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A deep exploration on how questions of time and its organisation affect planning practice, this book is aimed at public and private planning practitioners, national and local politicians and policymakers involved in planning, academics and students studying planning and related disciplines.
It presents time as a pervasive form of power that is used to shape democratic practices, and questions ‘project speed’: where time to think, deliberate and plan has been squeezed. The authors demonstrate the many benefits of slow planning for the key participants, multiple interests and planning system overall.
The chapter considers the role of time, public interest and deliberative democracy in relation to how planning inputs are organised and managed. In doing so, it considers the wider ‘public interest’ justification for planning to meet a range of present and future needs, and the role of democratic processes and deliberation as a means to enable ‘good’ planning. These are discussed in view of the implications of, and linkages with, time as a resource and the aims of planning, with consideration of the processes and tools available to foster proper time for planning. Care to sustain appropriate deliberative practices is linked to the act of planning itself as a participatory undertaking rather than an adjunct to public engagement, which is often offered under narrow terms and reflects attempts to orchestrate inputs. The challenges to enabling more deliberative approaches are considered in relation to critiques of (post-)democratic citizenship, competing values within increasingly pluralist societies and the unequal operation of power relations. Despite these issues, the case is made that enabling deliberation is an important component of good planning and should form a key part of the normative principles underpinning planning systems.
The chapter highlights that neoliberal discourses have a particular prominence and influence on political and economic thought and policy in the UK. The thinking behind neoliberal policy places time firmly in view as something to be ‘managed’ in order for ‘efficiency’ to be assured and ‘delay’ minimised. This view stresses that business and service imperatives are promoted in governmental policy generally and through planning policy more specifically. The chapter presents a discussion of planning and the role of time in a neoliberalised policy environment, and outlines the idea of ‘project speed’, cited to focus attention on the political project of reforming planning in the English case. It shows that there have been concerted efforts to orient planning timescapes not necessarily in service of good planning or of supporting democratic accountability but instead to primarily achieve growth. We view the reforms promoted by waves of neoliberalisation and ‘project speed’ over a longer period as attempts to control the present and future. Both the use of political time to service these agendas and the wider temporal politics of growth are questioned as effective long-term strategies in aiding good processes and/or outcomes.
This chapter provides a deep exposition of time and practice as conceptualised in the wider social sciences. It presents a review of how time has been theorised in social theory, drawing on key thinkers who emphasise the role of time in shaping social and institutional practices across capitalist economic systems, interpersonal power relations and political strategies. In considering this range, the chapter draws on a number of theorists’ work, notably, Pierre Bourdieu, Barbara Adam, Helga Nowotny and Nomi Lazar, whose ideas are presented as key in highlighting the operation of power, political strategy and the relationship of time to practice (and vice versa). This sets out a framework for analysis and provides both an insight and a guide to understanding the multiple temporalities of planning and how timescapes structure practice. By considering the use and organisation of time in organising how planning is practised and who is involved, the recognition that planning itself produces particular futures is brought into view. Key theoretical ideas are used specifically to examine, in later chapters, the way time is organised and deployed as a tool to exert control in the planning system in England.
This final chapter summarises the main arguments of the book and argues for a more reflective planning and practice that takes time and its implications more seriously. It reflects on planning timescapes as oriented towards neoliberal speed-growth agendas, such as project speed, in order to assist in problematising existing approach(es) to planning. In doings so, the case is made that there is much more at stake than simply whether planning is ‘fast’ or ‘slow’; instead, far greater emphasis is required about what we are planning for and why. A reset of planning systems away from short-term political and business agendas and towards considering longer-term challenges requires a rethinking of normative principles and overall goals, as well as, it follows, a reshaping of the timescape(s) of planning in order to fashion proper time(s). This assemblage should feature the central tenets of inclusion, deliberation and public interest as design principles for planning systems, processes and practices. How time is conceptualised, challenged, managed and practised by different actors with a stake in planning and its outcomes appears critical to just, sustainable futures. It concludes by outlining a research agenda in which understandings of time in and for planning can be further developed to advance practice.
This introductory chapter provides an initial grounding for the rationale, aims and scope of the book. It also indicates why this topic area should be embraced and absorbed in planning, and how this is useful for providing a deeper understanding of time in practice and the impact of time on practice. The consideration of time in relation to planning is an obvious one: planning is critically concerned with time as an activity in creating plans and policies for the present and future. Yet, beyond such seemingly self-evident claims and understandings of the importance of time, we need to consider the concept much more deeply to appreciate the profound role that time and ‘timescaping’ plays in structuring society, economies and politics, as well as for understanding how temporalisation shapes planning, which in turn shapes the experience of planning. In this respect, time has often been an obscure or uncritically accepted part of discourses shaping planning. This lays the foundations for exploring the contention that time, in its deployment both rhetorically and practically, can have profound impacts on both planning processes and outcomes.
With the book’s evidence in hand, this concluding chapter first synthesizes how everyday condo living harbours risks for the high-rise condo home, especially in the context of substandard condo design and construction quality. Legal scholar Michael Heller’s anticommons thesis provides a helpful way to conceptualize an additional potential risk of underuse associated with the ‘sharing’ of some common property elements in condominium. Stepping back, this chapter then considers the prospects for high-rise condo futures in light of these risks. It delivers two sets of provocations informed by this book’s findings on the impacts for homemaking of poor quality high-rise housing and owner/renter relations. These provocations are intended to promote discussion and perhaps action for brighter urban condo futures. This latter task is identified as far from straightforward, however, with recent optimism expressed by urban scholars about condominium’s prospects subsequently argued to be premature or potentially misplaced.
This chapter sets out a property-sensitive conceptual framework for examining home which better accounts for the way home is practised in propertied landscapes. Drawing on legal geography’s understanding of everyday property, the framework captures how perceptions and practices of property inform homemaking. It then provides a revised conspectus of contemporary high-rise condo living by rereading relevant housing and urban literatures through this framework. This review serves two purposes. First, it synthesizes extant understandings of the lived experience of (high-rise) condo housing and identifies various omissions, including of the socio-territorial dynamics behind everyday condo living. Second, it tables evidence of condo owners and renters’ divergent homemaking experiences. It shows that despite some recognition that internal tenure-based inequalities riddle condo life, these have not been systematically explored from owners’ or renters’, perspectives, leaving unknown their implications for the condo home.
This chapter explores the private unit’s borders and introduces territorial incursions as another constraint or pressure point for condo homemaking. It identifies how residents engage in socio-territorial practices of boundary-management in response to repeated visual, acoustic, olfactory and material breaches into their private units. This chapter shows these private borders operate as intensive, often porous zones of physical contact between residents’ condo units, especially where design and construction is subpar and as poor zones of social interaction. Residents’ interpretation of co-residents’ incursions as unreasonable contribute to the construction of co-residents, and renters especially, as ‘bad’ neighbours. These bordering dynamics undermine the condo home, creating perceived nuisance and diminishing residents’ (sense of) territorial control. Residents independently mediate their private interests with private judgements about what will be non-invasive to co-residents, with recourse to formal governance rules and agents relatively limited. This chapter corroborates how informal local working rules circumscribe condo homemaking.
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Condominium and comparable legal architectures make vertical urban growth possible, but do we really understand the social implications of restructuring city land ownership in this way?
In this book geographer and architect Nethercote enters the condo tower to explore the hidden social and territorial dynamics of private vertical communities. Informed by residents’ accounts of Australian high-rise living, this book shows how legal and physical architectures fuse in ways that jeopardise residents’ experience of home and stigmatise renters.
As cities sprawl skywards and private renting expands, this compelling geographic analysis of property identifies high-rise development’s overlooked hand in social segregation and urban fragmentation, and raises bold questions about the condominium’s prospects.
