ABSTRACT

Planning academics and professionals increasingly argue that factors such as urban density, transportation choices, environmental consequences, development of liveable communities, and urban health and well-being issues should be specifically addressed when making plans for sustainable cities. This chapter focuses on how planners actually perform their tasks when the sustainability and liveability of urban areas are at stake. It opens with a theoretical discussion of existing planning research on the individual performative qualities of planners and their practice stories. The chapter elaborates on Judith Butler's concept of performativity. Planning professionalism is understood as an effect of a set of actions that are reproduced in everyday practice, here discussed as an issue of performativity. Performativity is grounded here in the work of American feminist Judith Butler who, elaborating on Victor Turner, an anthropologist studying the rituals of social drama, has reinterpreted it with the idea that 'social action requires a performance which is repeated'.