Critical voices from the 1960s: Jane Jacobs and the Epistemological Critiques to the Technocratic Planning Model

During the 1960s, different critical voices emerged with regard to the main gaps of rational comprehensive planning, or as we will define it, technocratic planning (what Jacobs calls ‘modern, orthodox city planning’), voices highlighting the oversimplifying epistemological approaches that had been characterising planning in the first half of the Twentieth century. Jane Jacobs’ thought has been of paramount importance in influencing planning and urban discourses worldwide, but she has not been isolated: in the same years, other critical voices have been shaping a critical thought and fostering debate, on both sides of the Atlantic. Among them, Paul Davidoff , appealing for advocacy planning in NYC, Giancarlo De Carlo, proposing a sharp critique of architectural and planning education in Italy and Reyner Banham and his group, advocating the (paradoxical) possibility of non-planning in the UK. The paper proposes to identify an important common feature across their positions in the connection between epistemological and political critique; as Jane Jacobs, many critics of traditional technocratic planning underline the inappropriate and ineffective mechanisms of knowledge production and use in urban planning: if cities are characterised by organised complexity (‘intricate social and economic order under the seeming disorder of cities’, as Jacobs puts it), then it is not possible to reduce them to ‘simple problems’. These authors develop their interpretative discourses in different ways, and advance different proposals to bridge this gap, combining in original ways the epistemological dimension with a political and a cultural one.