ABSTRACT
In the planning field, practitioners have long been experientially aware of the varied interpretations and sensemaking practices which people bring to bear on complex struggles over urban development and environmental issues. 1 Conflicts over knowledge claims, values, and frames of understanding have become part of the routine experience of planning work. In seeking conceptual resources to recognize this reality, planning scholars in the past half century have drawn on similar intellectual resources to those which are grouped as interpretive political studies in this book. There are direct overlaps in particular with the field now called ‘interpretive policy analysis’ (see Chapter 27), and scholars such as Donald Schön and John Forester have been influential in both the planning and policy analysis fields (Wagenaar 2011). Although the term ‘interpretive’ is not widely used to describe a distinct approach within planning scholarship, many planning scholars are doing work which is very similar in conceptualization to that recognized in this handbook.
