Planning for autonomy : capabilities in urban planning

Abstract

As capitalist economies continue to concentrate resources and power over decision making on an ever smaller group of people, their consequences in the form of multiple and overlapping health, safety, and environmental crises impact disproportionally the inhabitants of the growing slums and informal settlements of many cities around the world. Facing multiple deprivations, large segments of the urban population find themselves increasingly restricted from escaping avoidable morbidity, living in crime-free communities, and realising their full human potential. To ensure sustainable urban development that leaves no one behind, interventions are needed that effectively address socio-environmental challenges to achieve equity in promoting well-being. However, existing strategies and concepts for promoting just cities have not succeeded in balancing power relations, and have raised doubts about capacities of planers and political decision makers to make ethical choices for the fair distribution of goods in correspondence to prioritised demands of different people. The author of this thesis argues that democratic processes are needed that enhance autonomy of traditionally marginalised people to self-determine their prioritised demands, to create strategies that challenge local power relations and resource scarcity created by systemic injustice, and to implement solutions that tackle obstacles to increased well-being of different people. The thesis suggests that planners can support these processes and strengthen their democratic character if orienting on the idea of capabilities, defined by Amartya Sen as a person’s opportunities to realise valued activities or states of being. This is grounded in the perception that the capabilities approach, with its sensitivity to person-specific circumstances and its focus on advancing justice through incremental improvements to unjust situations, is a pragmatic theoretical guidance to orient empowering planning processes that challenge systemic injustices and implement strategies to successively remove obstacles to valued opportunities for satisfying plural demands despite conditions of scarcity. To operationalise the capabilities approach for urban planning, the author of this thesis dialogues with Sen and further authors to develop a non-exhaustive, conceptual framework of ‘conversion factors’ or value-neutral determinants that possibly limit or enable people’s access to opportunities. To ensure local relevance and practical applicability of the framework, the thesis specifies and adapts the theoretically developed categories to cultural and individual variations of a specific location. For this, it analyses empirical data from a participatory planning practice, carried out in 2018-2019 within the institutional framework of the ‘Professional Residence in Architecture, Urbanism and Engineering’ at the Federal University of Bahia (RAU+E/UFBA), Brazil. In result, it identifies categories with a higher incidence of reported obstacles, as well as ‘couplings of capabilities’ to evaluate and further develop proposals for urban interventions that potentially enhance locally valued capabilities. With this, it provides a theoretical framework and an exemplary practical procedure for participatory planning practices that strengthen local autonomy to enable self-determined human development and tackle systemic inequalities.