ABSTRACT
In this chapter I want to look at the cultural turn in urban regeneration and in particular at the narrative turn in planning theory and practice which is an integral part of it. My focus will be on a wide-angled reading of long-term trends and possible future tendencies in urban planning and policymaking, but focused on the prospects – or lack of them – for that extraordinary concatenation of places which has come to be known as Thames Gateway. I am trying to nd out, through a critical ethnography of its everyday business conduct and a detailed reading of its planning and promotional literatures, how the Gateway is being made up, in the double sense of being invented and implemented, as it goes along by the people who are responsible for its delivery.1 How far are existing forms of civic
imagineering and urban impression management up to this task? Are we seeing a new style of governance emerge dependant not so much on media spin but upon the active conscription of potentially discordant voices and oppositional narratives on which the legitimacy of the planning process has itself come to depend?
