ABSTRACT
The journey this book takes through planning ideas and practices is rather unusual. If you were expecting a book that told you how to ‘do’ culture, or how to manage cultural conflicts, then this book may have been a little surprising. There are many books that attempt to do this, but they often struggle with the fact that culture is a complex concept, and what we think of as ‘cultures’ vary and change. Certainly, if you were hoping to find an easy answer to questions about cultures of planning, then the book will probably have been quite challenging. Instead of telling you what people in ‘other’ cultures do, this book has used 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.
