ABSTRACT
The issue of the relationship between planning and power is anything but new and has constituted a major thread of planning theory debates for decades. It is, in many respects, an undecidable issue—or, in other terms, an issue that can only be seen as openly dialectical—in a realm of practices, like planning, that conceives of itself and of its progressive nature as a distinctive combination of critical and normative attitudes, of acting critically and performing normatively. It is, however, a defining one, in particular, as concerns the attitude of planning—and planning theory—toward urban policy conflicts.
