Culture aspects
Contents
Culture aspects
Culture aspects in urban planning have been classically addressed in terms of urban arts and city planning. Growing features are cultural policy and practice. The purpose is to "create contexts in which planners and multicultural groups can continuously learn and experiment, think systematically, engage in meaningful dialogue, and create visions that energize action and inclusion in city planning." (Ameyaw 2000: 101)[1]
Concept of culture
Technically, culture is linked to cognition and refers to people’s assumptions about the world.[2] Definitions of culture, also as related to security, abound. The classical policy concept of political culture, as established by Almond and Verba, centers on norms and values guiding citizens’ assessments, expectations and behaviour consequences.[3] Theoretically speaking, culture provides the background for (re)cognition and forms the cognitive as well as value-laden basis for so-called "taken for grantedness". [4] This has been seminally elaborated by Alfred Schütz, who also regarded culture as a threshold criteria for defining when a society will accept a problem (such as a security threat/challenge) to be solved.[5] Social sciences and humanities have mainly defined cultural factors as cognitive forms by which members of social communities make sense of reality, attribute meaning to facts as well as save and reproduce knowledge and their interpretation of the world.[6] EU FP7 Programme documents show that this definition of culture also strongly influences Security Research, e.g. in the form of the emphasis on felt vs. actual security.
This cognitive dimensions of culture is especially important to address aspects such as perception of vulnerability and building of cognitive foundations for citizen resilience. It requires a "multicultural sensibility for planning", which includes considering how cultures, "[...] which prescribe members' relations with the community, orient their actions, and, among other things, suggest how they might use formal planning processes." (Baum 2000: 115)[7]
Culture aspects of citizen resilience
From the cultural point of view, identification of vulnerability should be based on a comprehensive approach. While vulnerability in general is the susceptibility of a community to the impact of hazards, its strategic addressing, among other things by urban planning, should in particular “ [...] involve a predictive quality: it is supposedly a way of conceptualizing what may happen to an identifiable population under conditions of particular risk and hazards [...]” – where vulnerability is seen as “[...] the complex set of characteristics that include a person’s: initial well-being (health, morale, etc.); self-protection (asset pattern, income, qualifications, etc.); social protection (hazard preparedness by society, building codes, shelters, etc.); social and political networks and institutions (social capital, institutional environment, etc.).” (Cannon 2003: 5)[8]
Resilience as an evolving concept in security research, in particular with respect to planning for secure systems of different kinds, can be summarized to be so far based on the following characteristics:
- It reflects the extent of change that a system can experience while retaining its order, or normative (formal) as well as its dynamic organization.
- It reflects the capability level of a system for self-organization.
- It requires both acceptance by as well as symmetric competences of the citizens.
- It reflects the capability of a system to learn and adapt to changing environments while retaining its characteristics and identity (or, technically, its operational closure).
With a view to building quantitative indicators for resilience to plan for improved systems, resilience can be defined as determined by the degree to which a social system is capable of organizing itself to increase its capacity for learning from past disruptions and disasters for better future protection and to improve risk reduction measures.[9]
- Culture aspects are an important ingredient of citizen resilience that urban planning can support and that, in turn, urban planning can take advantage of to tackle security aspects.
- Existing public security cultures influence the criteria for societal acceptance of urban security planning decisions and results, and for the addressing of security aspects in that context.
- Urban structure and cultural artifacts resulting from urban planning influence a society and its culture. That may involve and challenge ethics aspects.
- The concept of (security) culture is important for effective security related urban planning.
- Activating civic culture can also be a method to use in urban planning in order to efficiently address security aspects.
=Approaches how to address it
Apart from cultural criminology, the following approaches/schools of thought are of particular relevance for covering culture-related security aspects in urban planning:
- Cultural criminology
- Community safety approach;
- Security culture
- Perception of (in)security;
- Perception of (in)security;
- Environmental design (behaviour setting);
- Societal norms and values.
Practical checklists to consider culture aspects in urban planning
- Checklists for dimension consideration
- Stakeholder-rated methods
- Aspect determination methods for urban planners
Take home messages for addressing culture aspects of security in urban planning
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Footnotes and references
- ↑ S. Ameyaw: Appreciative Planning: An Approach to Planning with Diverse Ethnic and Cultural Groups. In: M.A. Burayidi (ed.): Urban Planning in a Multicultural Society, Westport: Praeger (2000) pp. 101-114 (p. 101).
- ↑ E.g. R.M. Keesing: Theories of Culture. In: Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 3 (1974), pp. 73-97.
- ↑ G.A. Almond/S. Verba: The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 1963.
- ↑ Cf. E. Adler: Seizing the Middle Ground: Constructivism in World Politics. In: European Journal of International Relations, vol. 3 (1997), no.3, pp. 319-363.
- ↑ A. Schütz: Gesammelte Aufsätze. Bd.3: Studien zur phänomenologischen Philosophie. Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1972, pp. 156-157.
- ↑ For a classical example, see C. Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
- ↑ H.S. Baum: Culture Matters–But It Shouldn’t Matter Too Much. In: M.A. Burayidi (ed.): Urban Planning in a Multicultural Society, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000, pp. 115-136 (p. 115).
- ↑ T. Cannon et al.: Social Vulnerability, Sustainable Livelihoods and Disasters. Report to DFID. Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance Department (CHAD) and Sustainable Livelihoods Office London, 2003, p. 5.
- ↑ United Nations, International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (ISDR): Terminology: Basic Terms of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2011, http://www.unisdr.org/we/inform/terminology).
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