Post-Structuralism and New Planning Spaces

Space is central to planning. As a future-orientated activity planning seeks to manage change in the built and natural environments in an open and accountable way. These two elements – environmental management and accountability – are linked through space and the stakeholders who have an interest in them. A particular space or place – a town, city or neighbourhood – will need to consider and make choices about the future. This is a political process in which competing interests will seek to prevail. The output from that process will normally be a plan or strategy that maps on to the space in order to effect future change. The role of planning is to ensure that the output reflects a wider, public as opposed to narrow, sectional interest. Such an output will have legitimacy because it has been undertaken in an open and impartial way. In recent years both the political and spatial elements of that process have come under scrutiny. The democratic principle – that planning operates in an open and democratic way – has been questioned by those highlighting the mismatch between the demand for greater openness and participation on the one hand and the increasing management of and withdrawal from political consideration of choices in the planning system on the other. In the view of some, planning uses the language and the ‘mood music’ of democracy and openness while in reality carefully managing the options and outcomes in a partial rather than an impartial way. That challenge is the focus of Chapter 9.