scientific and neutral rationality, although the title can raise such expectations as mentioned above. Her suggestions will not politicize planning, nor they will make it more power-sensitive, which are somewhat common calls that have been raised in the recent discussions in planning theory. On the other hand, her suggestions will be useful for planners in their daily works. If realised, they will improve the mutual understanding between planners and the public. Planning practice needs such grounded suggestions just as it needs insights from theoretical discussions.