Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
a number of ideas have gained much coverage in the literature. Kuhn's (1962, p. 10) celebrated
concept of paradigm shift, for example, attempts to explain scientific revolution. He suggests
that there is a 'normal science', which scientists and practitioners accept for a time as a basis
for everything they do. This is the accepted 'paradigm' or: 'some accepted examples of actual
scientific practice - including law, theory, application and instrumentation - which together
provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research'.
At particular points in time, scientists, however, become aware of anomalies in their
worldview; they find things that the prevailing paradigm does not explain well. Science then
enters a new phase, in which the old paradigm is scrapped and a new one developed in its
place - translated in the current economic jargon as the 'new normal'. Kondratieff (1935)
similarly developed the notion of 'waves of development' in terms of profit crisis in the
capitalist system, due to the possibilities of a given generation of technologies being exhausted.
Only by the diversion of new capital into a new a new set of technologies, can this be
overcome. Schumpeter (1939) translates these principles into business cycles, with new
industries and technologies arising over time. Foucault (1966, p. 235), this time in terms of
knowledge, asks:
How is it that thought detaches itself from the squares it inhabited before - general
grammar, natural history, wealth - and allows what less than twenty years before had
been posited in the luminous space of understanding to topple down into error, into the
realm of fantasy, into non-knowledge?
Hence we have a wealth of perspectives, from different domains, from key thinkers, and from
different times, all considering issues relating to change, and whether the future is merely a
continuation of the past or something much more imaginative. There is also the supplementary
question of how change over time can be better understood, or as Foucault labels this: 'the
order of things'.
Future studies attempt to think through possible (and desirable) ways forward, but also to
investigate alternative more radical possibilities through deliberative processes. This is very
often a normative process: expressing value judgments as to where we might like to be, or
go, from the societal perspective; as contrasted with stating facts, or analysing and/or extra-
polating trends. Part of this process is a focus on assessing the potential for enhancing positive
trends, or achieving breaks against more negative trends (this is often the policy-maker's goal),
or how to make more effective strategic choices in view of uncertain trends (the corporate
planning goal). All of these perspectives can be of relevance to transport, city planning and
wider sustainability objectives. But it is perhaps surprising that normative analysis in transport
planning is very seldom used, as there is a tradition of positivism and more quantitative
modelling. For example, the analysis is made of the impact of city development on the transport
network, or the traffic flow through a junction, rather than a more fundamental understanding
of the potential role of transport in achieving societal goals.
The position taken by Popper was that the level of future uncertainty was only partly
determined by the present conditions and societal trends as we know them. Dreborg (1996)
terms this problem as 'indeterminacy', explaining that a change in public policy may not only
affect an exogenous policy variable, but may change 'the rules of the whole game'. An actor's
decisions are largely determined by the ideas and knowledge available; new knowledge may
