Speaker
Description
To influence the formation of alternative trajectories for socially and environmentally just futures, transport and urban planners must challenge the status quo. To achieve this, they must actively facilitate a ‘cultural reform’ by bringing in new insights, knowledges, new narratives and new discourses with a commanding presence. However, the currently dominant ontologies, epistemologies, methodologies and tools of these disciplines are inadequate to open up alternative epistemic possibilities and imagine alternative pathways compatible with contemporary imperatives for equity, justice, health and wellbeing.
For transport and urban planners to achieve the cultural transformation required means seeing themselves and their disciplines differently. Rather than separate disciplines, with their individual objects and pre-occupations, they must see themselves as being not only mutually dependent but also part of the same processual entity. To enable this ontological shift entails these disciplines first to critically engage with their modes of being in the world and how they feed desires and outcomes contradictory to an equitable and climate just future.
What keeps sustainable transport and land use planning apart and how can they become genuinely integrated? While ‘integrated transport and land use planning’ is an easy phrase that has been repeated for decades, transformation begins with ‘being’ and to ‘become different’ requires seeing oneself and the world one is implicated in clearly. For instance, to what extent can we observe that meaningful change has occurred in terms of planning and building more equitable, sustainable, healthy urbanisms? Those small niches of celebrated progressive practice (we see you! We know who you are!) appear currently to be overwhelmed by a global regime of planet-destroying urbanism, cynical or perhaps just misguided at best.
In this paper, we advocate for an open-minded approach to counter-hegemonic alternatives. We argue that the framing of transport and urban planning and thus, planners - those with the agency to make change - is within a long-standing devious discursive space that is a powerful contributor constraining our self-reflective capacity and concomitantly, planners’ ability to facilitate the transition.
Acknowledging the principles of social constructionism, which assert that truth and knowledge are created and legitimised within different discourses and narratives, this position paper examines core aspects of the contemporary discursive landscape of transport and urban planning with a focus on Australia.
The settler colonial Australia’s urbanism represents a range of extremes, reflecting its ongoing struggle to address numerous contrasts and contradictions. A defining feature of this urbanism is the very high levels of automobility and the devious discourses that maintain the nation’s cultural and economic dependency upon it.
We explore some key practices shaped by these discourses and, in turn, how these practices help perpetuate their own discursive framing. In recognition of the narratives, values, assumptions and judgements that wield significant power in underpinning the discursive spaces of transport and urban planning, we illustrate how this discursive space coerces the urban and transport planning fields into operating as ‘closed practices’. By so doing, we aim to facilitate a critical discussion and encourage the self-reflection transport and urban planners urgently need to have. We conclude by describing some possible pathways for reorienting the transport and urban planning field toward embracing alternative epistemic perspectives and enabling long-overdue cultural reform.
| Keywords | paradigm change; equity; planetary health; transformation; sustainable urbanism |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
