Millennium Urbanism - Discursive Planning

Abstract

For many years there has been substantial urban political and economic interest in exploiting the use of cultural and aesthetic planning in order to improve the position of cities, within an expanding inter-urban competition. Built environments, places and spaces, have been regenerated in order to exploit their aesthetic, cultural, and historical significance so as to enhance commercial, consumption and public value, either for their citizens and/or tourists and capital. To date, discussions on urban planning have mostly ignored the fact that this ‘millennium urbanism’ also requires a lot of ‘discursive planning’, especially about the production of a place-identity and an urban imaginary. Discursive planning means staging the social meaning of urban space through texts, photographs, and visual signs. Aesthetic urban planning is not only about creating ambient surroundings, but also creating images, symbolic representations, and fantasies discursively using books and advertising, newspapers and television, research, and political agendas. These discursive practices are used to signify an identifiable and/or imaginary place-identity to form a sense of place or feeling of belonging to place. The article first discusses the theoretical relationship between discursive planning and representational space. The ‘how’ of discursive planning will be exemplified using the Environmental City Programme in Oslo, Norway as a case-study. I conclude by discussing how this form of urban planning needs a reflexive and semiotic community.