Seminar 7: New Directions in Planning Theory

This seminar and reading I found was one of most interesting so far out of all the lectures. I think it had a lot of good concepts involved in it. This seminar looked at three major concepts for planning and they were the Communicative Model, New Urbanism and the Just City. All of which had pros and cons in planning practice.

The communicative model is all about having differing viewpoints and allowing participants from the public to join in on the process. It is important use this form of planning because knowledge is socially constructed and therefore are needed to figure out and solve issues. Social interactions also allow for everyone to be involved in the process. The problem with this model is that you may get unjust results and it also takes a lot of time to communicate with people.

New Urbanism looks at the infrastructure more than the people. Kunstler explains that is an area that has all the things needed for a resident within 5 minutes of walking distance. It can be seen as everything such work, recreation and home life are all planned in one area. One of the issues of this type of planning concept is that it has a very narrow view and does not include public participation.

The third concept was the Just City which the idea that a city and town should be a utopia and a planner’s job is to achieve this. It all about getting everyone involved in the process and making city beneficial for everyone. The problem of this concept is that it is hard to define and implement and it is not always possible to get everyone involved. This seminar was very interesting and New Urbanism was one of my favourite concepts that the presenters and the reading discussed.