Planning Theory & Practice, 13:4, December 2012, DOI: 10.1080/14649357.2012.731210 Love as a Planning Method ANDREW ZITCER* & ROBERT W. LAKE** *Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, **Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, The traditional rational planning model situates the planner at an objective distance from the planning subject, seeking impartiality through detachment between the observer and the thing observed. But persistent critique within and outside the planning discipline has undermined the illusion of value neutrality underlying the rational model, leaving unresolved the nature of the relationship between planner and subject. What might planning look like if love replaced distanced objectivity in the planner–subject relationship? What might it mean for a planner to love the people and communities that are the subject of planning? Attempts to answer these questions prompt further questions: What is love, and how can love be practiced as a planning method? Not just any sort of love will do as a mode of planning. Love as a planning method cannot be uncritical, willful or blind. Love is neither lust, which objectifies the subject, nor infatuation, which is partial and distorted, nor desire, which consumes itself in its realization. Love must avoid slipping into paternalism, which renders the subject void of agency and a mere recipient of influence and domination. Nor is love reducible merely to fraternalism, which constructs a closed circle of commonality that necessarily excludes difference. Love encompasses but is more than care, nurturance, consideration or respect (Lawson, 2007, 2009). Love defines a relation rather than an action or behavior (Metcalfe & Game, 2008; Nussbaum, 1990). To love another or to be “in love” is to be engaged in a particular kind or quality of relation. A loving relationship entails a reconciliation of the contradictory impulses of differentiation and connection. It is a paradoxical relationship that celebrates the autonomy, uniqueness, and complexity of the other while simultaneously nurturing connection, mutuality, and regard. The challenge of love is to balance separation and connectedness, individuality and relationality: to retain the integrity of difference while fostering unity and conjunction (Sandercock, 2003; Young, 2000). There are many varieties of love and the different kinds of love negotiate this paradox in different ways (Lewis, 1960; Nussbaum, 1998). In his sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King, Jr. (1957) distinguished among eros, philia, and agape in seeking a way to realize the injunction to love one’s enemy. He characterized eros as a “yearning of the soul” that, like desire, is unidirectional; philia as “intimate affection” and “reciprocal love;” and agape as “the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men . . . that seeks nothing in return.” Because planning, as a public art, is political, the value for planners of considering these varieties of love lies in their implications for acting politically. Each of these modes of love invokes a distinct relationship between planner and subject and entails different political implications in the practice of that relationship. Hannah Arendt explored the relationship between love and the political and her insights offer much of value to planners. The political, for Arendt, rests on three principles of publicity, natality, and plurality (Disch, 1994). Publicity is an essential condition for politics because, in contrast to the invisibility of the private realm, “everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody” and thus to be political is to be public (Arendt, 1958, p. 50). Arendt describes natality as the emergence of the private individual into the public realm, a “second birth” in which “with word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world” (1958, p. 176). Natality initiates the possibility for both individual action and collective politics, “an act of individuation that is achieved, paradoxically, by a declaration of connection to those whom one respects enough to want to be joined in friendship with” (Disch, 1994, p. 33). Plurality is a fact of the diversity of public life because “the reality of the public realm relies on the simultaneous presence of innumerable perspectives and aspects in which the common world presents itself and for which no common measurement or denominator can ever be devised” (Arendt, 1958, p. 57). How, then, do the varieties of love intersect with these dimensions of the political? Arendt wrote with suspicion about eros, a romantic or affectionate love that, because of its “inherent worldlessness,” she considered private and therefore unpolitical (Arendt, 1958, p. 52). Arendt equated eros with worldlessness because, unlike other modes of love, it isolates its participants in a web (“a world of their own”) that separates them from the public. “Generally