FACULTY OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING

BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING

URP 400 (PHILOSOPHY AND PLANNING)

BY

KATLEGO H. SEBONEGO

INTRODUCTION Urban planning as an art and science has in the past and present, influenced how our cities are shaped formed and consequently how human beings interact with each other and their environment. Practitioners of urban planning however have their own ways of operating when they implement their work and this is mainly caused by their own philosophical views. Positivism as a philosophy and way of thinking has to a certain extent, an impact on urban planning. J.E Baggott (2004) states that positivism is a rejection of metaphysics. He holds the position that the way to attain knowledge is by simply describing the phenomena that is experienced, nothing more nothing less. This approach assumes a scientific perspective in the sense that one only sticks to what he can observe or measure, anything above that to the positivist would be deemed impossible. Rounding it all up, positivism is a set of epistemological and scientific philosophies which hold that the scientific process is the best methodology of explaining how human and physical phenomena occur. The principles of positivism in its strongest original formulation can be broken down into these five tenets: 1. The unity of the scientific method i.e., the logic of inquiry is the same across all sciences (social and natural). 2. The goal of inquiry is to explain and predict. Most positivists would also say that the ultimate goal is to develop the law of general understanding, by discovering necessary and sufficient conditions for any phenomenon (creating a perfect model of it). If the law is known, we can manipulate the conditions to produce the predicted result. 3. Scientific knowledge is testable. Research can be proved only by empirical means, not argumentations. Research should be mostly deductive, i.e. deductive logic is used to develop statements that can be tested (theory leads to hypothesis which in turn leads to discovery and/or study of evidence). Research should be observable with the human senses (arguments are not enough, sheer belief is out of the question). Positivists should prove their research using the logic of confirmation. 4. Science does not equal common sense. Researchers must be careful not to let common sense bias their research 5. The relation of theory to practice science should be as value-neutral as possible, and the ultimate goal of science is to produce knowledge, regardless of any politics, morals, or values held by those involved in the research. Science should be judged by logic, and ideally produce universal conditionals: For all conditions of X, if X has property P and P=Q, then X has property Q. Statements must be true for all times and places. (Wikipedia encyclopaedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism#Antipositivism_and_critical_theory) Positivism was initially instigated by a French philosopher in the early 19th century by the name Augustus Comte and his main aim was to come up with a system of unifying all truth based on the scientific method (S. Bernecker, D. Pritchard, 2010). For Comte, the physical sciences had to come first before the human race could task itself with the daunting challenge of dealing with human society itself, by and large his views were that one ought to set the empirical goals of the sociological method. He therefore came up with three stages that the society undergoes in its quest for finding the truth, which is (1) the theological, (2) the metaphysical and (3) the positive. The theological phase was based on faith and reference to

God and that man believed that God had reigned over human existence, without man using his own rational powers to explore basic questions about existence. The metaphysical stage involves an era of logical rationalism, stating that the universal rights of humans are the most important. The final stage is the scientific or positive stage. The central idea of this phase is that individual rights are more important than the rule of any one person. Looking at the positivist view of the world, urban planners can have a certain influence on the urban form of the world looking at the fact that in a positivist world, science was seen as the way to get at truth, to understand the world well enough so that we might predict and control it. Therefore an urban planner assuming this position would tend to approach planning mainly from the technical aspect of it and not necessarily engage the society in the planning process and therefore planning would be done from a top-down approach and public participation would be very minimal. M Neufeld (1995) declares that the positivist approach assumes that with science comes prediction and therefore control. Hence when planning is guided by this philosophy, it is done for the people and not with the people because it views human behaviour as something which can be controlled and channelled which is not necessarily the case. Another important point to note from this point is that under this positivist position, planners tend to assume too much authority and think that they can control development instead of guide it because they would think that they have all the answers and solutions to all the planning issues and problems. The positivist approach in urban planning is so prevalent more especially in developing countries and this is why planning in these countries is so technocratic and stringent, not involving the public in the planning process, although more recently efforts are being made to incorporate the public into the planning process. Nevertheless planning under the positivist approach is predominantly a top-down process with minimal public participation i.e. more scientific than social, albeit it is done for social beings and structures. Max Horkheimer (1995) has criticized the classical positivist kind of thinking. Firstly he claimed that positivism falsely represented human social action. Horkheimer argued that positivism ignored the observers role in the constitution of social reality, that is to say the role of the observer in the positivist theory fails to comprehend and consider the historical and social conditions affecting the representation of social ideas. This is why planning from this approach will tend to misrepresent what the society that is being planned for really wants and needs. However, advocates for positivism contest that the only the only legitimate source of knowledge are sense data, through which reality is experienced (R. Thorpe, R. Holt, 2008). They argue that the personal and subjective basis of making sense of the world around us needs to be guarded against and that findings are claimed to be reliable only when they can be repeatedly verified. Positivism avoids speculation (C. LeGouis,1997), and this is why the three stages of human belief (the theological, the metaphysical and the positive) according to Comte and other positivists are self-confined and hence avoid speculation and assumptions. So under the positivist approach, planning is not done from a humanistic approach but rather from a more objective perspective. Subjective data according to the positivist is unreliable and so planning is done in a more technical and scientific manner with minimal public participation. In reaction to the critique of positivism, post positivism came into place. This philosophy greatly relaxes the epistemological commitments of logical positivism and no longer asserts the separation of the knower and the known. Rather than dismissing the scientific project

outright, post positivists seek to transform and amend it, though the exact extent of their affinity for science varies vastly. A typical example would be one where post positivists accept the critique that observation is always value-laden, but argue that the best values to adopt for sociological observation are those of science. This position is of late being accepted by planning authorities and one can now see how efforts are being made to integrate the social aspects of planning to the scientific aspect. CONCLUSION In conclusion, the positivist approach has had a major influence on urban planning and the way it is carried out. Through procedures like the master plan and the traditional planning cycle one can see clearly and explicitly the positivist approach in these respective procedures. However it has to be said that this philosophical approach has some limitations in the sense that it is very limited in the social aspect, urban planning affects people and the society and therefore it has to done with the people and not for the people. Which is why I would advocate a balance or mixture of both a positivist approach and a non positivist approach to planning, hence a post positivist approach is the best way to go about in urban planning.

References: Baggott, J. E (2004) Beyond measure: modern physics, philosophy, and the meaning of quantum theory. London: Oxford University Press Bernecker S., Pritchard D (2010) The Routledge companion to epistemology. Taylor & Francis Publishers LeGouis, C ( 1997) Positivism and imagination:scientism and its limits in Emile Hennequin, Wilhelm Scherer, and Dmitrii Pisarev. Pennsylvenia: Bucknell University Press Neufeld, M.A ( 1995) The restructuring of international relations theory. London: Cambridge University Press Horkheimer, M (1995) Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings. Cambridge: MIT Press Publishers Thorpe, R. Holt. R ( 2008) The Sage dictionary of qualitative management research. CA, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publishers Wikepedia encyclopaedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism#Antipositivism_and_critical_theory