ABSTRACT

I agree with Robert Cooper (2005: 1693) that a city cannot be defined from a centralised perspective but is rather an ‘endless kaleidoscope of possible viewpoints’, a ‘mobile panorama of interacting events’. As I have demonstrated, representational theories portray knowledge as the representation of an aspect of the world. I have identified a need to free the social imagination from the representation of anything given or prior: Deleuzean clichés. I believe that practitioners of spatial planning and governance should resist stereotypical tying down of the ‘imagined communities’ of a time or place (Rajchman, 2000: 101), such as the Ngarrindjeri peoples of Hindmarsh Island (Chapters 4 and 5) and begin to regard cities, human and nonhuman actants not as ‘things-in-themselves’ but as multiple and mutable elements of connections and disconnections, relations and transitions; Hinchliffe et al.’s (2005) ‘creative address’.