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Book Review: Nested identities: nationalism, territory and scale

The last part of the book is concerned with ‘Cultural perspectives on planning’, although what is meant by ‘culture’ in this context is not discussed in any depth. Bianchini acknowledges different meanings of ‘culture’, but focuses on the role of public and community art in revitalizing urban areas; while in a curious appendage to the same chapter, Greed discusses ‘time planning’ – a theoretically interesting concept, but reduced to a recommendation for a ‘temporal master plan’ (p. 206). Also under the heading of culture, there is a conventional overview of tourism planning and town centre management (Davidson and Maitland), and a theoretical piece by Hillier on communicative planning, with boxed ‘snapshot’ studies from logging conflicts and Aboriginal land rights cases in Western Australia, which unfortunately are not very well integrated into the text. In the last chapter, Greed returns to the issues of the physical/social divide in town planning and the need for built environment professions to deliberately change white, male, heteronormative cultures. However, while effective equal opportunity strategies are very important in themselves, it is not clear how getting more women, people of colour or people with disabilities into the professions will actually change cultures, let alone make differences to the built environment. Neither is it clear how equal opportunities relate to ‘social town planning’. The question remains: can practices of social planning lead to better outcomes in the built environment, for whom and by whose criteria? To answer this question requires interrogating the reformist ideals and the self-evident necessity of planning itself. Maybe what is needed to dissolve the ‘social/physical dichotomy’ is a critical cultural reinterpretation of planning in which, for example, regulations, policies and practices are seen as instances of multiple genealogies in the creation of white, classed and gendered, able-bodied nationalism (e.g., Matless, 1998; Chapter 6). But given that planning theory seldom ventures across such unmapped and dangerous territory, the final evaluation of Social town planning should be as the student text it sets out to be. Readers will certainly gain insights from individual chapters about the way in which different groups are affected by built form and by marginalization in professional and regulatory discourses, and these will be of undoubted use in practice. If, in the end, they are no wiser about what ‘social town planning’ is, perhaps this is no great surprise.