Citizen Participation Through Communicative Action: Towards a New Framework and Synthesis

摘要

The record of public involvement in the transportation planning process in the United States has been uneven and, at times, disappointing. It is therefore a matter of some satisfaction that the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA), recognizes that public involvement and input is essential in transportation plan-making. However, little guidance is available to planners as to how participatory democracy could possibly be enhanced and improved in the existing transportation planning process. As matters stand today, the predominant use of technical rationality in the planning process, to the exclusion of communicative action, has probably been the biggest problem. This paper introduces the concepts of communicative action to buttress and complement technical rationality, currently used in the transportation planning process. A real-life case-study is presented to demonstrate how communicative action was successfully used in a problem-ridden planning situation. Validity claims as suggested by Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action are used in this case-study. It is concluded that academic institutions as well as planning agencies will have to make a concerted effort to educate and train planners not only to be involved with the engineering of our infrastructure, but also to be equally concerned with coping with the social, economic and political dimensions of planning.