Some Rough Ideas on 'Planning and Culture' by Stefan Nieuwinkel

The thesis I would defend in my contribution sounds somewhat like "Only if we can operationalise the paradigmatic shift which is taking place in our concept about the 'organisation-environment'- concept cluster to the level of planning instruments, can we integrate a rich concept of culture in our planning activities."

The paradigmatic shift can be described as the shift from an Euclidean concept to a Heraclitean concept of the world. The domain (except from physics and chemistry) where this shift is most elaborated as far as I know is the domain of Organisational Sciences. There the shift is described as the transition from Weberian-Taylorian rationalism to 'order out of chaos' - theories like the Garbage Can Model of Cohen, March et al. (which in its description of the organisation as the coincidence of four initially independent streams is the closest to the Heraclitean metaphor).

With little difficulty, however, the Euclidean-vs-Heraclitean metaphor can be expanded to our concept of the environment (it is an environmental metaphor in the first place). If we start from a very simple environment, where we consider only 'space', it is self-evident that Euclidean space is space as pure and undifferentiated 'extent'. The planning instrument corresponding with Euclidean space is the white paper on the desk of the planner. The mathematics of Euclidean space is vectorial: it is essentially an 'aggregating' mathematics. The consequence is that if you add the vector with the vector equal in length, but opposite in direction, the result is the null vector (in Euclidean space differences are annihilating one another). The Heraclitean environment concept is much richer: it starts from an already differentiated space, is much more relational and includes a time concept (You never step twice into the same stream).

Let's now turn to 'culture'. I would propose a rather pragmatic (that is close to human action) concept of culture (Culture as a specifically human device to cope with a complex and ever changing environment and at the same time attributing to the complexity and change in the environment - cf. WEICK's 'Organisational Model). This definition of culture precludes any reification ('The' culture of the 'the' Flemish, 'the' Walloon, 'the' Arabic nations), which is the seed of nationalism and ethnocentrism. If we link this definition of culture to the Heraclitean metaphor, we are able to open our mind to 'initial differences' in the environment, and to conceptualise these as dynamic. It sees 'planning' as adding a culture to an already existing environment of cultures and coming in interacting with these cultures.

I would like to elaborate on these ideas and to make sense of the BOM-experience in the light of these ideas.

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Some Rough Ideas on 'Planning and Culture' by Stefan Nieuwinkel