Countering ‘The Dark Side’ of Planning

Abstract

This chapter explores Foucauldian approaches to planning theory and notes that Foucauldian concepts and perspectives have been productive of significant critical studies of urban/regional/environmental/spatial planning and land-use regulation. It suggests that an examination of counter-conducts opens up more nuanced possibilities than the sometimes rather one-sided use made of Foucault's work on power, discipline and governmentality. An analysis of counter-conducts, in effect, counters the 'dark side' of planning. The chapter focuses on three strands of analysis that exemplify approaches to Foucault's work in planning studies: power and rationality; discipline and social control; and governmentality, which in this field tend to have a common emphasis on the way power subverts the overt progressive aims of planning. The inter-relations of governmentality and subjectification are elaborated and developed throughout Foucault's writing, and there is not space to follow up the rich details of his provocative re-workings of them.