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Abstract

This paper aims to reinscribe an ethics of care in planning through a conceptual framework which connects the ethics of being caring with the politics of practicing care. We argue that planning’s limited attention to care is an unfortunate legacy of positivist views and their alignment with rationalist moral theories in which care is demoted to the private-domestic sphere and ‘feminine’ emotions while justice is elevated to the public-political sphere and ‘masculine’ reason. The perceived universality, objectivity and rationality of justice seems to have eclipsed the particularity, subjectivity and relationality of care. We suggest that a moral vision is needed in planning that integrates care and justice on both pragmatic and ethical grounds.

Keywords

ethics care justice responsibility attentiveness planning

Introduction

Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Rumi, 1207-1273

The notion of ‘caring’ found renewed traction in our everyday lexicons since the COVID-19 pandemic which not only laid bare the care crisis (Dowling, 2021), but also foregrounded the centrality of care in how we imagine a ‘good city’ and a ‘good life’. Yet in planning, whilst care is implicit in its normative aspirations - such as serving the public interest, creating better places and protecting the environment - debate about the ethics of care has attracted little attention. The terms ‘care’ and ‘caring’ are often used or implied, but care as a concept is either not fully unpacked (Healey, 2023; Metzger, 2014; Sandercock, 2023) or implicitly synonymised with other concepts such as: kindness (Forester, 2021), compassion (Lyles et al., 2018) and love (Porter et al., 2012).

This is intriguing because planning systems in western countries were founded as an integral part of the welfare state which sought to “institutionalise an ethic of care within market societies” and create “caring enclaves” (Smith, 2005: 10) in which the inability to pay would not jeopardize access to public spaces, local amenities, decent homes, and environmental assets. For welfare idealists, within “these care-full locations, co-operation would be valued over competition, burden sharing would be rewarded over self-interest, and a range of social values incompatible with market individualism would be promoted” (Smith, 2005: 10). Despite this origin, while concepts such as ‘just city’ (Feinstein, 2010) and ‘just planning’ (Campbell, 2006) have been widely debated by planning scholars and professionals, there has been limited explicit engagement with concepts such as ‘caring city’ and ‘care-full planning’. Furthermore, the relationship between justice and care has remained elusive in planning theories. Forester (2021: 63) is similarly intrigued about “little mention, and even less analysis, of kindness or compassion” in “the literature on the politics of planning” which focuses primarily on “persistent appeals to equity and justice”. This is a missed opportunity for recognising “care as a transformative ethic that can guide our thinking on what constitutes the just city” (Williams, 2017: 821), and for exploring how “a place-based ethics of care offers possibilities to create and plan for more socially just cities” (Till, 2012: 8).

In contrast to planning, other cognate disciplines (such as human geography, architecture, and urban studies) have drawn on feminist thinking to explore the expanding “landscape of care” that encompasses “the institutional, the domestic, the familial, the community, the public, the voluntary and the private, as well as the transitions within and between them” (Milligan and Wiles, 2010: 738). The multifaceted vistas of this landscape have been examined by a growing body of work on: micro-spaces of care (Conradson, 2003a; England, 2000), uneven geographies of care and responsibilities (Conradson, 2003b; Massey, 2004), unpaid labour of care (Clayton et al., 2015; Jupp, 2016) and its class, ethnic, race and gender dimensions (McDowell, 2004), the symbolic, material, emotional and power relations in care giving and receiving practices (Power, 2020), the post-colonial care across time and space (Raghuram et al., 2009), caring for non-humans (de la Bellacasa, 2017), the ethical architecture (Fitz and Krasny, 2019), and the politics and ethics of caring for places (Cox, 2010; Gabauer et al., 2022; Staeheli and Brown, 2003; Valentine, 2008; Till, 2012).

We argue that the limited attention to the ethics of care in planning literature is not simply an oversight, but rather an intellectual blind-spot which stems from a legacy of positivist views of planning as a technical, rational activity predicated on objectively formulated goals and performed by value-neutral professionals. Despite their widespread criticisms, these persistent conceptions of planning continue to be conveniently aligned with rationalist moral theories which prioritise justice over care in ethical judgements. The perceived universality, objectivity and rationality of the former have rendered it superior to the particularity, subjectivity and relationality of the latter. The “rational lexicons” have undermined the “relational lexicons” in planning and in public policy more widely (Unwin, 2018: 10). Thus, in the prevailing Kantian and Utilitarian inspired moral theories, care is relegated to the private-domestic spheres and conceived as ‘feminine’ emotions, while justice is elevated to the public-political sphere and framed in ‘masculine’ reason (Staeheli and Brown, 2003; Williams, 2017). These binary and hierarchical views of morality are then mapped onto a dualistic spatial division between proximate and local relations of responsibility and care, and distant and global relations of obligation and justice (Barnett, 2005). Furthermore, given the anthropocentric nature of much of rationalist morality, another duality is invoked between humans and non-humans whereby the former are ascribed with rights and justice while the latter remain subservient to humans’ needs and demands (Davoudi, 2012; Whatmore, 2002).

Planning scholars, among others, have provided compelling critiques of the universalist conceptions of justice, their prescribed rules and principles, and their disregard for history and context (Feinstein, 2010; Campbell and Marshall, 1999), and called for “a situated ethical judgment” (Campbell, 2006: 92). However, the primary focus of these critiques is on conceptualisation of justice itself, rather than on care or on the relationship between them. Reflecting on this gap, Crisp and Waite (2022: 2274) argue that “micro-level and relational understanding of interconnectedness of human life remain undeveloped in the concept of Just City” and just planning. Although the critiques of universalist conceptions of justice have highlighted the importance of socio-spatial contexts, they have seldom questioned the primacy of reason (cognitive) over emotion (affective) in ethical judgments. As a result, the prevailing western philosophical traditions of subordinating ethics to epistemic reasoning has remained largely unchallenged in much of these critiques. There are, of course, noteworthy exceptions whereby the importance of emotions in planning decisions and their entanglement with reason are explicitly highlighted (Baum, 2015; Ferreira, 2013; Forester, 2021; Healey, 2023; Lyles et al., 2018; Porter et al., 2012; Sandercock, 2023).

Building on these and taking a lead from Williams' (2017) call for developing an integrated view of care and justice, our aim in this paper is to trouble the prioritisation of justice over care and show how a deeper theoretical understanding of the ethics and politics of care can open new ways of connecting care and justice together and “negotiating a path between the universal and the particular” which has long been the subject of planning debates about ethical judgments (Campbell, 2006: 102). In doing so, we conceptualise care not “simply as a social relation with moral or ethical dimensions” (Popke, 2006: 505) – a view prevalent in much of the writings on care - but rather as a moral and ethical position in and of itself with the potential to foster new ways of our being together and “chase out neoliberal individualism” (Jon, 2020: 339). We also put forward a conceptual framework consisting of two interrelated, yet analytically separated, categories that we call care-full planners and care-full planning. We use the former to discuss the ethics of care at the individual level, and the latter to discuss the practice of caring at the collective / institutional level. Here, we argue for the need to cultivate a moral vision in planning which is founded on an integrated view of justice and care. The framework is meant to be an opening which will hopefully evolve into longer and richer dialogues about care and planning.

The paper is organised under five sections. After this introduction, section two provides a brief overview of rationalist moral theories and their related liberal theories of justice to set the scene for the discussion on how the ethics of care has been developed vis-a-vis these theories and how it differs from them. In section three, we outline the feminist origin of care and its positioning in contextual moral theories to make it a full-fledged ethical standing. In section four, we present our conceptual framework and unpack the relationship between being caring (care-full planner) and practicing care (care-full planning). Section five concludes the paper by calling for the grounding of planning policies, practices and educations in the ethics of care. We suggest that this will not only enrich planning’s field of inquiry, but also enhance planners’ capacity to make ethical judgments in uncertain and contested situations.

Rationalist moral theories and the primacy of reason over emotion

“For many who have never heard of philosophy, let alone of Kant, morality is roughly what Kant said it was.” (MacIntyre, 1998:122)

This provocation indicates the profound influence of Kantian theories and their roots in Plato’s philosophy and the Enlightenment on our understanding of morality. According to these, morality consists of a set of abstract and universally applicable principles against which judgments about right and wrong and good and bad are made by free, autonomous, and rational subjects. Their objectivity lies in maintaining a clear distance between the self and the ‘other’ by way of appealing to the supreme principle of ethical judgement which, following Kant, is the ‘categorical moral imperative’¹ or, following Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the ‘utility’ of outcome calculated on the basis of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’. As MacIntyre puts it, “Kant made morality a cold and unsympathetic exercise in reason and the Utilitarians reduced it to a set of pseudo-scientific calculations that don’t work” (cited in Robinson and Garratt, 2004: 129).

Premised on these conceptions of morality, much of liberal theories of justice since John Rawls have focused on establishing universal principles and addressing questions such as: should resources (economic and environmental) be redistributed according to principles of equality, equity or welfare; should the currency of this redistribution be limited to resources (as per Rawls) or extended to capabilities (as per Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum²); and should cities be “evaluated” against “broadly applicable norms” of democracy, diversity and equity (Feinstein, 2010: 36). Despite their differences, such interventions share a privileging of rationality and reason over feelings and emotions in moral judgement. In this reason-based ‘moral point of view’, there is little room for empathy, compassion, and attentiveness.

Questioning the homogenised, idealised, and universalised principles of liberal justice, feminist scholars, notably Nancy Fraser, Iris Marion Young and Seyla Benhabib, have criticised them for: being “difference blind and unable to address cultural oppression”, and prioritising “the social politics of equality” over “the cultural politics of difference” (Davoudi and Brooks, 2014: 2688). Such understandings position the beneficiary as the ‘general other’, rather than the ‘concrete other’, i.e., “an individual with concrete history, identity and affective-emotional constitution” (Benhabib, 1992: 159). Affective registers that are central to the ethics of care play little parts in the good judgments, as do the “widely shared intuitions of injustice” (Barnett, 2011: 248, emphasis added), or people’s feeling and relational experiences of injustices in their daily lives (Barnett, 2017). As mentioned earlier, the influence of universalist conception of justice on planning has been documented and critiqued by many planning scholars, some of whom have directed their criticisms on how in planning emotions are treated as “a source of biases and distortions” that ought to be eliminated (Hoch, 2006: 367). Adding to their voice, we argue that a disregard for emotions risks dismissing the broader conception of care as a moral position because, if “reasoning and justice are inescapably linked” (Campbell, 2006: 102), so are emphatic emotions and care. This is not to underplay the importance of situated justice in planning, but to call for cultivating a moral vision in planning that combines justice and care, as we elaborate later in section four.

The enduring hold of ‘reason’ on what constitutes ethical judgement is a legacy of Kant’s separation of reason from what he calls ‘inclinations’ of which emotion is the most obvious category. This division is not only “insidious” (Solomon, 1995: 128), but also gender biased because it consigns emotion to ‘feminine’ traits and weaknesses. Indeed, Kant saw women as “incapable of being fully moral because of their reliance on emotions rather than reasons” (cited in Held, 2006: 11). Sigmund Freud (1961 [1925]: 258) went further to claim that “for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men […] they show less of justice than men (because) […] they are more often influenced in their judgment by feeling of affections or hostility”. Puwar (2004: 26) highlights a paradox by showing that, “while women [symbolically] represent justice – for example, the Old Bailey in London and the Statue of Liberty in New York– they are not seen as being capable of actually administering justice”.

While overtly misogynistic views of morality are no longer tenable, emotions continue to be gender biased and bracketed-out from the discussion of ethical judgments even by some critics of liberal theories of justice. These risks perpetuating the claim that, “the infusion of feelings into” our judgment keeps us “from developing a more independent, abstract ethical conceptions in which concerns for others derives from principles of justice rather than from compassion and care” (Gilligan, 1997: 484). Many accounts of public participation in planning have shown how people’s care for places is often dismissed as emotive utterance, subjective and not worthy of consideration in planning decisions (Devine-Wright, 2009). This perpetuates John Locke’s claim that, “move the passions and thereby mislead the judgment” (quoted in Nussbaum, 1999a: 263 original emphasis); a claim that is powerfully challenged by Nussbaum’s “alternative view of knowledge of love” (Nussbaum, 1999a: 262). Dismissing emotions risks confining care to the private, domestic and familial spaces, and partitioning it from the public, political spheres in which justice reigns as superior morality. In the following section we show how these views have been challenged by feminists and post-structural political theorists in their attempt to ground the ethics of care as a moral position in and of itself.

The ethics of care and its feminist origin

“We need an ethics of care, not just care itself” (Held, 2006:11)

The ethics of care has grown out of feminist theories that flourished in the late 1960s (Held, 2006). Although Sarah Ruddick’s essay, Maternal Thinking (1980), was among the pioneering contributions, what turned care into a prominent feature of moral philosophy was the work of a developmental psychologist, Carol Gilligan (1982). She devised her ethics of care when questioning the validity of her colleague Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential cognitive-developmental model. Grounded in Kantian moral theories, Kohlberg (1984) argued that moral maturity proceeded through hierarchical stages that corresponded to moral reasoning. Applying his model to empirical research, Kohlberg claimed that boys achieved higher levels of mature (meaning reason-based) moral judgments than girls. Suspicious of Kohlberg’s standards against which women’s alleged ‘inferior’ morality was measured, Gilligan conducted her own study showing that women and men simply followed different paths to moral development. While women’s “different voice” represents “an ethic of care”, men express “an ethic of justice” without one being superior to the other. In her ethic of care,

“the moral problem arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights and requires for its resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rules.” (Gilligan, 1982: 19, emphasis added).

In this passage, Gilligan proposes three fundamental features which distinguish her ethic of care from Kohlberg’s ethic of justice. Firstly, the moral concepts of care ethics are responsibility and relationships, rather than rights and rules. Secondly, its morality is particular and situated rather than universal and abstract, and, thirdly, it is manifested as a practice rather than a set of principles. These features have remained prominent in much of the subsequent definitions of care ethics notably by its key proponent, Joan Tronto who sums them up by stating that, “In Gilligan’s ‘different voice’ morality is not grounded in universal, abstract principles but in the daily experiences and moral problems of real people in their everyday lives” (Tronto, 1987: 648). They have also informed the development of our proposed conceptual framework that we discuss in section four.

While Gilligan’s work raised “caring, nurturing, and the maintenance of interpersonal relationships to the status of foundational moral importance” (Friedman, 1993: 147), her focus on ‘female morality’ inadvertently deepened the gendered separation of care and justice. As such, it has been criticised by feminist scholars for treating women as a homogenous group with a feminine focus on care and, hence, pushing them further into (un)paid caregiving roles. Despite Gilligan’s rejection of a gendered division of morality, her work is still interpreted by some as a female model of moral development (Okin, 1989). To redress this and prevent the “voice of care” (Nussbaum, 1999b: 13) from being “dismissed as a parochial concern of some misguided women” (Tronto, 1987: 656), political theorists have engaged with it not as an exclusive domain of female morality, but as the basis for an alternative ethics which can “enlighten our entire way of collective and individual being” (Milligan and Wiles, 2010: 743). Much of this work is inspired by Tronto's (1987: 658) conceptualisation of care as a form of contextual moral theory that puts the emphasis on the complexity of a given situation to which our “moral imagination, character, and actions must respond”.

Here, prescribing ‘categorical moral imperatives’ (as per Kant) and establishing universal principles of justice (as per liberal theorists) are seen as illusory tasks. Morality is seen not as “the recitation of abstract principles”, but as being “situated concretely […] for particular actors in a particular society” and particular time and space (Tronto, 1987:658). A prominent example of contextual moral theories is Aristotle’s virtue ethic which some consider to be a predecessor to the ethics of care (Held, 2006). The emphasis on context resonates with the abovementioned critiques of liberal theories of justice and is clearly reflected in Young’s (1990: 104) suggestion that, “it is impossible to reason about substantive moral issues without understanding their substance, which always presupposes some particular social and historical context”. Similarly, Campbell (2006) advocates a situated understanding of justice in planning which takes account of the “messy and contingent ways in which justice is practised” (Williams, 2017: 824).

However, the ethics of care goes beyond contextual sensitivities and attends to the crucial role of feelings and emotions in ethical judgments. Foregrounding emotions is not without precedence. It can be found in Adam Smith’s appeal to sympathy - “our ability and desire to put ourselves in others’ shoes” - in moral judgement (Ure 214: 230), and David Hume’s suggestion that “morality is more properly felt than judged of” and “moral judgments […] cannot be judgments of reason because reason can never move us to action, while the whole point and purpose of the use of moral judgments is to guide our actions” (cited in MacIntyre, 1998: 123).

As we mentioned earlier, a key motivation for feminist scholars to position care in moral theories has been to trouble the feminisation and domestication of care and to articulate that caring is not merely a feminine sensibility or belongs exclusively to women’s morality but is the essence of what makes us all human. Building on these insights and motivations, we propose a conceptual framework for the ethics and practice of care in planning. We hope this might serve as an opening for further debates.

Conceptualising care in planning

The questions of what moves us to act and what happens in the passage from being caring to actually giving care have generated a rich and diverse debate often with a reference to the distinction made by Noddings (1984) between caring about and caring for to which Fisher and Tronto (1990) added two other dimensions: care giving and care receiving. In developing our framework (shown in Figure 1), we have consolidated these four dimensions into two interrelated, yet analytically separated, categories of being caring (the ethics of care) and practicing care (the politics of care). The former refers to the ethical, affective and inter-subjective relations of caring about and caring for. The latter refers to the political, social and institutional relations of care giving and care receiving. Translated into planning, the former can be called care-full planners (as individuals) and the latter care-full planning (as a set of institutions and structures). In the following two sub-sections we unpack these in turn and show how their interplay provides a new way of conceptualising the relationship between care and justice not as dualistic, but as complementary ethics with potential to enrich planning thoughts and expand planners’ moral capacity for making decisions in increasingly challenging and uncertain contexts.

Figure 1.

A conceptual framework for the ethics and politics of care in planning. Source: Authors’ own drawing on Fisher and Tronto’s (1990) four dimensions of care.

Being caring: Care-full planners

“We are always One-for-the-Other.” (Levinas, 1981: 135)

Fisher and Tronto's (1990: 40) much-cited definition of care as “a species activity” implies that caring is a fundamental feature of what makes us human. This felt and existential understanding of our responsibility to “maintain, continue and repair our world” (ibid.) is reiterated by post-structural theorists, notably Emmanuel Levinas. Challenging liberal philosophies’ subordination of ethics and moral responsibility to epistemic reasoning, he considers the ethical as “prima philosophia”, meaning that ethical responsibility is “the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity” (Levinas, 1985: 95); it is what makes us who we are. Engaging with Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world, he posits that, “my ethical relation of love for the other stems from the fact that the self cannot survive by itself alone, cannot find meaning within its own being-in-the-world” (Levinas and Kearney, 1986: 24).

For Levinas, ethics takes place not at the level of consciousness, but at the level of pre-reflective sentience or sensibility. It is “built into human relations” prior to “other forms of relating such as knowing or perceiving” (Barnett, 2005: 8). As Critchley (1999: 239) puts it, “the Levinasian ethical subject is a sentient self (un soi sentant) before being a thinking ego (un moi pensant)”. We are always-already responsible (caring) towards the other and our bond with the other is proximate, affective and embodied. Here, proximity does not correspond to some forms of Cartesian distance. Instead, it refers to the immediacy of the responsibility³ that arises spontaneously from our encounter with the other. As Levinas (1985: 96) puts it, “the other is not simply close to me in space, or close like a parent, but he [sic] approaches me essentially insofar as I feel myself […] responsible for him [sic]”. This implies that our ethical relationship does not have to diminish “by the contingencies of geographical location” (Popke, 2003: 304) and our caring about and caring for others does not have to be conditioned by spatial or temporal distance. Moreover, for Levinas caring relations are “irreducibly asymmetric” and premised on an “absolute and inviolable responsibility for the Other”. So, any attempts to rationalise, justify or calculate care in terms of obligation or even reciprocity would negate it (Barnett, 2005: 8). It is “a responsibility that goes beyond what I may or may not have done to the Other or whatever acts I may or may not have committed, as if I were devoted to the other man before being devoted to myself” (Levinas, 1989: 83). It is this always-already being-toward-another which is at the heart of Levinasian ethics of care.

Complementing Levinas’ dyadic, one-to-one relations of responsibility, Jon-Luc Nancy (1991) has shifted the emphasis from a singular other to plural others. He suggests that, to exist is not to co-exist, but to be responsible to other beings (plural) as the condition of our existence, because ‘being-in-the-world’ is not simply being-with others (as Heidegger suggests) but, being-in-common with others as a collective. The ethics of care is premised on acknowledging this shared being and realising that not only humans are interdependent, but also all humans and non-humans are interconnected. Such an ontology underpins many indigenous philosophies (Sandercock, 2024). For example, some Brazilian communities understand themselves as ‘nature’ and “their actions seek to return nature to nature itself” (Iran Neves OrdÔnio Xukuru, cited in Vega Centeno and Desmaison, 2023: 47). In the African ethics of Ubunto - a value system which reinforce reciprocity and mutuality- “a person is a person through other people” and other beings (Eze, 2010: 190). Similarly, drawing on her work with Australian Aborigines, Bird Rose (1999: 181, 185) argues that “listening to Indigenous people in an ethic of situated availability throws open a world of connection and responsibility”; a world in which “a dialogical approach to connection impels one to work to realize the well-being of others”.

Based on these insights, an ethical subject - such as a care-full planner - can been as an individual who has an attitude, a disposition, a virtue, or a “habit of mind to care” (Tronto, 1993: 127). Their ethical responsibility is assumed rather than rationally accepted or autonomously chosen (Barnett, 2005). Here lies the difference between justice and care. Drawing on Gilligan’s (1982: 73–74) distinction between “the morality of rights” and “the morality of responsibility”, Tronto (1993) suggests that justice is an obligation-based ethics while care is a responsibility-based ethics (cited in Edwards, 2009: 234). In the former, there is a sense of detachment which positions us as free, rational, and autonomous moral agents capable of working out what obligations, if any, we have to others and to the world before making an objective decision about whether and how we ought to fulfil them. In the latter, we are seen as relationally involved with others and presupposing a sense of “responsibility to discern and alleviate the […] troubles of this world” (Gilligan, 1982: 509). Our responses to the others’ needs are ‘automatic’ without prior justification. Therefore, for care-full planners the central moral question is not “What, if anything, do I owe to others? but rather – How can I best meet my caring responsibilities” (Tronto, 1993: 137) towards people, places, and planet.

While there is no singular answer to the above question of ‘how can I’, one productive route is to follow Tronto’s (1993) suggestion that to meet our caring responsibilities, we need to be attentive to the needs of others. This is not the same as simply ‘paying attention’ to them. Attentiveness involves “active attention” which “emanates from the self and is […] aimed at creating space for others to enter and relationship to flourish” (Sevenhuijsen, 2014: 5). Simone Weil similarly asserts that being attentive requires ‘waiting’ and suspending our thoughts to allow others to enter (cited in Zaretsky, 2021). It requires “holding back” our suppositions and ideas so that we “acknowledge the otherness of the other” (Sevenhuijsen, 2014: 3) because, understanding others “comes only when we let go of our self and allow the other to grab our full attention” (Weil cited in Zaretsky, 2021: 47). This opening is a rupture and “doesn’t proceed from a preconceived idea about what we will discover when we engage in it” (Sevenhuijsen, 2014: 8). But, regardless of whether it brings pain or pleasure, being attentive to others’ needs is the first necessary step towards care giving. Iris Marion Young (1990) calls it ‘asymmetrical reciprocity’, i.e. being “open to everyone’s unique, embodied Subjectivity […] and existence which cannot be reduced to that of others” (Sevenhuijsen, 2003: 186) rather than assuming that we can see the world through the eyes of others or stand in others’ shoes.

We will come back to how attentiveness, as a core value of the ethics of care, can be cultivated in planning processes and practices. Here, we need to emphasise that as soon as we reflect on the ‘how can I’ question, we, as ethical subjects, are not only a Levinasian sentient self, but also a thinking ego. Our emotions meet our cognition and our assumed responsibility towards others becomes profoundly conditioned by our social, cultural, political contexts. As planners, we need to negotiate the complex ethical environments in which we operate, and in doing so, our caring attitudes become shaped by our professional codes of conduct and a myriad of rules, regulations and institutional norms, structures and procedures. As a UK planner put it, “everybody is under so much pressure just to tick the box and then hand things through” (quoted in Slade et al., 2018: 32). There is, therefore, no single, uniform ethical subject called care-full planner, but a plurality of care-full planners with different, context-dependent, and evolving conceptions of what is ‘good’ care and how it ought to be acted upon and practiced. Such plurality is reflected in planners' contrasting views of, for example, the value of public participation in planning, as shown in the following three statements (quoted in Clifford, 2022: 97-98):

“It’s not important to me personally at all quite frankly. I could do without the buggers”.

“Well, I regard it as […] absolutely vital. I think sort of the old style of hierarchical […] things emerging from the darkened rooms is absolute poison and it shouldn’t have happened […] you couldn’t imagine planning without participation”.

“There’s a sort of a love/hate relationship on public participation”.

Practicing care: Care-full planning

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” (Weil, 1942 n.p.)

The passage from being caring to practicing care is paved with tensions, power, and politics. As we move from one to the other, our inter-subjective relations of care, responsibility, and attention are confronted with what Levinas, himself, calls “the political world of […] government, institutions, […] committees” (Levinas and Kearney, 1986: 29). In these messy and contested worlds, practice of caring is fraught with “inner contradictions, conflicts, frustration” (Tronto, 1998: 17) as well as asymmetrical and potentially paternalistic power relations. That is why Tronto warns against “despairing or romanticising care” (1998: 17). The world of planning epitomises such contentions. It is a key site in which tensions are played out and through which different and competing responsibilities towards multiple others across time, space and species are mediated and consolidated. It is the space in which emotions and reasons become entangled and questions of “how far should we care” (Smith, 1998: 16) and what counts as ‘good’ care’, for whom and by whom are negotiated and contested.

These social and political contestations necessitate the integration of justice and care; and not just on pragmatic grounds (Hoch, 2006), but also on ethical grounds because the Levinasian pure responsibility is always “in danger of remaining a pious and irresponsible desire […] and of even being perverted at any moment” (Derrida, 2001: 22-23). This failure to act upon our caring responsibilities is not simply a practical failure but an ethical one. For Tronto, lack of competence (another core value of the ethics of care) is “not only a technical problem, but a moral problem” (Tronto, 1998: 17). Furthermore, the action-oriented ethics of care means that our ethical responsibilities are always-already “becoming political” (Derrida, 1999: 99), and “the call of the Other enjoins an ethics and politics of decision” (Popke, 2003: 308). This offers a new way of thinking about care and justice not as oppositional ethics but as co-constitutive of any situated ethical judgments to the extent that one without the other risks leading to moral blindness, as we elaborate below.

Without justice, caring for ourselves and our nearest and dearest may stop us from caring for strangers in far-away places and times. Practicing care can become parochial, paternalistic and disempowering. The scalar tension in practicing care is often invoked in planners’ responsibility to serve ‘the public interest’. Without justice, such a responsibility can become confined to the specific interest of specific people in a specific place. This is clealry shown in the following statement by a planner from Southwest of England, highlighting the tension between house building and protecting green fields:

“If you’re elected to look after the residents of South Gloucestershire, you’re trying to protect their green fields, their greenbelt, if you’re elected to look after the people who live in Bristol, you want to solve the housing crisis and give somebody a chance to get on the market.” (quoted in Slade et al., 2018: 12)

Furthermore, care without justice can increase the inequity in care giving and care receiving and lead to what Tronto calls “privileged irresponsibility”; i.e. allowing “those who are relatively privileged” to excuse themselves from responsibility and simply “ignore certain forms of hardships that they do not face” (Tronto, 1993: 120). In the above example, those who have the privilege of owning a house may abdicate their responsibility for those who cannot afford to own or rent one. Thus, care without justice risks “quietly acquiescing to a system that creates ever more” hardships (Borg, 2001: 301).

Without care, on the other hand, principles of justice risk overlooking or dismissing the situated injustices that people feel and experience in their everyday life. As Solomon (1995: 127) puts it, “without (an) empathetic perspective, there can be no adequate conception of justice”. An overemphasis on rational conceptions of justice risks crowding out emotions and sidelining the ethics of care. With this in mind, Unwin (2018) urges us to be ‘bilingual’; to not only use the rational lexicons of metrics, value added, and performance indicators, but also the relational lexicons of identity, belonging, and kindness.

Care-full planning is, thus, premised on a moral vision that combines care and justice on both pragmatic and ethical grounds. It enjoins planners’ responsibilities as well as obligations towards others. Care-full planning is that which encourages, enables and cultivates ways of enacting that moral vision and providing the conditions of possibilities for care-full planners to effectively act upon their ‘habit of mind to care’ and best meet their caring responsibilities. As we mentioned earlier, this requires embedding a culture of attentiveness - to the needs of people, places and planet - in planning processes and practices by proactively engaging in activities such as: presence, deep seeing and listening, thoughtful speaking, honouring intuitions, recognition of plurality, reliability and accountability (Sevenhuijsen, 2014). Most of these are familiar to planners and have long been discussed in planning literature particularly in relation to the search for meaningful participation in planning decisions and for pursuing communicative and collaborative planning. Among these activities the art of seeing and listening stands out as a core competence for being attentive to the needs of others. More than thirty years ago, Forester (1989: 109) suggested that “listening is crucial if we are to learn what others care about or fear, what common interests we might share, what arguments or strategies or offers we might try tomorrow”. It enables us to delve “further in” on a specific issue rather than “abstracting out the relevant moral principles” (Edwards, 2009: 232). These activities also resonate with previously invoked expectations from, for example, reflexive practitioners, just planners and advocacy planners. There is, therefore, no need to reiterate them here. Instead, it is important to emphasize that like any other attributes and expectations, attentiveness should not be read as an all-encompassing, fixed, or universal characteristic of care-full planners or care-full planning, but rather as one productive way to foster a situated and relational ethic and practice of care in planning. It also helps to foreground the moral dilemmas that planners often face when their stipulated professional duties come into conflict with their felt ethical responsibilities.

In England, as in many other places, such a conflict has been on the rise due to the ongoing neo-liberalisation of planning which, among other things, has largely evacuated care from its policies, processes and practices and led to demoralisation of planners and alienation of those in whose name they plan (RTPI, 2023). For example, neoliberal austerity measures and the cutbacks in the resources for planning have led to revocation of the position of public sector-based community planners whose role was to see, to listen, and to be attentive to communities’ needs. Even limited forms of community engagements are increasingly outsourced and sparse (Clifford et al., 2019). Consecutive reforms of the planning system in England with an emphasis on deregulation and targets have jeopardised its democratic legitimacy and credibility and created widespread mistrust of both planning and local governments more broadly. As a planner put it, “targets were one of the worst things to happen to planning in many years” (quoted in Clifford, 2022: 94). This has been compounded by the attempts to depoliticise planning by an over-emphasis on the so-called evidence-based approach. Facts and figures are increasingly demanded from planners as a way of evicting empathy, compassion and care out of planning in the name of speeding up decision-making processes. In the words of a planner, “if you’re not careful you’ll end up valuing the measurable rather than trying to measure the valuable” (quoted in Clifford, 2022: 93).

Left unchecked, these trends risk creating care-less planning systems in which ethical judgments become subordinated to highly selective epistemic reasoning that despite being cloaked with objectivity often serve particular ideological goals. They also risk widening the gap between what people care about and what planners end up doing. There is, however, strong resistance to these trends from professional planners who seek to carve out a space for practicing care and justice often in the most difficult of circumstances. For example, a UK planner recalls her “proudest achievements” to be when she manged to “persuade a very angry planning committee and my manager and his manager and his manager up to the chief exec … to back an application that we had for a drug rehabilitation centre in the town centre. I think it was the right thing to do morally” (quoted in Clifford, 2022: 98).

Inspired by such acts of defiance, our call for care-full planning is, in many ways, a call for resisting neo-liberalisation which privileges individualism and dismisses relations of care as belonging to the private and domestic realm of gendered emotions. By putting forward a broader conception of the ethics and politics of care in planning, our aim is to disrupt such long established yet less visible power structures.

Conclusions

“It is time for us to give up organising the world in neoliberal terms and trying to find ways to squeeze care into that worldview […]. When people are reminded that they are not just economic actors, but homines curans as well, there is a greater frame within which the hard work of explaining that ‘there is an alternative’ can begin. We need now to stop being dazzled by neoliberal forms of resilience and, instead, have the courage ourselves to return to a forestalled alternative future, one in which care truly matters.” (Tronto, 2017: 40)

Tronto’s call to see ourselves not merely as homo economicus but as caring people resonates with our motivation for this paper and its emphasis on the vital role played by empathic emotions, care and responsibility in the way we plan and make planning decisions. The paper is meant to serve as an opening and invitation to “reimagine the soul of planning” (Sandercock, 2024, n.p.) and its aspiration to care about and care for other people, places, and planet. By situating care not simply as a social relation with moral dimensions but as a moral position in and of itself, we troubled the persisting prioritisation of justice over care in ethical judgments and challenged its paternalistic foundations in rationalist moral theories. We showed how care has been relegated to the private and domestic realm of feminine emotions while justice has been elevated to the public, political realm of ‘masculine’ reason, and discussed how this separation can be challenged by drawing on a relational ontology advocated in the feminist and poststructuralist ethics of care and responsibility.

In our attempt to reinscribe an ethics of care into planning, we proposed a conceptual framework made of two interrelated categories: being caring (the ethics of caring about and caring for) and practicing care (the politics of care giving and care receiving). We used the former to conceptualise what it means to be a care-full planner (as an individual) and used the latter to conceptualise what it takes to develop care-full planning (as a set of institutions), with attentiveness being an essential feature of both being caring and practicing care. We used the framework to provide a new avenue for developing a moral vision that brings together care and justice on both pragmatic and ethical grounds, showing how one without the other can lead us to moral blindness.

Attending to the ethics of care is particularly important for planning given that planners intervene in social and spatial processes whose uncertainty and complexity always exceed predetermined formulations. The more uncertain the context in and upon which they operate, the more pressing their ethical responsibility is towards others across time, space, and species. We acknowledge that moving towards a more care-full planning is becoming increasingly challenging in the contemporary neoliberal conditions whereby carelessness has become prevalent. However, as Tronto suggests in the opening quote of this section, we cannot give-up being caring and practicing care, not least because the future of planet and our survival depend on it, and that is what many planners try to do daily despite facing significant institutional challenges, as our above examples show. Indeed, our call for planning to engage more centrally with care ethics is a call to resist the expanding neoliberalisation of planning and re-politicise it by inscribing an irrecusable responsibility into our planning decisions, one that cannot be wished away by abstract principles, formulaic policies, and bureaucratic procedures. The call for care-full planning also involves decentring patriarchal forms of power in planning, seeking to move past continuing dominant western worldviews, and embrace the deep sense of being-in-common-in-the-word that already exists in many non-western cultures that are often rendered ‘elsewhere’.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the participants of the following events for their valuable feedback and inputs into an earlier version of this paper: Urban Planning and Design Seminar, 14 February 2024, Newcastle University; AESOP Conference, 4-8 July 2024, Paris; and, UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference, 2-4 September 2024, Reading. We also owe thanks to the Editor of this journal and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions to improve the paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Simin Davoudi

Notes

Author biographies

Simin Davoudi holds the Chair of Town Planning in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, and is Co-Director of Newcastle University’s Centre for Researching Cities. She is Honorary Member and former President of AESOP, Fellow of the RTPI, Trustee of the Academy of Social Sciences and of TCPA, and a former member of the ESRC Strategic Advisory Network. She has held visiting professorships at universities in the USA (Virginia Tech), the Netherlands (Uni of Amsterdam & Nijmegen), Sweden (BTH), Australia (RMIT), Finland (Tampere Uni.) and Austria (BOKU), and served as expert advisor for several UK government departments, EU directorate generals, research councils in the UK and Europe, various planning schools and international research projects. Simin has undertaken over 35 research projects funded by international, European and UK research funding bodies and has over 200 academic publications.

Emma Ormerod is a Senior Lecturer in Economic Geography in the Centre for Urban and Regional Development (CURDS) in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology at Newcastle University. Her research interests lie in raising critical questions about sub-national governing, politics and power. Within this, she currently has two main strands of research: firstly, investigating the relationship between housing and the economy through increasingly entrepreneurial forms of housing governance (raising critical questions about transparency, accountability, ‘publicness’, politics and wider democracy) and secondly, investigating gender inequality in local and regional development (raising critical questions about place leadership, devolution and power). Her research interests straddle urban planning, geography and housing studies and have been shaped though her previous ten-year career in town planning.

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‘Care-full’ planning: Towards an ethics and politics of care in planning

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Rationalist moral theories and the primacy of reason over emotion

The ethics of care and its feminist origin

Conceptualising care in planning

Being caring: Care-full planners

Practicing care: Care-full planning

Conclusions

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biographies

References