Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning

Abstract

Spatial planning practice employs a discourse full of terms and buzzwords, such as 'social justice', 'environmental sustainability', 'public interest' or 'community engagement'. This book takes a Lacanian, and related post-structuralist perspective to demythologise ten of the most heavily utilised terms in spatial planning: rationality, the good, certainty, risk, growth, globalisation, multi-culturalism, sustainability, responsibility and 'planning' itself. It argues that these terms, and others, are mere 'empty signifiers', meaning everything and nothing. Drawing on examples of planning practice and process from the UK, North America and Australasia, it suggests that spatial and urban planning is largely based on the construction and deployment of ideological knowledge claims. Also that each of these contested ideals puts forward its own separate definition of the ten words in an attempt to dominate the theoretical debate. In addition, it perceives that the words themselves act as sublime objects of planning and societal desire for a 'better world'. The book concludes that planning in the 21st Century should move on from seeking the impossibility of idealised end-states to a process of contingent trajectory.