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A Focus on Eclecticism

I think it may have been in the first editorial that I wrote for this journal that I used the word “eclectic” to describe the range of the articles that we had on offer. “Oh dear”, said one of my editorial colleagues, “Does that mean that there is no thematic coherence?” Our tenth anniversary is not so far off now, which inevitably promotes some reflection about how the journal has developed. Thinking back to the early days, the editors had many discussions about how we could encourage the submission of papers that would address squarely our stated purpose, to relate theory to practice in a critical and comparative context. That is a specification which trips off the tongue quite easily: but at the outset it seemed a pretty daunting task. (I think that I fell back on the gnostic mysticism of the film Field of Dreams—“If you build it, they will come.”) But a nagging concern at the back of my mind, at least, was the question whether increasing interest in publishing in the journal, from a wider range of authors with varying interests and from different backgrounds, would make it difficult to maintain and project that sense of strategic focus. It must be for others to judge how far we meet our specification. The gratifyingly steady increase in the number of articles submitted suggests some degree of success. But for me at least, required by my role as an editor to read a great many manuscripts that (if I am honest) I would probably not otherwise be reading, the fascinating lesson is that so many approaches, insights, analytical techniques and normative yearnings, based on a vast diversity in the evidence base, can indeed cleave to the same purpose. Eclecticismworks— in so many ways. So it is in this bumper edition, with five articles, an Interface, an extended book review and a Comment. In “Places that Support Human Flourishing: Lessons from Later Life”, Rose Gilroy provides a review paper that argues that a proper degree of attention to the space and place issues affecting quality of life for older people will tend to produce more liveable places for all. She uses considerations of home, neighbourhood and mobility as the primary means to demonstrate the validity and achievability of this as “a right and proper goal for planners”. Mee Kam Ng’s “From Government to Governance?”, gives us a fascinating study of how civil society is developing in the Hong Kong SAR partly through a desire and a determination to oppose an unpopular plan to take more of Hong Kong’s famous harbour for reclamation—this in the context of a political system in which democracy is still very constrained. Ng’s challenge to planning-related professionals in Hong Kong’s public and private is whether “they are ready to take up the inter-related challenges of further empowering the lay public through instituting a participatory mode of planning governance?” She puts this in the context of the “economics-first” city, where the capacity for public challenge has formed around the evidence of loss of the harbour through reclamation, symbolised recently through the demolition of the old Star Ferry terminal on Hong Kong side, a structure whose iconic significance was in inverse proportion to its architectural quality. It is sobering to think that in England the new Sub National Review proposes, in effect, to reduce the level of public involvement in regional and sub-regional planning by passing Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 9, No. 2, 139–141, June 2008