Michael Gunder

Sustainability: Planning’s Saving Grace or Road to Perdition?

This article explores the concept—sustainability—as a transcendental ideal of planning purpose and value. The article critically argues that sustainability largely has been captured and deployed under a narrative of sustainable development in a manner that stifles the potential for substantive social and environmental change, all of which constitutes new purpose, legitimacy, and authority for the discipline of planning and its practitioners while potentially sustaining or creating adverse social and environmental injustices. These are injustices that planning traditionally attempted to address but now often obscures under the primacy of the economic imperative within dominant institutional interpretations of the sustainable development narrative.This article explores the concept—sustainability—as a transcendental ideal of planning purpose and value. The article critically argues that sustainability largely has been captured and deployed under a narrative of sustainable development in a manner that stifles the potential for substantive social and environmental change, all of which constitutes new purpose, legitimacy, and authority for the discipline of planning and its practitioners while potentially sustaining or creating adverse social and environmental injustices. These are injustices that planning traditionally attempted to address but now often obscures under the primacy of the economic imperative within dominant institutional interpretations of the sustainable development narrative.

Planning as the ideology of (neoliberal) space

This article briefly reviews the history and concept of ideology, largely as articulated by exponents of the Frankfurt School, and considers the impact that this has had on historical planning theory and practice, culminating in Habermasian derived communicative planning theory. It then considers the role of ideology in a post-Marxist world and argues for the value of Žižekian critique for understanding planning’s contemporary role of ideologically defining the use of neoliberal space.

Passionate planning for the others' desire: an agonistic response to the dark side of planning

Abstract This monogram suggests that while planning seeks ertainty and the avoidance of conflict in its practices, this is at best an unrealisable fantasy, an unfulfillable desire for security in modernity, and one that has considerable cost. The work examines current planning practice from the perspective of Foucaults governmentality, Flyvbjergs and Bourdieus conceptualisations of practical reason and Lacans psychoanalytical theory. Planning is argued to be driven, at least in New Zealand, by a desire to seek institutional performativity and efficiency. The discipline attempts to achieve this by seeking compromise and the avoidance of conflict with dominant actors, while minimising, the resistance of the docile majority. Habermasian derived communicative planning theory is specifically examined in this context and found wanting. The essay prescribes one possible agonistic and passionate response for an alternative communicative planning practice, drawing on Arendt and Foucault. It then illustrates the similarity, and value of, Foucauldian genealogical theory and aspects of Lacans psychoanalytical theory for fostering understanding within this proposed polemical response, particularly, as the application of these methods have the ability to expose pernicious elements of planning related practices, rhetoric and actions. The monogram will conclude with a discussion of ‘planning for the Others’ desire’ rather than the persistent fantasy of ‘planning for certainty’ in a finite and capricious world.

Conforming to the expectations of the profession: A Lacanian perspective on planning practice, norms and values

This article introduces and examines aspects of Lacans critical social theory, it examines why a Lacanian psychoanalytical appoach can be regarded as pertinent to analysis of planning processes. The article introduces the notion of the Lacanian subject and explains some of the key Lacanian concepts including the ‘Real’, the ‘Other’, and the Lacanian signifier. These concepts are then related to the acquisitions of planning education and professional skill development—what ‘shapes’ the planner? The article suggests that planning practices and decision‐making are often constrained by the planners desire to conform to self‐imposed perceptions of professional and societal expectations. These practices contribute to maintenance of the ideological edifices which constitute social reality in that they do not necessarily materialise a planners own values and beliefs, but rather the beliefs and values which a planner ‘thinks’ that planners are supposed to have and to express in society. The article concludes with a consideration of the implications this has for planning ethics.

Shaping the Planner’s Ego-Ideal: A Lacanian Interpretation of Planning Education

Can you succinctly and clearly define what planning and many of its guiding principles —such as the public good, sustainability, or even market forces— actually mean? For many of us, this is difficult to accomplish. Lacan provides an explanation for this challenge based on his theorizing about human subjectivity— how we acquire the identifications that constitute ourselves as planners. The article will deploy Lacan’s explanatory power for understanding how the professional identities of planners and the central ideas constituting the planning discipline are interrelated. Particularly, Lacan’s theoretical model of the four discourses will be used to explore planning education and how aspiring planners acquire and internalize the discipline’s often-diffuse sets of traditions, beliefs, knowledges, and values.

Commentary: Is Urban Design Still Urban Planning? An Exploration and Response

This article considers the factors contributing to the recent international trend for a differentiation between planning and urban design. It considers these highly related fields from the perspective of neoliberalism, global competition, and the doxa of New Urbanism. The article argues that urban design needs to be retained as an important subset of planning practice, concerned with the physical design of cities, so that the core planning values of serving the public interest in the attainment of social equity, democratic civil society, and an ecologically sustainable future may be maintained in our city-building processes.

Symbolic Violence and Victimization in Planning Processes: A Reconnoitre of the New Zealand Resource Management Act

This article conceptualizes two interrelated constellations of effects produced by practices of power in New Zealand planning. These are symbolic violence and institutional victimization. This article contends that acts of submission and obedience become symbols of violence when the state’s planning regimes allow no elements of choice, or freedom to resist, for those acted upon. This is compounded further into institutional victimization when the oppressors are also the final practicable, or actual, arbiters of appeal. We provide evidence that suggests this is a regular occurrence in New Zealand and, further, is indicative of a wider ranging consequence of modern governance that Foucault called governmentality. In New Zealand, the provision of a theoretically consultative statutory planning process obscures the actual rationality of exclusion underlining many of its planning practices.

Planning as urban therapeutic

In this paper we seek to present a challenge to the normative prescriptive role of strategic urban planning practice. In effect, we challenge what has traditionally been regarded as the essence of strategic or ‘forward’ planning: the plan as a statement of what the city ought to become. Using Lacanian-inspired analysis we seek to understand how urban issues may be identified as metaphorical deficiencies or illnesses, to which planners apply a therapeutic salve in the form of strategic policies. Turning to the psychological utopianism of Ernst Bloch, a Freudian-inspired predecessor of Lacan, we suggest a way forward in Blochs immanent transcendent conceptualisation of hope. We suggest replacement of the transcendent term ‘utopian’ by ‘utopic’, as a practice which is critical, inclusive, and dynamic; performative rather than normative.

Applying Lacanian Insight and a Dash of Derridean Deconstruction to Planning’s ‘Dark Side’

The critique of planning’s ‘dark’ side has been a theme of both modern and postmodern perspectives. While a great deal of anecdotal and empirical evidence exists that highlights how planning can be, and has been, used for nefarious ends there are few theoretical insights or understandings of the role of different actors, institutions or processes. This article provides a critical analysis of the notion of ‘dark side’ from a Lacanian and Derridean perspective. A short case study of the use of planning for what would broadly be regarded as ‘dark’ ends highlights a number of issues, particularly through engagement with Lacanian theory, which provides a useful theoretical framework for further research into the misuse of planning.

The Production of Desirous Space: Mere Fantasies of the Utopian City?

The Lacanian perspective argues that planning, in its discourses and practices, is inherently ideological and the visions and ideals shaping the fantasies of the future city are often reflective of the homogenic desires of conflicting, but dominant, privileged minorities. Here the democratic process fails because the issues of contention are pre-shaped and ‘technically’ determined and the rationality deployed only allows a limited range of ‘sensible’, i.e. pre-framed, dreams of what constitutes the ‘good’ city. This article draws on both Lacan and Lefebvre to explore the dichotomy between seeking a common harmony of social vision while at the same time avoiding any exclusion of cultural and related difference in lived space.