Planner pen portraits
Introduction
What does it mean to be a ‘planner’ in the contemporary UK? The activity of what’s variously been labelled town and country, urban and regional, or spatial planning is now well established. Over 25,000 planners claim professional status through membership of the RTPI. Yet the profession is not static. The system has evolved over time. So has its organisational context and professional delivery.
In recent years, driven by ideas of private sector efficiency and the budget cuts of austerity, local government services have been outsourced, delivered in partnership with the private sector, or changed by increasing pressures of commercialisation. And as planning has become more complex, it is ever more common for developers to employ planning consultants, or for specialist expertise to come from the private sector. Nearly half of all UK chartered planners now work in the private sector.
The implications of this evolving organisational context for planning have been the subject of our ESRC funded research project, Working in the Public Interest. This has involved different work packages, including archival work on the history of public and private sector involvement in planning in the post-war period, focus groups on the nature of contemporary planning work, desk based research on the extent of outsourcing across UK local planning authorities, and detailed ethnographic work on the reality of everyday planning work in different organisational settings.
There was also a work package which involved biographical interviews. These were 23 detailed interviews with a cross-section of planners to explore their career paths, professional self-understanding, working practices and values. The interviewees were working in all four countries of the UK (including a regional spread across England), included seven who have worked just in the public sector, seven just in the private sector and nine who had experience of both sectors, and a mix of seniority and personal characteristics (such as gender).
The interviewees were mainly recruited through alumni and networks of the WITPI academic team and cannot claim to be completely ‘representative’ of the entire planning profession, but hopefully provide an insightful cross-selection of planners. All the interviews were transcribed, and on the basis of their professional history (particularly sector(s) worked in and career trajectories) plus views expressed during the discussions, the twenty-three interviewees were characterised into ten composite ‘ideal type’ planners.
Each of these ideal types draws on at least two interviewees, but most were based on three (with some interviewees being considered to provide examples of two different ideal types due to career changes). It is important to emphasise that none of these ten planner types are based on any single individual but are composites and abstractions from across our interview data. Many people might fit the characterisations of more than one of the types presented here, particularly over the course of a longer career.
The ten ideal types are presented here as ‘pen portraits’ of what might be considered typical planners. Each one consists of a written description of how that type of planner might describe their career and role, some direct quotations from the interviews with planners in that category on the public interest / purpose of planning / what it means to be a professional, and some notes about the characteristics that may distinguish planners of this type. There is also a visual representation of each planner type: these are not pictures of real people, but illustrations produced by Rob Cowan, who we asked to read each pen portrait and then draw the mental image of the person that came to mind.
The pen portraits do, in places, try to be slightly provocative. In many walks of life, our professed values sometimes become compromised and planning is no exception. That is reflected here, although hopefully no single pen portrait is any more disparaging than another!
The aim of this approach is to help us think through professed and practised values in planning, as well as the variety of roles, career paths, professional self-understandings, working practices and values present in planning. Contemporary planners have quite different roles, working in very different (and changing) organisational settings and perhaps working towards quite different goals.
Arguably, many stakeholders – including academics researching planning – often talk as if there were just one type of planner, typically working for a local authority, or at best two types: a local authority planner and a private sector planning consultant. In reality, the professional positions being filled by those who lay claim to the label of being a ‘planner’ are much more differentiated. Hopefully these pen portraits help us think through the varying roles and vales within planning, and the implications of that variety.
Given the approach taken to recruiting interviewees and the inevitable constraints of time and resource to conduct these rich biographical interviews, there may be some potential planner types that we have missed. Inevitably there may also be different views on how we should characterise planners into types. There is also an interesting question of how these ten planner types map into different national contexts. Your feedback on these pen portraits is welcomed.