Between theory & practice

For my elective, I'm taking Bjorn's Local Development in Latin America course, and it's a little different than I expected. For the most part, it is a course almost entirely grounded in theory. A lot of it I have encountered before and for the most part it's a good review and of course, fascinating reading, but some of the other students and I have begun to wonder aloud how useful this will be to our future practice, when we have to emerge from the safety of the classroom where we criticize other planners and actually be planners ourselves and make decisions that affect real communities. Some of us have been hoping for more concrete case studies, so that we can pick them apart and see what worked and what didn't, rather than have abstract debates about theory each class (which of course are useful, but hopefully you know what I mean).

Well, the other day was different. Bjorn brought in a few students who had been participated in the Santo Domingo planning studio and we watched the video about their experience and then got to pick their brains about it afterwards. It was really a fantastic class day. We got to ask them specific questions about how they went about gathering the information, how they felt they were perceived, how they conducted themselves, and how they arrived at decisions about what to say or do in different situations.

The most fascinating example of this was when a group of government and NGO representatives were coming to the community and wanted a presentation of the community's challenges. Most community members wanted to pick amongst themselves who should represent them, but according to Bjorn and the students, there was one woman who was more articulate, confident, and would be the "perfect" candidate to make the presentation. However, this woman was not very popular in the community. Bjorn explained the turmoil they felt when it was time to make the decision about what they were going to do, saying that they truly believed it would be best for the community if the unpopular woman presented, but that was a hard solution to swallow after coming from an approach that was "non-interventionist" or otherwise respectful of community agency. Ultimately, they decided to select the well-spoken woman over the community's wishes.

I wasn't sure how to feel about the story, but I found it incredibly interesting. Finally we had a real case study to chew on and think through the moral, ethical, theoretical, and ground-level implications of our actions as planners. I brought this case up to Alan over a beer to see what he had to say about it. He had a great way of looking at it, and said I should read about the American Pragmatists, whose approach began from an action that is then tied back to a guiding principle (or theory, I guess), rather than trying to make the difficult transition from theory to practice.

This makes sense to me in the context of general frustration I've felt coming from a critical theory background, in which almost any practice by non-community actors, or even intra-community actors can be deconstructed/criticized. Again, it's incredibly useful to have a theoretical background and the actions of practitioners absolutely need to be critiqued, but critique for the sake of critique can stifle creativity and be almost paralyzing at times. Planners cannot be non-interventionist, I think, because planning is intervention by design. Bjorn and the students realized that community agency and wisdom is not the only value in planning; planners also have wisdom. That's not to say that planners always have the answer, as we know all too well, but I think it's more helpful to future practitioners to grapple with the most difficult decisions we must make and how we'll make them. Grounded in theory, but nuanced and pragmatic.