The moral limits of autonomous democracy for planning theory: A critique of Purcell
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article tests the moral limits of autonomous democracy applied to planning theory by offering a critique of the recent work of Mark Purcell. In the first part, I situate Purcell’s view as a pure example of autonomous democracy applied to urban politics and planning. I argue that his view relies on the claim that there is something morally problematic about decision-making in planning that is not exercised autonomously and democratically. Indeed, his approach depends on the claim that autonomous democratic control in planning is morally superior. I consider two arguments for why we might agree. The first is by arguing that indirect centralized (heteronomous) power structures alienate people from their originary state of autonomous control. The second is by arguing that autonomous democracy will lead to the morally best outcomes. Ultimately, I conclude that neither argument works well and that there are not conclusive reasons for thinking that there is something morally better about autonomous democracy as a decision-making structure in planning compared to other forms that don’t rely on direct democratic control.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.066 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".