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There is a thought I long had in my head's backburner but I'm getting more and more convinced there is at least some truth in it.
That most of our discussion in planning, participation and democracy suffers from the "myth of the noble savage"
I'll Explain.
That most of our discussion in planning, participation and democracy suffers from the "myth of the noble savage"
I'll Explain.
The first time I had this thought was a couple of years ago, when I was teaching a class about "international planning", that was mostly conceived as a course about urban planning issues in the so-called "Global South".The introductory part was unavoidably about the colonial city
This "Global south" label forces you to talk together contexts as diverse as day and night, but the general representation that emerged from discussion in the class was that of the westerners, corrupted by greed, coming to submit a local society living in a "state of nature"
No matter that India, China, pre-Colombian societies, north American Nations were probably as much as or even more sofisticated, contradictory, imperfect, nuanced as the colonizers. The background image was always that of some local villagers living in an idyllic equilibrium
I then started to pay attention to similar "epistemological frames" in planning studios, and there were a lot. It is particularly fascinating how even second year bachelor students often come with the idea of an "innate knowledge", almost a mystic one, local people have
It is impressive how this concept of "local knowledge", with its proximity to the innate knowledge of the noble savage is now profoundly rooted in the general discourse, opposing the oppressive external bad "knowledge" of experts to the "good" unbiased, pure knowledge of insiders
This manichean eresure of the complexity of society is somehow a precondition to the use of terms like "community" in an unchallenged positive way. The "community is where the good is, and the evil is among the corrupted knowledge of "experts". It's simple, moral, appealing
The problem is that, if we continue to frame the problem of decision-making in complex societies within this mythical representation of the noble savage against the corrupted intellectual, whose knowledge has separated from the real nature, we will be playing a Commedia dell'Arte
It will be a badly scripted Commedia Dell'Arte, with its planning version of Pulcinella, as the cunning but well intentioned servant, Balanzone as the violent but ridiculous master, etc, perpetually reproducing a reassuring scheme where everyone can easily find good and evil
But how this can advance us all? Can we really think that this Commedia Dell'Arte is a useful representation of the society withinthe planning discourse? That the evil is always on one side or the other? That the myth of the noble savage is anything more than a fable? T
Can we really think that vagues claims to "the community", an ill-defined entity where one can put everything he likes leaving all that he dislikes outside, separating the purest from the corrupted, is something more than a myth, or more real than Santa Claus?
The sooner we abandon this epistemological frame, the faster we will be able to start a real meaningful discussion about how we get decisions right, or more probably less wrong, in societies where "the people"are not a compact, singleminded entity but a messy, contradictory crowd
