Love as a planning method

Love as a Planning Method

The traditional rational planning model situates the planner at an objective distance from the planning subject,

seeking impartiality through detachment between the observer and the thing observed. But persistent critique within

and outside the planning discipline has undermined the illusion of value neutrality underlying the rational model,

leaving unresolved the nature of the relationship between planner and subject. What might planning look like if love

replaced distanced objectivity in the planner–subject relationship? What might it mean for a planner to love the

people and communities that are the subject of planning? Attempts to answer these questions prompt further

questions: What is love, and how can love be practiced as a planning method?

Not just any sort of love will do as a mode of planning. Love as a planning method cannot be uncritical, willful

or blind. Love is neither lust, which objectifies the subject, nor infatuation, which is partial and distorted, nor desire,

which consumes itself in its realization. Love must avoid slipping into paternalism, which renders the subject void of

agency and a mere recipient of influence and domination. Nor is love reducible merely to fraternalism, which

constructs a closed circle of commonality that necessarily excludes difference. Love encompasses but is more than

care, nurturance, consideration or respect (Lawson, 2007, 2009).

Love defines a relation rather than an action or behavior (Metcalfe & Game, 2008; Nussbaum, 1990). To love

another or to be “in love” is to be engaged in a particular kind or quality of relation. A loving relationship entails a

reconciliation of the contradictory impulses of differentiation and connection. It is a paradoxical relationship that

celebrates the autonomy, uniqueness, and complexity of the other while simultaneously nurturing connection,

mutuality, and regard. The challenge of love is to balance separation and connectedness, individuality and

relationality: to retain the integrity of difference while fostering unity and conjunction (Sandercock, 2003; Young,

2000).

There are many varieties of love and the different kinds of love negotiate this paradox in different ways (Lewis,

1960; Nussbaum, 1998). In his sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr. (1957)

distinguished among eros, philia, and agape in seeking a way to realize the injunction to love one’s enemy. He

characterized eros as a “yearning of the soul” that, like desire, is unidirectional; philia as “intimate affection” and

“reciprocal love;” and agape as “the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men . . . that seeks

nothing in return.”

Because planning, as a public art, is political, the value for planners of considering these varieties of love lies in

their implications for acting politically. Each of these modes of love invokes a distinct relationship between planner

and subject and entails different political implications in the practice of that relationship.

Hannah Arendt explored the relationship between love and the political and her insights offer much of value to

planners. The political, for Arendt, rests on three principles of publicity, natality, and plurality (Disch, 1994).

Publicity is an essential condition for politics because, in contrast to the invisibility of the private realm, “everything

that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody” and thus to be political is to be public (Arendt, 1958, p.

50). Arendt describes natality as the emergence of the private individual into the public realm, a “second birth” in

which “with word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world” (1958, p. 176). Natality initiates the

possibility for both individual action and collective politics, “an act of individuation that is achieved, paradoxically,

by a declaration of connection to those whom one respects enough to want to be joined in friendship with” (Disch,

1994, p. 33). Plurality is a fact of the diversity of public life because “the reality of the public realm relies on the

simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for

which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised” (Arendt, 1958, p. 57).

How, then, do the varieties of love intersect with these dimensions of the political? Arendt wrote with suspicion

about eros, a romantic or affectionate love that, because of its “inherent worldlessness,” she considered private and

therefore unpolitical (Arendt, 1958, p. 52). Arendt equated eros with worldlessness because, unlike other modes of

love, it isolates its participants in a web (“a world of their own”) that separates them from the public. “Generally

speaking,” Arendt asserts, “the role of the ‘heart’ in politics seems to me altogether questionable” (Arendt, The Jew

as Pariah, p. 247; quoted in Chiba, 1995, p. 517). It is questionable, for Arendt, because it is private and, because it

is private, it negates the possibility of politics (Nussbaum, 1990, p. 343).

At the opposite extreme from the privacy of eros is the self-denying character of agape, the self-sacrificing

love that asks or requires nothing in return. Agape describes the biblical imperative of love for all, one’s neighbor

and one’s enemy, love that is unconditional, love for love’s sake (C.S. Lewis (1960) calls it Gift-love) that is an end

in itself. It is precisely this unconditional universalism that causes Arendt to object to agape as a denial of the

individuality and subjectivity of both the self and the subject. The magnanimous actor motivated by agape blindly

abides by a divine command and, in so doing, abandons autonomous judgment and volition while also negating the

“historicity, individuality, and particular needs of the neighbor” (Chiba, 1995, p. 527).

Both the deindividualization of the other and the dehistoricization of his or her situation take place in exchange

with standardized equality and uniformity in which everyone is treated. Arendt thinks that due to the universalism of

agape, what is loved in neighborly love is love itself rather than the neighbor. She maintains that neighborly love

cannot properly deal with the historical and contingent conditions of the other person and that it results in both self-

denial and the denial of the other. (Chiba, 1995, pp. 527–528).

Philia, the Greek word for friendship, offers a more politically promising form of love than the biological

imperative of eros or the theocratic imperative of agape. Its power lies in the virtue of its reciprocity and non-

necessity. Friendship is a choice we make, a gesture of solidarity with another. Friends stand side-by-side, ready to

comprehend, and to make the world intelligible, together. “For Arendt,” Chiba explains, “friendship signifies a

companionship with others as equal partners in a community common to them” (1995, p. 518). Lisa Disch, quoting

Arendt, extends the thought:

The kind of friendship Arendt has in mind is not intimacy, but public friendship, mediated by individuals’

partnership in a common world . . . .[Friendship] equalizes the discussants, not economically but politically, by

enabling them to “become equal partners in a common world.” It is friendship that makes possible the

articulation of common interests. (Disch, 1994, p. 43)

Where agape strives to love the world, philia constructs a world in common; “friendship . . . embodies a politics of

world-building” (Chiba, 1995, p. 523). In contrast to the selfless love of agape, philia or public friendship

establishes a reciprocal relationship that closely corresponds to Arendt’s view of the political. It is a relationship that

negotiates the paradox of separation and connectedness by experiencing the public world in common while

acknowledging and protecting its diversity.

Arendt’s views on love and the political suggest amethod for planning that employs the attributes of philia. Her

method for collaborative world-building is “visiting”, an approach that preserves both the self and the subject as

equal partners in a shared endeavor. Visiting entails engaging with an event or situation so as to tell its story through

the diverse perspectives that construct it. As Disch explains: “Visiting involves constructing stories of an event from

each of the plurality of perspectives that might have an interest in telling it and imagining how I would respond as a

character in a story very different from my own” (Disch, 1994, p. 158). Visiting differs from empathy, which by

assimilating or adopting the other’s perspective effaces one’s own, and also differs from abstraction, which reduces

the diversity of perspectives to a universal norm. Visiting offers planners “a model of solidarity premised not on a

common identity or essential sameness but on a limited, principled commitment to respond to a particular problem”

(Disch, 1994, p. 22).

Arendt’s method of visiting and storytelling differs in fundamental ways from conventional practices of

distanced, objective research and rational planning (Lake & Zitcer, in press). Where the analytical planner maintains

a distance from the world in order to observe it, the visitor ventures into it to engage in conversation with its

multiple participants. The implications of this positional shift are perhaps most acute in the domain of research, for

if the purpose of traditional planning research is fact-finding, the goal of visiting is joint interpretation, “bringing to

light more truth than fact” (Disch, 1994, p. 188). Research is directed to a distant audience, while visiting addresses

its subjects as its principal interlocutors. Research is retrospective, compiling information about what has already

been enacted, and the resulting plan is presented as an accomplished fact, while visiting produces a story intended to

provoke critical thinking in an on-going discussion. Because visiting initiates discussion rather than concluding it, its

“judgment is only provisional, and defending it does not involve proving it is right” (Disch, 1994, p. 208).

The reciprocal nature of philia and its associated practices of visiting and storytelling emphasize methods of

communication rather than data-gathering or analysis. Bakhtin describes the inherently intersubjective character of

communication: “[the] word is a two-sided act . . . determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is

meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener, addresser and

addressee” (Bakhtin & Morris, 2009, p. 58). As a consequence, visiting employs methods thatChiba calls “the public

activity of citizens . . . which can consist of spontaneity, speech, common deliberation, persuasion, cooperation.