ABSTRACT

After many decades of engagement with the planning fi eld, I have come to understand planning as a sociopolitical project centred on collective endeavours to shape place qualities to promote better trajectories than might otherwise occur. For me, places are locales, landscapes, territories which we inhabit, imagine and seek to shape. Planning, understood in this way, is a form of “place governance”, sociopolitical practices concerned with the development and management of places. Such a project is not just any form of place governance, but one with a particular orientation. It takes a dynamic focus, recognising how place qualities evolve and change through the actions of many webs of relations. It is future oriented, in the sense of searching for ways of making place qualities better than in the past. It emphasises how places are experienced and valued by the diverse and often confl icting many who have a stake in a place, not just the powerful few. In searching for ways of making places more liveable and sustainable for these many, such a form of place governance gives recognition to the complexity of temporal and spatial interdependences and the multiplicity of knowledge claims and forms of knowledge which may be asserted when place qualities are argued over. It also stresses the value of open and transparent reasoning when addressing collective action issues and in this way helps to enrich the public realm of a political community. 1 In taking this position, I emphasise a strong normative commitment. This does not mean that I expect the planning project as translated into practices to appear in such a form. Instead, for me it represents a form of place governance to be struggled for and an evaluation framework to judge how governance practices are evolving (see Healey, 2012).