Fassil Demissie
Ashgate
Hardback
300
Drawing on a range of international studies of planning policy and practice, this book takes a Lacanian, and related post-structuralist perspective to demythologise ten of the most heavily utilised terms in spatial planning. It argues that these terms, and others, are mere 'empty signifiers', contested by competing ideologies with a result that they end up meaning everything and nothing.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 should move on from seeking the impossibility of idealised end-states to a process of contingent emergence and trajectory without closure.
Ashgate
Hardback
300
Drawing on a range of international studies of planning policy and practice, this book takes a Lacanian, and related post-structuralist perspective to demythologise ten of the most heavily utilised terms in spatial planning. It argues that these terms, and others, are mere 'empty signifiers', contested by competing ideologies with a result that they end up meaning everything and nothing.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 should move on from seeking the impossibility of idealised end-states to a process of contingent emergence and trajectory without closure.