Reinventing democracy – the benefits and necessity of politics

Luuk Boelens’s article about the use of scenarios in spatial planning provides us with a vivid description of diverse exercises in this field. He detects a confusion of concepts – ‘radical disorientation’ – a confusion of methods – ‘projection and prospection’ – and confusion about priorities – future scenarios versus concrete projects. His polemic ends with a plea for a pragmatic approach: ‘It is not a matter of providing certainty based on clear and balanced prognostications but of indicating various reference-points for the decisions entailed by those prognostications. Scenarios are … directions that enable us to plan and make decisions in our multi-dimensional world.’
Both this plea and this interpretation of the role of scenarios have my whole-hearted endorsement. In order to arrive at that more pragmatic approach it is necessary to take the analysis of the problem a step further and, if we are to solve it, to become rather more concrete than Boelens would have us be with his plea to ‘become aware of the multiple dimensions of space and time’.
To bridge the gap between ‘long-term thinking’ and ‘short-term doing’ it is first necessary to reduce the whirlwind of global ideas that Boelens conjures up for us with all his bibliographical references to sober Dutch proportions. There are several aspects of the process of social reorientation currently under way in the Netherlands that clearly affect the country’s physical layout and the development of its cities. I mention four of them: 1. The Netherlands is reorienting the ecological basis of its economy. The realization that uncontrolled growth is ultimately untenable is leading to ever stricter regulations. One example of this are the environmental-effects reports required for physical planning projects. 2. The Netherlands is reorienting its relationship with a Europe that is busy changing from ‘abroad’ to ‘home’. This requires a readjustment of standards: by European standards we live not in a densely populated country but in a sparsely populated city. 3. The Netherlands is reorienting its means of existence and the relevant socio-economic arrangements. There are all sorts of indications that the competition among countries in Europe is in the process of turning into a competition among cities. This presents the Netherlands with the task of somehow transforming a loose collection of provincial cities into a world city, a metropolis based on ‘decentralized clustering’. 4. The Netherlands is reorienting its administrative culture: internally, in response to its citizens’ greater prosperity, higher level of education and increased free time; externally, in response to continued improvements in communications and transport and the associated world-wide interaction and competition among social systems. This leads to an emancipation of the individual citizen as the bearer of the system of self-government considered attractive in this part of the world: democracy.
According to Boelens, in order to bridge the gap between thinking and doing, between the random future and the precise present, we need a method that links reference points for the future to moments of decision. I share this view. The method evolved for achieving this by, for example, The Metropolitan Debate, consists of concretizing visions of the future in various projects and, conversely, of positioning projects within various visions of the future. By making both visions of the future and projects simultaneously the subject of decision-making in a simulation of future development, we would increase the participants’ ability to grasp the connection and interaction between both.
The heart of the problem is the increasing inability of the individual citizen to keep a grip on social developments for which he or she, as a citizen in a democracy, is jointly responsible. This inability is increasing as a result of the growing complexity of society and the declining significance of former social ties such as gender, age, class, family, job, church, sports club and political party. This is why it is necessary to increase the competence of individual citizens by creating conditions for integration and consistency of short-and long-term decisions at the individual level of the citizen as (to quote Van Gunsteren) ‘office holder in the republic’. To my mind, that is the ‘radical reorientation’ that is needed now.
Dirk Frieling