Planning for complex modernity : the Turkish case

Abstract

This thesis investigates the relationship between planning and modernity, follows the evolution of conventional planning within epistemological shifts and globalization processes, and searches for a communicative planning alternative for Turkey on the background of Turkish planning experience within the broader context of Turkish modernization and democratization. Conventional planning for national development took shape in the context of simple modernity characterized by positivist social science, nation state and capitalism. It is state and expert centered, and based upon instrumental rationality. Parallel to new epistemological debates and globalization processes, conventional planning has gone into a crisis. Today, there is a “communicative turn” in planning theory that entails competition among multiple rationalities within a broader and multi-layered public sphere. As a developing country that has used planning extensively in its modernization process, Turkey faces a similar crisis in planning. Conventional planning in Turkey reached to its limits towards the end of 1970s. However, neoliberal discourse, replacing planning since 1980, could not deliver to the mounting problems of efficiency and democracy either. In that context, Turkey needs to go beyond a simple market versus state dichotomy and should generate a genuine communicative planning in its development process. Based upon global trends in planning theory and the Turkish planning experience over the 20th century, communicative planning is emerging as a real possibility in Turkey. With its long experience in multi-party democracy and recent democratization impetus accelerated by its candidacy for full membership into the EU, Turkey can be one of the pioneering countries in the developing world, if it achieves communicative planning. Bringing the state, market and civil society representatives together, communicative planning can enrich information basis of planning, restore legitimacy of plans in political and social domains, and thus, increase the possibility of successful implementation of plans.