Strategic planning and 'Trading zones'

This chapter is an attempt to use the concept of Trading Zone, as elaborated by Peter Galison (1999) in the field of the history of science, to indicate new opportunities to foster innovation in Planning, beyond the illusion of conquering a general consensus about values and objectives among different actors involved in strategic planning. To do this I will first illustrate how in the field of planning there has been for a long period a kind of mirroring between the debate about rationality, rooted in political science, and the development of the theory of planning (Webber, 1969; Faludi 1973). A process of mirroring that was somehow suspended when the most complex decision-making model was proposed by Cohen, March and Olsen in 1972, the so called “garbage can model”: a provocative theory that emphasized the extreme complexity of collective decision making processes. My point is that we have to re-start today from that kind of complexity to elaborate a vision of strategic planning, which is adequate to the emerging problems of the contemporary city. The Trading Zone concept is a promising tool to move in that direction