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Insurgencies: Essay in Planning Theory

Insurgencies is a collection of ten reprints by John Friedmann, one of the most influential scholars in planning theory. Friedmann takes the reader on an intellectual journey from 1973 to 2010. Each chapter is framed with commentary. Friedmann provides reflection about his motivation at the time of writing the original piece, as well as current critique. The chapters end with study questions to help the reader review the key ideas and to push discussion beyond them. The book covers transactive planning, civil society, the “good” city, radical planning and planning theory. The book begins with transactive planning. Friedmann argues that new communication practices can reduce the gap between planners and clients. Transactive planning fuses “processed knowledge” (scientific/technical knowledge) with “personal knowledge” (experiential knowledge) through dialogue and mutual trust. In this context, planners must be rapid learners where they make sense of a vast amount of information and “locate the points of potentially effective intervention” (p. 25). Transactive planning allows both sides to learn from each other and to move from knowledge to action. In chapter 2 Friedmann delves deeper into the epistemological assumptions behind transactive planning. He offers an alternative epistemology to Karl Popper’s objective knowledge. By removing the authority of objective knowledge, practice is free to use knowledge from any source. In this conflictive process of social learning, practice is political; normative assumptions are explicit and open to critique. In chapters 3, 6, and 8 Friedmann puts forth new ways to think about our changing political economy and the role of civil society. Chapter 3 offers an alternative to the shrinking role of the state and the inability of the market to address issues of inequality. At its core, the good society is full of social movements built of many small groups of people, each free and accepted as they are, engaged in dialogue about building “a life in common with each other.” (p. 53). The ongoing tension between the state and the good society reorders social relations. These early ideas about the good society reemerge later in Friedmann’s work around civil society and planning (chapter 6). Today more planners work for local communities and organizations than the state. But it is not enough for planners to simply engage civil society, rather, given planning’s increased role in civil society, the practice must rethink how it functions. Later, in chapter 8, Friedmann returns to the importance of utopian thinking in emancipatory struggles. We need a vision for the good city. Friedmann believes this vision comes from contested political discourse about the common good. The good city is a process, one where human flourishing is a right, where civil society is a place for people to pursue active citizenship and where good governance includes a wide range of participants from a city-region. Part of the redefinition of planning is presented in Chapter 4. Here Friedmann carves out a space for radicals in the intellectual history of planning. Friedmann explains the central task for racial planning: “the mediation of theory and practice in social transformations” (p. 64). Radical planners “work to expand people’s horizon Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 13, No. 4, 641–644, December 2012