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With apologies for cross-posting, please see below a call for papers for a special issue of the journal Planning Theory on the relationship between ideology and planning.

Best,

Andy

Call for Papers: Simplifying narratives of power: ideology, discourse and planning

The concept of ideology has a complex genealogy. This extends from its earliest positivist Enlightenment incarnation as the ‘scientific study of ideas’ which was developed to “extricate human thought from the grip of ‘phantoms’” (MacKenzie, 1994: 3), through to its more recent post-positivist incarnation in which it conceals and simultaneously reproduces the semantic and phantasmagorical indeterminacy of the political world (Žižek, 1989).

Indeed, Eagleton (2007) identifies six different meanings of the concept which may here be simplified to three: the general production of ideas, beliefs and values in social life (an understanding which approaches the broader concept of ‘culture’); the mobilisation of ideas, beliefs and values in the promotion and legitimation of sectoral interests against opposing interests; and a third more pejorative form in which ideas, beliefs and values are mobilised to legitimise powerful interests through distortion and misrepresentation.

Given this variety of ideology ‘in the abstract’, and the truism that ‘planning is political’, it is by no means surprising that there are many different incarnations of the concept of ideology which manifest in the planning literature. The concept of ideology has been employed in both pejorative and positive terms to discuss various issues, including:

• the problem of incoherence and fragmentation of meaning in planning (Foley, 1960; Guttenberg, 2009; McAuslan, 1980);
• the need for planning to establish its own rationale and meaning (Fagence, 1983; Foley, 1960);
• the challenges to planning achieving its own rationale due to inherent instability of meaning (Reade, 1983; Stead and Meijers, 2009; Taylor, 2003) and structural contradictions (Harvey, 1985);
• the psycho-social ambiguity of concepts central to planning which can serve to legitimise the neoliberal status quo (Gunder, 2010; Gunder and Hillier, 2009);
• the need to expose and engage in pluralism through open and rational communication resulting in consensus (Coaffee & Healey, 2003; Healey, 1997, 2003);
• the apparent domination of neoliberalism over planning thought and practice through the totalitarianism of consensus (Allmendinger & Haughton, 2010, 2012; Purcell, 2009),
• The effects of political ideology on changing planning ideas and practices (Thornley, 1992) and;
• the variation in cultural expressions of planning practice across space and time (Knieling and Othengrafen, 2009; Sanyal, 2005) and the politics of their transformations (Grange, 2014).

As with ideology ‘in the abstract’, treatments of ideology in the planning literature are united by a common acceptance that ideas, concepts, the ideologies they comprise, and the discourses through which they find agency matter, and that they matter because they have the power to shape the terms by which political and social reality is understood, and shaped through planning practice.

The variety of ways in which the concept of ideology has been used in the planning literature, however, suggests both its strength and weakness as an analytical tool. On the one hand, it highlights that the concept of ideology in its various forms can be a powerful tool to help us understand the political nature of planning. On the other hand, mirroring Wildavsky’s (1973) famous critique of planning, it also suggests ideology could come perilously close to being everything and therefore nothing.

This special issue of Planning Theory starts from the premise that the significant analytical potential of the concept of ideology for planning thinking can only be realised if its potential role is brought to the fore of analysis. We also note, however, that ideology has rarely been subject to sustained critical reflection within planning and that there have been very few attempts to provide an overview of this terrain or to identify potential new directions for scholarship. We therefore invite contributions exploring the intersections of planning thought and practice with various approaches to ideology, seeking to bring together a range of papers that use the concept to cast light on different facets of the complex relationships between planning, politics and society.

Key questions which could be considered include:

• How can the underlying relationship between ideology and planning be understood?
• Why has this relationship proven so fraught and contested through much of the history of planning?
• Do different theoretical approaches to the concept of ideology and its analysis (Marxist; post-Marxist; Foucauldian; Lacanian; Freeden’s conceptual method etc.) offer more or less promising means of understanding that relationship and the politics of planning?
• How can different approaches to ideology enhance understanding of the contemporary historical conjuncture and its implications for planning ideas and practices?
• How can we understand the mediated relations between ideology, planning and the production of space?
• Is there an ideology of planning today (Harvey, 1985)?

We are interested in reports on ‘ideology in action’ from planning case studies, alongside or integrated with the broader or more theoretical issues highlighted in the questions above.  We hope that these might come from a range of different contexts and planning challenges, giving a broad palette from which to start to progress thinking on this under-analysed field.

In addressing these questions the Special Issue will seek to critically survey the current state of the concept of ideology as it relates to planning theory, policy and practice across a variety of geographical contexts and advance debates about its analytical value from a variety of different but related theoretical positions. Contributions from the Global South are especially welcome.

Please send 500-word abstracts to Edward Shepherd ([log in to unmask]) by the 20th of October, 2017. Authors will be notified of provisional acceptance by the Special Issue editors (Edward Shepherd, Tim Marshall and Andy Inch) by the end of October with formal confirmation from Planning Theory in January 2018. The Special Issue editors hope to hold a symposium in April 2018 as a means of discussing draft contributions with submission of papers expected by June 2018.

Bibliography

• Allmendinger P and Haughton G (2010) Spatial planning, devolution, and new planning spaces. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 28(5): 803-818.
• Allmendinger P and Haughton G (2012) Postpolitical planning: a crisis of consensus. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37(1): 89–103.
• Coaffee J and Healey P (2003) ‘My voice: my place’: tracking transformations in urban governance. Urban Studies 40(10): 1979-1999.
• Eagleton T (2007) Ideology: An Introduction, new and updated edition. London: Verso.
• Fagence M (1983) Ideological fundamentalism in town planning - an exploratory appraisal. The Environmentalist 3(1): 17-27.
• Foley DL (1960) British town planning: one ideology or three? The British Journal of Sociology 11(3): 211-231.
• Forester J (1989) Planning in the Face of Power. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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• Guttenberg AZ (2009) Planning and ideology. Journal of Planning History 8(4): 287-294.
• Harvey D (1985) On planning the ideology of planning. In: The turning point: the urbanization of capital: studies in the history and theory of capitalist urbanisation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp.165-184.
• Healey P (1997) Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies. Houndmills and London: Macmillan Press Ltd.
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• Knieling J and Othengrafen F (eds) (2009) Planning Cultures in Europe: Decoding Cultural Phenomena in Urban and Regional Planning. Farnham: Ashgate.
• MacKenzie I (1994) Introduction: the arena of ideology. In: Eccleshall R, Geoghegan V, Jay R, Kenny M, MacKenzie I and Wilford R Political ideologies: an introduction second edition. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1-27.
• McAuslan P (1980) The Ideologies of Planning Law. (Urban and regional planning series; vol. 22). Oxford: Pergamon Press.
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• Purcell M (2009) Resisting neoliberalization: communicative planning or counter-hegemonic movements? Planning Theory 8(2): 140-165.
• Sanyal B (ed) (2005) Comparative Planning Cultures. London and New York: Routledge.
• Stead D and Meijers E (2009) Spatial planning and policy integration: concepts, facilitators and inhibitors. Planning Theory and Practice 10(3): 317-332.
• Taylor N (2003) More or less meaningful concepts in planning theory (and how to make them more meaningful): a plea for conceptual analysis and precision: an essay in memory of Eric Reade: 1931-2002. Planning Theory 2(2): 91-100.
• Thornley A. (1991) Urban Planning Under Thatcherism: the challenge of the market, London: Routledge.
• Wildavsky, A (1973) If planning is everything, maybe it’s nothing. Policy Sciences, 4 (2): 127-153.
• Žižek S (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.