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.

Planning theory has undergone significant changes in recent decades. The revised and updated 2nd edition of this popular text provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date analysis of these changes, how they relate to planning practice, and their significance. It is an essential guide to current planning theory and the post-positivist perspective.

Planning Theory expresses a sound unease about the direction taken by the current analysis and criticism of planning experiences. To oppose the debate that freezes planning as a permanently declining engagement, this book aims to identify the essential guidelines of a re-launch of planning processes and techniques, configuring a kind of neo-discipline. This builds upon a multi-disciplinary integration - never seen and experimented with until now.

Planning and Transformation provides a comprehensive view of planning under political transition in South Africa, offering an accessible resource for both students and researchers in an international and a local audience. In the years after the 1994 transition to democracy in South Africa, planners believed they would be able to successfully promote a vision of integrated, equitable and sustainable cities, and counter the spatial distortions created by apartheid. This book covers the experience of the planning community, the extent to which their aims were achieved, and the hindering factors. Although some of the factors affecting planning have been context-specific, the nature of South Africa’s transition and its relationship to global dynamics have meant that many of the issues confronting planners in other parts of the world are echoed here. Issues of governance, integration, market competitiveness, sustainability, democracy and values are significant, and the particular nature of the South African experience lends new insights to thinking on these questions, exploring the possibilities of achievement in the planning field.

Planning theory is currently in a confused state as a consequence of a number of changes over the last ten years in planning practice and social and economic theory. Even prior to these events, planning theory was an uncertain discipline, reflecting planning's precarious position between and resting upon a range of professional subject areas and philosophical roots. Planning Futures is an attempt to pin down the constantly evolving landscape of planning theory and to chart a path through this fast changing field. Planning Futures is an up-to-date reader on planning theory, but adds something more to the subject area than a mere textbook. The contributors have attempted to bridge theory and practice while putting forward new theoretical ideas. By drawing upon examples from planning practice and case study scenarios, the authors ensure that the work discusses planning theory within the context of present planning practice. Case studies are drawn from an international arena, from the UK, Europe, South Africa and Australia.

Discussing some of the severe criticism of communicative planning theory (CPT), this book goes on to suggest how theorists and planners can respond to it. Looking at issues of power, politics and ethics in relation to planning, this book has lessons for both theorists and practicing planners, whether critics or advocates of CPT.

The sharing of information and knowledge is essential in the processes and negotiations involved in planning. In this book, Alex Lord sets out a new way of looking at the transfer of information and the cooperation of groups in planning by exploring the strand of economics known as information economics, including game theory. He starts by discussing theories of information economics, then moves into actual accounts of bargaining in planning practice.

Bringing together authors from academia and practice, this book examines spatial planning at different scales in a number of case studies throughout the British Isles, helping planners to become re-engaged in critical thinking about space and place.

"This book provides relevant theoretical perspectives on the use of ICT in Urban Planning as well as an updated account of the most recent developments in the practice of e-planning in different regions of the world"--Provided by publisher.

For a profession concerned overwhelmingly with the material worldwhether houses, offices, highways, streets, parks, or sewer systemsurban planning has a poor understanding of materiality, perhaps because, as Robert Beauregard says, Plans erase what exists in order to propose what has been imagined. Too often planners position their work as fact-driven, purely administrative, and allegedly devoid of politics, or they fail to grapple adequately with the social and physical complexities of the real world. In this ambitious and provocative book Beauregard sets out to situate urban planning and its ways of knowing, being, and behaving within a new materialist framework that acknowledges the inevitable insufficiency of our representations of reality while also engaging more holistically with the world in all its diversityhuman and nonhuman actors alike."