Humanizing development: Essays on people, space and development in honour of masahiko honjo. Edited by R. P. Misra. Maruzen Asia, Singapore, 1981, 366 pp
| Published date | 01 October 1984 |
| Author | Louis Wassenhoven |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/pad.4230040409 |
| Date | 01 October 1984 |
382
Book
Reviews
HUMANIZING DEVELOPMENT: ESSAYS ON PEOPLE, SPACE AND
DEVELOPMENT IN HONOUR
OF
MASAHIKO HONJO
Edited
by
R.
P.
Misra
Maruzen Asia, Singapore, 1981,
366
pp.
The common thread in this collection
of
20
essays, a
festschrift
to
honour the former director
of the U.N. Centre for Regional Development, can be found, according to the editor, in the
essays’ concern with ‘human issues in development’ and ‘the symbiotic relationship between
man, space and development’. In contrast to the mentality of growth-oriented development’,
which unfortunately remains to the end either ambiguous
or
a statement of the obvious,
particularly when the editor attempts to define the ‘spatial approach to humanized
development’, which rests on the perfectly legitimate notion, close to the heart
of
scores of
social scientists and planners, that spatial organization is conditioned by, and conditions in
return, societal values and processes, including production and distribution. There is
a
certain
mystique in the notion of development as
a
‘spatial transformation process’, to which Misra
adds attractive but unproven assertions, which even government policy makers often share,
that external national dependence can be reduced by altering internal spatial structures
or
that
a
strategy of need-based, self-reliant, spatially-defined communities can rid
a
country of the
greed-mentality of economic growth and political dependence. What is the unit
of
spatial
organization which would best serve these objectives? Surely not the time-honoured ‘city-
region’ suggested by Ernest Weissmann in his paper. Unfortunately, the frequently
encountered efforts to relate space, development and some appropriate style of planning are
plagued by ideological confusion and the naive belief that particular political ideologies
must
have an equivalent model of spatial organization. Inconsistencies inevitably arise when
different varieties of ‘humanized’ neo-socialists adopt the ‘bash the cities’ slogan and
advocate
a
decentralized, community
or
neigbourhood-based decision-making structure,
which, as Benjamin Higgins rightly points out in his essay, is
a
basic
liberal
principle,
according to which ‘decisions and choices should be on the smallest possible unit’.
Identification of the spatial unit, within which greater popular mobilization and enhanced
small group effectiveness in the provision of collective goods can be achieved, by promoting
the community’s ‘perceptible interdependence’, is no doubt an essential task, especially in
specific cultural environments, as Akin Mabogunje powerfully argues. Caution is however
required before such formulations are elevated to single-track strategies for development of
the ‘agropolitan’ variety put forward by Friedmann (1979), which Mabogunje seems to
embrace.
In his own contribution to the collection, John Friedmann continues his personal, long and
fruitful exploration of the space-development connection, often bewildering in its changes of
direction and in its speedy incorporation of concepts generated in a variety of fields of
enquiry. The former proponent of national urban development policies as an instrument of
social and economic development now turns to the advocacy of greater rural consciousness,
which regional planning literature previously ignored, and of ‘micro-level development’ in
‘agropolitan districts’, presumed
to
act
as
‘active communities’. The formulation, developed
with M. Douglas, is not entirely new. The idea of ‘agropolises’ had received considerable
attention in the fifties, and Soviet regional policy was always based on the concept of agro-
industrial complexes. More recently, Friedmann’s thinking received the influence of Michael
Lipton’s diagnosis of ‘urban bias’ as the reason ‘why poor people stay poor’ (Lipton, 1977), a
view challenged by Nigel Harris (1977) in the pages
of
this journal’s predecessor. The
agropolitan approach remains somewhat nebulous and lacks operational precision, as
Monique Cohen (1978) has remarked in an excellent review paper. In this book, it receives
more support in D.
R.
F.
Taylor’s essay. Taylor draws on his work with
W.
Stohr and on
Dudley Seers’s insistence
on
self-reliance as a key ingredient of development, to recommend
‘development from below’ strategies, which should be ‘basic needs oriented, labour intensive,
small scale, regional-resource based, rural-centred’ and should make use of appropriate
To continue reading
Request your trial