ABSTRACT
Politics and Conflict in Governance and Planning offers a critical evaluation of manifold ways in which the political dimension is reflected in contemporary planning and governance. While the theoretical debates on post-politics and the wider frame of post-foundational political theory provide substantive explanations for the crisis in planning and governance, still there is a need for a better understanding of how the political is manifested in the planning contents, shaped by institutional arrangements and played out in the planning processes. This book undertakes a reassessment of the changing role of the political in contemporary planning and governance. Employing a wide range of empirical research conducted in several regions of the world, it draws a more complex and heterogeneous picture of the context-specific depoliticisation and repoliticisation processes taking place in local and regional planning and governance. It shows not only the domination of market forces and the consequent suppression of the political but also how political conflicts and struggles are defined, tackled and transformed in view of the multifaceted rules and constraints recently imposed to local and regional planning.
Switching the focus to how strategies and forms of depoliticised governance can be repoliticised through renewed planning mechanisms and socio-political mobilisation, Politics and Conflict in Governance and Planning is a critical and much needed contribution to the planning literature and its incorporation of the post-politics and post-democracy debate.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|1 pages
Existing and Emerging Paradigms on Spatial Planning and Governance
chapter 2|17 pages
Crisis in Planning Theory
part II|1 pages
Conflict in Governance and Planning Practices
chapter 4|16 pages
Multilevel Power Relations and Planning Conflicts in a ‘Land of Exception’
chapter 6|19 pages
Different Understandings of ‘Public Interest’ as a Source of Conflict
chapter 7|18 pages
The Conflict between Free Market Capitalism and Social Policies
part III|1 pages
New Attempts to Overcome the Post-Political Trends in Planning and Governance
chapter 9|18 pages
Politicising the Regional Scale?
chapter 10|17 pages
Local Welfare Governance and Social Innovation
chapter 12|20 pages
A Counter-Movement to ‘Place-Less’ Power
part IV|1 pages
Reflections and Conclusions