RTPI Library Series. New York; London: Routledge, 2017. xix, 307 pp. (Illustrations.) US$44.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-138-68265-8.
This book is, as the subtitle states, a collection of essays that engages with and reflects on the work of John Friedmann, eminent international planning scholar whose illustrious career spanned over half a century. It is divided into five sections: “Practicing Hope,” “Economic Development and Regionalism,” “World Cities and the Good City,” “Social Learning, Communities and Empowered Citizenship,” and “Chinese Urbanism.” The collection is bookended by a postscript from Friedmann and a preface from Leonie Sandercock, his life partner and an accomplished scholar of planning herself. While certainly not a hagiography, the book does present itself as a set of twenty-six “essay gifts,” a term used by one of the editors and very apt if we understand “gift” in the Maussian sense as a form of reciprocal exchange. Many of the editors and invited authors were once students or close associates of Friedmann, and their essays represent a symbolic repayment for his contribution to their own intellectual and professional development. Though generally written in academic fashion with ample empirical substantiation, the essays are short and often take on a reflective or dialogic tone. Unfortunately, John Friedmann passed away in June 2017 at the age of 91. The postscript recorded in this book is thus Friedmann’s last piece of writing: characteristically lively and lucid, it carries through his indefatigable commitment to conversation and optimism for the future.
The five sections reflect the dominant themes in Friedmann’s long career, but the individual essays do not slot neatly into the specific sections. Rather, several of Friedmann’s books and arguments seem to exert a much stronger influence across the essays: notably his defence of utopian thinking in “The Good City,” the framing of planning as social learning, as well as the concepts of urban “super-organism” and “urban fields.” Most authors explicitly engage with Friedmann’s work, showing how his political and intellectual projects have been extended to different contexts, put into practice, or reformulated in the face of new challenges. The essays by Tanja Winkler, Yuko Aoyama, and Mike Douglass are great examples of how planning theory travels across academies and continents and is built upon by generations of scholars to shape the world toward a common goal. I also find in Roger Keil’s response to Friedmann’s neglect of suburbs, Saskia Sassen’s questioning of the Good City in the age of privatization, and Keith Pezzoli’s defense of bioregionalization great instances of how intellectual traditions develop through disagreement. Finally, essays by Timothy Cheek, Aftab Erfan, and Libby Porter provide a more personal perspective on how Friedmann touched their lives as teacher, colleague, and provocateur. As short essays, they are not meant to be read as fully developed theses or contributions to scholarly debates. As “essay gifts,” however, they pay the highest compliment to Friedmann by keeping his ideas alive, not as dogma, but as dialogue. From the reader’s perspective, the book is infused with hopeful energy, as perhaps a vocation like planning must be or else fade into obsolescence.
The section that raised the most questions for me is the last one on “Chinese Urbanism.” After retiring from the University of California, Los Angeles, Friedmann started to study China and published “China’s Urban Transition” in 2005. In this section, essays by Klaus Kunzmann, Sheng Zhong, and Mee Kam Ng present rather contrasting pictures of what planning theory brings to the study of China and vice versa. Kunzmann focuses on the actual work of doing planning in China, highlighting the obstacles posed by cultural differences and institutional barriers. In this sense, he joins Friedmann as a Western scholar struggling to understand China. Sheng Zhong and Mee Kam Ng, however, attempt to shift the normative foundation of planning theory by bringing in Confucian values and philosophy. Zhong suggests that social learning is happening in Shanghai, but the agents are flexible bureaucrats and developers rather than insurgent citizens. Ng argues, through the case of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement, that the Chinese route to the “good society” focuses on the cultivation of individuals as virtuous citizens rather than the transformation of social relations through activism. Unlike Kunzmann, they consciously uproot Friedmann from his foundation in continental philosophy and anarchist traditions and suggest that China must be understood within its own historical milieu. Conceding some ground to this argument, Friedmann suggests in his postscript that there could be a “culturally and institutionally specific Chinese version of planning theory” (294), and raises the concept of “human flourishing” as a guiding principle for planning. These are debates characteristic of a foundationalist planning theory that requires a vision of a “good society” as the basis for action. Attempting to replace this foundation with another reproduces the same kinds of questions that planning theorists have struggled with for a long time. Should there be many visions? Are they bound by historical experience or natural principles? Can “human flourishing” transcend cultural and political differences and create a unified theory of action? Are Confucian values, like the “Asian Values” debate in Singapore, an ideological smokescreen for political hegemony?
Another important discussion in the book is on insurgencies and the role of the radical/progressive planner. Most of the essays focus on civil society as the main protagonist for social change. Friedmann, in his postscript, is aware that the championing of civil society and insurgent action downplays the role of the state and resists the dominance of the market in contemporary societies. However, progressive action can arise from multiple sources and intersections and the classic division of society into market, civil society, and the state might be too blunt. Haripriya Rangan, for example, proposes that social entrepreneurialism might be the “business model” for the radical planner, while Chung-Tong Wu and Robin Bloch emphasize the role of the state in facilitating regional development. These essays highlight how planning theory must be analytically sharp and self-reflexive in order to remain relevant to and inspiring for practitioners today.
As a student and scholar of planning myself, I enjoyed this book. It is not a biography or a hagiography, but a permanent invitation to dialogue where the original interlocutor has quietly left the room.
Kah-Wee Lee
National University of Singapore, Singapore