Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Plans are policies and policies, in a democracy at any rate, spell politics. The
question is not whether planning will reflect politics, but whose politics it will
reflect. What values and whose values will planners seek to implement?
(Long, 1959, quoted by Taylor, 1998: 83)
A view of planning as being essentially political in nature has important implications
for the perception of the role of cartographic representations in the process.
Although not explicitly discussed in the literature, it can be assumed that in the
rational planning model cartographic representations are seen as a tool to transmit
'objective' and 'true' information to support planners in choosing amongst altern-
ative possible courses of action. If planning is viewed as a fundamentally political
activity, 'values' rather than 'facts' become the most important criteria for decision-
making. The crucial question then, as Long (1959, quoted in Taylor, 1998) points
out, is 'What values and whose values?' The previously instrumental and scientific
role of cartographic representations in the process, thus, might in a political debate
change to promote particular values, and to persuade or even manipulate others.
Yet this potential role for cartographic representations was either not realised or
not deemed worthy of investigation, as 'maps' in planning are not explicitly con-
sidered in the political planning theory literature.
A
pluralist
stance on the way the political process limits rationality has been
promoted by Lindblom in his classic article 'The science of “muddling through” '
(1959). He argues that, through the process of political decision-making in which a
solution is negotiated amongst various interest groups, important information is lost
and the thorough analysis of the potential outcomes of action and possible courses
of action becomes an impossible task. In contrast to the rational comprehensive
approach, objectives and means are chosen simultaneously. Rather than seeking
comprehensively rational solutions, political bargaining becomes the order of the day.
Lindblom identifies two factors that determine the influence of information:
limitations on sources of information, and the decision-maker's limited cognitive
capacity to process it. Two further important issues relating to the importance of
information in decision-making processes can also be deducted from Lindblom's
model. First, the pluralist idea of many competing interests all bargaining to have
their values expressed in policy implies that information will be introduced into the
decision-making process selectively and as a means to justify particular values.
Naturally, this might also affect what is shown on cartographic representations in
planning, and how it is presented. Second, Lindblom suggests that the more realis-
tic trial-and-error model of decision-making ('successive limited comparisons'
(Lindblom, 1959: 154)), which involves incremental changes to currently existing
policies, means that the consideration of alternatives relies more on past
experience for determining future action than on linear and objective calculations.
