Democracy and Social Planning-A Pessimistic View
Orlans, Harold
To some, a union of democracy and social planning virtually defines the socialist aspiration, and surely it would be an ideal union if the two were constantly compatible. I shall argue, however,...
...however, it is not to the failure but the underlying human realities of democratic planning that attention should be directed...
...Planning represents a centralization of knowledge and decision...
...Stevenson, a town of 6,000, thirty miles north of London, was desig nated the first New Town site, and a corporation headed by the distin guished architect Clough Williams-Ellis was set up to superintend its expansion to 60,000 within ten years...
...As pressures, circumstances, and planners are always changing, the plan itself is continually open to revision...
...If a plan is ever to appear, a date must be set beyond which no new entries can be made...
...The people can not all speak at once...
...To the innocent an innocent enough question solvable by rational calculations...
...from this time on the plan courts death for it represents the events of yesterday and there is no assurance these will resemble the events of tomorrow...
...In 1945 the national electorate had chosen Socialist ministers and in 1946 local electors chose Conservative councillors, but neither electorate was ever asked if it wanted New Towns and things were far advanced before the average citizens heard of the project (for many, the first concrete news came in the form of an invitation to sell their property to the government...
...Recent historic experience suggests that socialists might worry more about how the people can obtain—and retain—real power in a great industrial democracy and somewhat less about how the nation can rationally plan its affairs...
...social planning can therefore be only proximate, tentative, and fallible...
...For surely the essential socialist goal is equality of occupational opportunity and living standards, and the only guarantor of this is equality of social power...
...They know little of the history of a plan and still less of its technical features...
...Planning is much simplified and facilitated by the assumption that people are more alike than unlike in their needs, but this statement is more defensible on the abstract than the concrete level...
...They must speak seriatim, which takes too long because by the time the last has finished talking conditions have changed from what they were when the first started...
...On the one hand, popular participation informs the planner about the social terrain he is trying to map...
...Work ceases upon the picture or manuscript, not because it is finished, but because sending-in day is at hand, or because the printer is clamorous for copy, or because `I am sick of working at this thing' or `I can't see what more I can do to it.' " An arbitrary sending-in day is always at hand for both plan and planner, and things are not made easier when this date is suddenly altered or foreclosed...
...our hope is merely to improve things a little...
...Montaigne...
...3. Not reason but politics, passion and chance is the final arbiter in the planning process...
...A series of accidents, deaths, and calamities gave the corporation five chairmen in as many years...
...if both, in what proportions...
...They are countless little Napoleons whose dreams are no less vainglorious for being in the realm of ideas...
...materials are ordered, contracts signed, work gets under way-and the wretched citizens change their minds...
...and it is provincial, whereas the plan usually represents a broader frame of reference...
...That government did much to improve the welfare of its people (the national health service would alone vindicate its achievement), but little to increase their participation, or augment their power, in government...
...The change in the plan most widely desired (the retention of houses scheduled for demolition because they stood in the midst of the future industrial area) would certainly have made it technically less satisfactory if locally more popular...
...democracy, their dispersion...
...The outcome was dismal: by December 1950, after four and a half years' effort, only 28 houses had been completed...
...It is unfortunate that state planning has, for many, become the hall 194 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 mark of socialism, leaving the assertion of democratic values to anarchism, classic liberalism, and shrewd conservatism...
...and the realistic images which must replace them are, to a considerable extent, mutually incompatible...
...but the importance of that part is often exaggerated by both regnant planners and those who aspire to replace them...
...And like Tolstoy's Napoleon, removed from the scene of battle they issue orders based upon outmoded information which have small effect upon the course of events that proceed by their own infinite calculus...
...For flats are those who scorn these values or put others—a diversi * "I always call by the name of Reason that semblance of it which every man imagines himself to possess...
...Age, menstruation, urbanity, eccentricity, love, sciatica, cynicism, sadness...
...on the other, the planner facilitates the democratic process by presenting to the people intelligent alternatives for their choice...
...The argument will be conducted in general terms but, for those who prefer to think concretely, will be illustrated by the experience of planning the English New Town of Stevenage during the Labor Party regime...
...democracy reserves this right to amateur, managerless masses...
...In Great Britain, this "garden city" idea was espoused by Parliament in the New Towns Act, 1946, empowering government corporations to buy the necessary land and to build towns thereon wherever the Minister of Town and Country Planning would direct...
...To be sure, there are also important respects in which planning and democracy are perfectly compatible and complementary...
...Their interest is inconstant, and rarely matches that of the planner to whom the plan is a full time job in which his self-esteem has been invested...
...But these paltry remarks do not have the color of the living events which suggest that: 1. Planners inhabit a paper world...
...and an infinite number of other characteristics identify groups of persons with needs to which others are indifferent or hostile...
...and while rational planning is often justified by abstract arguments, it is only by concrete specifications and results that its claims can ever be tested—and its optimism found excessive...
...But this paper world is as essential as language, ideas, and a sense of self-importance...
...2. Time waits for no plan...
...A plan hinges on the purchase of Y tons of cement at prevailing prices...
...While the Labor Government happened to be responsible for its passage, this was a nonpartisan measure, part of a long-range plan to move a million people, and enough industry to employ them, from inner London to its rural periphery...
...Conceptualization is a form of vanity and vanity is essential to life...
...Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 195...
...Thus the planner acts upon his illusion of knowledge...
...Conservative homeowners angered by the proposed scale of property compensation and those who preferred rural to city ways joined in legal action and won an injunction against the Minister (subsequently reversed by higher courts) . The local government body, the Stevenage Council, irritated by the planners' failure to consult it, also turned hostile and held a referendum which showed 52 per cent opposing the project...
...The building of relatively small towns, economically and socially wellbalanced, and tastefully and efficiently laid out in open country is an old utopian fancy and the dream of many architects forced to design one unit at a time in the clutter of established cities...
...When we consider the variety of persons in any community each with interests peculiar to his kind, the impossibility of achieving a rational reconciliation of all their conflicting demands becomes apparent...
...The state is not transformed nor history transcended by socialism...
...3. The people do not speak, they are spoken for...
...Stevenage councillors supported the New Town for sixteen months before Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 191 resolving that they wanted none of it...
...And their voice is as sounding brass...
...in December 1953, 2,268 houses had been built and the population stood at 13,100...
...Only when the chasm opens beneath our feet (the revolution, depression, panic, flood or infestation, the unanticipated triumph or disaster) do we appreciate the insubstantiality of the ground on which we stand...
...The initial intention in most New Towns was to perpetuate the national house : flat ratio of about 7:1, but the government was later inclined to decrease this ratio to conserve farmland...
...For we can expect no more than a small success...
...Planning empowers a cadre of skilled professionals to manage affairs...
...Decentralized government, town meetings, referenda, petitions, polls, "free" and "full" discussion (are either ever possible...
...and so on...
...State planning is in little jeopardy even in this crazy, prodigal country, but the tenuous, haphazard, formal sovereignty of the people is apparent in the most democratic modern nations—including postwar socialist Britain...
...Hence the need for confining his experience to controllable dimensions, for 190 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 converting flesh and blood into paper and ink...
...that would make an awful hubbub...
...The corporation promptly acquired for its staff two large manor houses and there began planning a safe, modern town in six residential neighborhoods...
...Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 193 fled skyline, high city densities, the conservation of agricultural land—before them...
...he will recognize his unimportance...
...The ultimate issue is determined by the relative weight of each pressure group upon the planners and politicians, and the latter's breaking point under varying historical and personal circumstances...
...The means for doing this need to be examined, tried out, and strengthened...
...and the neat schedule of research, consultation, design, and implementation is disrupted, months of work are scrapped and important decisions must be made overnight by ill-prepared men...
...In Socialist Whitehall or capitalist Washington, in the company of fellow intellectuals—civil servants, technicians, secretaries and filing clerks—they reduce the buzzing confusion of the real world to neatly ordered statistics, diagrams and words, and fabricate a design therefrom with which they strive to shape the future...
...Each side adduces equally cogent arguments to show that its kind of building is cheaper and better serves the national welfare: Houses are cheaper per unit because British industry is geared to their construction— and they are more expensive because homeowners spend much money over a period of years maintaining their needlessly duplicated services and utilities...
...A decision must be made now...
...but it seldom matters because so do we all...
...The Council referendum then showed 52 per cent against it and 48 per cent for, but a year later, a small poll con 192 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 ducted by the Corporation found 54 per cent for the development, 20 per cent against, and 26 per cent neutral...
...Needless to say there is a tendency for both questions and report to suit the interests of these privileged few, be they bourgeois or proletarian politicians, newspaper publishers, or sociologists...
...it needs but the skill to mould it...
...Reality, despite its several virtues, is a conservative state of affairs...
...the meteorological and political weather during the planning season...
...the geographic and social topography of the site to be planned...
...There can be no invariant political formula for its advancement...
...Many exigencies limit the quality and democratic character of plans, such as the money, material, and personnel available for planning...
...At Stevenage the government ordered full steam ahead—and then a grinding halt...
...So every moment brings its demand for decisions which must be made wisely or unwell, for planning, like life, is a hardening of the heart to the uncertainties of fortune and the ever sharp cutting edge of time...
...Neighborhood Unit 1" (the existing town) was neatly ticked and charted, surrounded by woods and parks and farmland—and cried havoc at this pleasant ascription of its future...
...To cap it all, the Treasury banned capital expenditure by New Town Corporations for a year in 1947 and was exceedingly tightfisted thereafter as a result of the financial crisis and epicrisis...
...What the ratio will actually be when Stevenage is finished is anybody's guess...
...the appointment of workers and housewives to responsible position—we already have some acquaintance with these and similar measures to increase popular participation in government, and it is plain that they will not inaugurate the millennium...
...the planners incorporate their suggestions into the plan and heave a sigh of relief at a job well done...
...Should the purchase be made immediately at the risk of spoilage (the only available storage place is a shaky barn) or should one gamble on prices remaining stable until the cement is needed...
...addiction to McCarthy, rose water, steam baths, or trumpets...
...Until that surpassing peace (which signifies the death of all we know), social differences will be resolved in the usual way by struggle, compromise, intelligence, exigency and accident as our wills leave their wake of victory, defeat and sheer inconsequence in the seas of history...
...Planning requires things to remain unchanged or to change predictably, democracy, that the people be free to change their minds...
...There is usually enough correspondence between any going ideology, philosophy, or "fact" and the incalculable complexity of history to preserve that illusion and give it a degree of utility...
...The important thing is to retain the goal...
...Elected, appointed, and self-appointed authorities did most of the speaking at Stevenage...
...A plan always and immediately reflecting the public's will would be a poor plan, inefficient and unesthetic if not strictly impracticable...
...That reason plays a part in social planning is not in dispute...
...Ministry officials gave Stevenage first priority since it was to be the prototype of some ten other New Towns...
...At times this goal may be advanced, and at times retarded by state ownership, control, or planning...
...My personal observation ceased at this time, but things improved afterwards...
...and even a small success would be gratifying...
...shops, schools, pubs, and Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 189 churches, ample parks, and an industrial sector between the railway and the by-passing Great North Road were admirably mapped out...
...Citizens are consulted, let us say at a town meeting...
...But force majeure and mineur intervened to rankle and then disrupt the venture...
...I shall single out only one: the omnivorous, damning effect of time...
...Much as they may gratify the artistic impulse, the airy images of planning and democracy present in utopian and rationalist thought correspond but slightly to the perplexing human realities...
...Or a hundred persons can enter seriatim each of a million private compartments to answer several questions...
...To believe in the happy reconcilability of such diverse natures and interests is to believe in the reign of heaven upon earth: our sins will then be absolved, otzr passions forever calmed, and our politics superfluous...
...I might continue in this vein, but enough has perhaps been said to indicate my position, which may be summarized as follows: 1. Society and history are too complex and transitory to be perfectly knowable...
...This episode was unsatisfactory both politically and technically in that local opposition was needlessly aroused and construction much delayed...
...but in fact as charged with passion as the dispute between Lilliputians who open their eggs from the small end and the BigEndians of Blefuscu...
...The planner who leaves his desk and drawing board to find a richer experience is at the mercy of chance encounters, for no vantage point is available from which to survey accurately the whole turbulent field of battle: like Pierre on the knoll at Gorki he will find a distant view either indefinite or toylike and a close one, at Raevski's Redoubt, too detailed to be put into perspective...
...or in a pyramid of voices, one voice summarizing several others and becoming successively removed from its source...
...Assuming that an accurate, up-to-date record could be kept of the popular will (nothing, of course, is easier to obtain by polling techniques or more meaningless—transitory, unreflective, and irresponsible—than the public's "opinion" on any issue), two things in particular would reduce its significance: the people are uninformed and they are uninterested...
...The chief planner resigns, dies, or bucks party policy and is fired (all three happened at Stevenage) ; comes down with the flu, spring fever, feelings of inadequacy, or a bright new idea...
...2. The participation of the people in planning is easier said than done...
...Such, in brief, was the early Stevenage story: a competent and powerful Socialist ministry acting out a utopian idea, embarrassed by opposition it partly provoked and slowed by economic misfortune...
...This kind of reason, which may have a hundred counterparts around one and the same subject, all opposed to each other, is an implement of lead and wax, that may be bent and stretched and adapted to any bias and any measure...
...I shall argue, however, that this is not the case and, more broadly, that these political ideals may be striven for but not attained: or attained only if they have first been rendered realistic, which is to say compromised, limited, and inspiring only to those who have known worse...
...R. G. Collingwood observes in his autobiography that "no `work of art' is ever finished, so that in that sense of the phrase there is no such thing as a `work of art' at all...
...In short, there are different ways of calculating costs, and "the" national welfare is more a matter of faith than mathematics, encompassing, as it does, the unknown future together with the multitudinous present...
...Homeownership promotes responsible citizenship and family life—and philistinism...
...4. Conflicting group needs are not resolved by reason* or empiricism, but by power and prejudice abetted by reason and experience...
...Let us take a simple instance: should private houses or apartment houses be built at Stevenage...
...There can be but a few questions and only a few persons can frame them and tabulate and report the answers...
...For private houses are admirers and advocates of petty bourgeois values, privacy, and private property—that is, most Englishmen...
...To some, a union of democracy and social planning virtually defines the socialist aspiration, and surely it would be an ideal union if the two were constantly compatible...
Vol. 1 • April 1954 • No. 2
