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Another planning theory? Rewriting the meta-narrative

This essay proposes to frame the persistent scientific/literary genre known as `planning theory' as a peculiar meta-narrative whose ideological underpinnings are seldom faced even by its critics in the discursive field. Although self-referred to as theory, its consistent ignoring of the material and concrete in planning practice on the one hand, and the subservience to the political role of the state by unquestioned professionalism, makes its complicity with power obvious. This kind of theory or theorizing, in spite of its negation of practice as object for analysis, is therefore to be seen as praxis itself. The proposed re-evaluation of this meta-narrative restates past critiques and reviews the historical and material genealogy of planning as a spatial apparatus of the modern state. A critical deconstruction of the dominant discourse of planning suggests challenging its foundational traits: authoritarianism, hierarchy, anonymity and time/space absolutism. Finally, the essay calls for a re-imagining of planning as a counter-hegemonic project.