Book review: Nailing jelly to the wall

The last major ethnographic study of planners in the United Kingdom (UK) was from the 1970s. Given all the changes in the public sector that have taken place in the meantime, this study is surely long overdue! The most prominent of these changes are reflected in the approach taken to the research. Planners are observed in four different settings across the UK, chosen to reflect the different environments in which a planner might now work. Those that work in local government have now to adopt a more commercial attitude, accounting and billing for their time. Where the work has been contracted out to a commercial firm, planners may find themselves working on different local authorities without the local knowledge that used to be an important part of the work. Other planners, working for consultancies, develop expertise and work in projects with local government or with developers. All this is beautifully illustrated with detailed and telling drawings throughout the book (though these might have been accompanied by some more textual elaboration).

So what do these planners have in common? What do they do? Do they still work in the public interest (the main theme of the research project that this book reports)?

The book is dominated by the four case studies. Each takes us into different organisations, different offices and, of course, different tea-making routines (Schoneboom and Slade, 2020) ^[1]. In the tradition of ethnographic research, the chapters explore the variations in the working cultures. The reader will tend to conclude that the evident differences are a result of the more or less commercial status of each planning team. But to draw such a conclusion on the basis of four cases chosen for that very difference is perhaps going too far. The book also reveals the extent to which there is movement between public and commercial planning roles. The networks that result are ones drawn on to facilitate the work they do. While there may be disparaging remarks made about “other” planners (particularly those in local government), they need to work together in many instances. As ever, we need more ethnographies to help us better understand the cultural questions.

At times, this interest in the culture distracts us from the work that planners do. When the focus is more explicitly on the work, there are some fascinating glimpses into what it entails, including the negotiations with applicants and the decisions that result. Where we learn something of the considerations that are relevant to a decision (e.g. 115ff. an application for an extension to a house), we have a good understanding of the work. We see the behind scenes of the planning committee, taking a bus tour to visit key sites. We watch a planning inquiry as it progresses from day to day. These reveal something of the politics at play and the balance of power and authority. And we infer much of what it is that planners do from these public performances.

However, we don't always see the granular detail of the work. We are left wanting to know a little more, at times, about the “projects that require multifaceted judgements” (34). What are these projects? What sorts of judgements? What is at stake? When discussing competing interests between dog walkers and seabirds, for example, we are told that “tacit knowledge of local politics, developer positions and organizational know-how are needed to assess what is and what is not possible in particular places” (41). Again, can that tacit knowledge be teased out further? We understand that this is not an easy task, but it does seem to be an essential element of what planners do.

We might also comment on the approach to “team ethnography” (17) the authors reveal. While the fieldwork locations remain anonymous, the team members work at Newcastle and Sheffield Universities. But in what sense were they a team? Was the teamwork more a matter of pragmatism and geography than a methodological choice? The preface identifies the authors of the four fieldwork chapters, suggesting one reason why the detail and focus is a little different at times. Might we also have been reminded about the positionality (16) of the authors of these chapters as a way of understanding those differences in attention?

The book concludes: “Our work suggests a rather bleak picture of planning as a relatively narrow, highly pragmatic activity involved in managing and smoothing development and restricted to challenging the worst aspects of proposals, but without the power or position to fundamentally change the nature of development” (194). There is a good deal of interest in sustainability, in climate change and in other grand challenges. But planners appear largely to be constrained by a narrower economic vision of development. Whatever their professed values, what they can do is limited. They inform and advise. They don't shape or refuse. It is, perhaps, a frustrating profession for those who want to change the world for the better and in the public interest.

If planning is what planners do, then this book will be valuable reading for those entering the profession.