Rationality and Power

Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice, subtitled in the original Danish as The Aalborg Project, documented Flyvbjerg's fifteen-year ethnographic study of a single urban planning effort: the redevelopment of central Aalborg, including a bus terminal and traffic reorganization project that appeared, in its technical parameters, entirely straightforward. The case revealed a pattern that no amount of technical analysis could have predicted and no universal planning principle could have accommodated. The outcome was determined not by technical requirements but by power dynamics between the municipal government and the business community, historical patterns of land use, cultural attitudes toward public transportation, and personal relationships between decision-makers — contextual factors that no model could have captured because they were specific to this city, this moment, these particular people. The book established phronetic social science as a methodological alternative and produced the empirical foundation for everything Flyvbjerg subsequently wrote.