Fantasy in Planning Organisations and their Agency: The Promise of Being at Home in the World

Abstract

Planning organisations are generally considered the producers of public policy plans. This article considers planning organisations as also producers of fantasies. These are fantasies that organise the collective desires of a polity and construct the visions that guide and shape the agency of the organisation itself. Further, in contrast to differentiating between fantasy and reality, this article will take a psychoanalytical approach to fantasy where fantasy helps to structure a subject's reality and, in aggregate, that of a subject's society. This is a perspective that acknowledges a constitutively unclear division between these two ideas of a materialised reality produced by our actions and the fantasies that help generate this observable materialisation. Exploring this issue is important, as the article will argue that this fantasy construction underlies much that constitutes planning policy practice and regularly occurs even when planning actors know that these desired fantasised outcomes cannot possibly be achieved within a plan or policy. After exploring the Auckland Plan as an exemplar of fantasy construction, the article will argue that planning needs to acquire a different relationship to fantasy, one in which planning is no longer ‘in thrall’ to fantasy and the improbable desires that planning fantasies often propagate.