ABSTRACT
This chapter takes through planning ideas and practices are rather unusual. Instead of telling you what people in other cultures do, it uses contemporary critical scholarship about culture to rethink our approaches to plans and planning. Or to mash metaphors, this work on culture can be used to reflect on planning, but it is more like Alice's looking-glass than a perfect mirror. Generally speaking, planners and planning theorists translate from the disciplines they are most familiar with, and these are largely economics, geography and political science. Occasionally things go a bit more sociological, although Eric Reade was pretty clear that planners responded badly to sociological critique. It believes that planning is a useful activity, that there are ways it could be improved, then it needs to keep looking for different ways of understanding it, using comparative analysis, philosophical interrogation, and seeking perspectives from it colleagues in other disciplines.
