Planning In Postmodern Times

Postmodern social theory has provided significant insights into our understanding of society and its components. Key thinkers including Foucault, Baudrillard and Lyotard have challenged existing ideas about power and rationality in society. This book analyses planning from a postmodern perspective and explores alternative conceptions based on a combination of postmodern thinking and other fields of social theory. In doing so, it exposes some of the limits of postmodern social theory while providing an alternative conception of planning in the twenty-first century. This title will appeal to anyone interested in how we think and act in relation to cities, urban planning and governance.

Featuring updates and revisions to reflect rapid changes in an increasingly globalized world, Readings in Planning Theory remains the definitive resource for the latest theoretical and practical debates within the field of planning theory. Represents the newest edition of the leading text in planning theory that brings together the essential classic and cutting-edge readings Features 20 completely new readings (out of 28 total) for the fourth edition Introduces and defines key debates in planning theory with editorial materials and readings selected both for their accessibility and importance Systematically captures the breadth and diversity of planning theory and puts issues into wider social and political contexts without assuming prior knowledge of the field

Everyday assumptions about democracy and its limitations shape alternative public participation practices and interpretation of community interests. This case study examines how participants in a multi-stakeholder visioning process designed a storytelling initiative to update their city's general plan based on community values. By framing public participation as a discursive practice, this analysis uses discourse tracing (LeGreco & Tracy, 2009) to demonstrate how participant discourses shaped communication design in enabling and constraining ways. Findings show how an autonomous city narrative organized attention and activity within city boundaries and downplayed resident differences. Discourses about planning problems, democracy, and storytelling as research led the planning group to extract and summarize values from individual stories to generate an abstracted form of citizen judgment. This aggregation of stories inadvertently obscured some critical differences in order to produce the city's general plan. This is the story of an uncommon public participation effort from the perspective of a participant action researcher with a background in local government planning.

This dissertation primarily aims to address the question of what should be "the role of public policy/planning" in today's era of uncertainty, compounded by climate change and natural hazards events in addition to ever-diverging socio-economic inequalities. In the first chapter, I proposed a set of "anti-essentialist norms" in planning, based on which planning practitioners can gauge whose voices and interests should be prioritized in the midst of the conflicts amongst different social groups and movements. To do so, I drew theoretical insights from third-wave feminist social theorists who have explored for a long time where to find a source of political solidarity that goes beyond the fixed categorization of gender. The second chapter, on the other hand, aimed to develop and promote more progressive use of the 'resilience' concept in disaster planning, by a thorough examination on the history and use of the concept across different disciplines. I have proposed that more emphasis on co-constitutive human-nature relationship as well as focusing on the collective aspects of resilience building can move us forward towards the progressive articulation of resilience theory, going beyond the pessimistic critique on resilience as "offloading of responsibilities". Finally, the third chapter subsequently argued for the progressive potentials of resilience in disaster planning in practice -- comparing the cases of Seattle and Paris. Based on eleven in-depth key informant interviews with practitioners in the field, I have demonstrated how resilience can become a source of empowerment and innovation for local governments to effectuate a more inclusive, participatory risk governance model. In the end, my dissertation was an effort to converge "social problems" and "ecological problems" in public policy -- by outlining planners' role in addressing social inequality on the one hand (Chapter 1), and yet at the same time proposing the possibilities of "resilience" or "emancipatory catastrophism" where our changing relationship with nature calls for the rise of solidarity and collective actions -- represented as increasing local initiatives and more inclusive knowledge practices (Chapter 3).

This text explores the future directions of planning theory in all its contemporary manifestations, analysing how new perspectives can assist in understanding the challenges the state faces in regulating land use for the future.

Post-Rational Planning confronts today’s threats to truth, particularly after recent news events that present alternative facts and media smear campaigns, often described as post-truth politics. At the same time, it appreciates critical tensions: between rationality (prized by planners and other policy professionals) and desires for positive, socially just outcomes. Rather than abandoning quests for truth, this book provides planners, policy professionals, and students with tools for better responding to debates over truth. Post-Rational Planning examines planners’ unease with emotion and politics, advocating for more scholarship and practice capable of unpacking uses of rhetoric and framing to support or counter key planning decisions impacting social justice. This includes learning from recent works engaging with rhetoric, narrative construction, and framing in planning, while introducing other valuable concepts from disciplines like psychology, including confirmation bias; identity-protective cognition; from marketing and adult education. Each chapter sheds new light on a specific topic requiring a response through post-rational practice. It starts with recent research findings, then demonstrates them with case examples, enabling their use in classroom and practice settings. Each chapter ends by summarizing key lessons in "Take-aways for Practice," better enabling readers of all levels to synthesize and use key ideas.