★ (유) Making Space:Planning as a Mode of Thought

 

★David C. Perry, "Making Space:Planning as a Mode of Thought", Helen Liggett & David Perry, Spatial Practices,  1995. pp.209-242.

 

[ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

 

The author argues here that the search for the best definition of planning is better directed toward thinking spatially. Instead of trying to come up with a politics and technology for planning that all can agree upon, the author offers a spatial approach suggested by Foucault. Thinking spatially means seeing the various politics and technologies of planning in their contextual places in society. They become examples of particular relations of power that constitute the conditions of freedom and dominance in the spatially produced urban space. Michael Dear and Allen Scott (1981) argued that planning is a “social event,” not a free-standing and independent moral and/or scientific occurrence. Clearly, planning is also embedded in the dominant relations of social formation, deriving its spatial logic and historical meaning from the “general pattern of society as a whole.” The author's approach is designed to tie the investigation of planning to its actual participation in the construction of social/physical space. This approach seeks out the space in which planning is generated. To think of planning spatially is to think of it not as the conceptualization of relations within the boundaries of abstract space, but to see it as both the critical interrogation and affirmative intervention of such abstraction.