ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author draws on Patsy Healey's analysis of transnational flows of planning to interpret such circuits of knowledge and techniques. 'The Universal and the Contingent', she explores two key concepts presented in that work: the idea of planning as a 'contingent universal', and the idea of planning not as a technology but instead as produced by a 'community of inquirers'. In keeping with Patsy Healey's analysis of the 'transnational flow of planning ideas and practices', these global mayoralties must be understood as instances of what she has termed 'circuits of knowledge and techniques'. In an essay on 'relational concepts of space and place', S. Graham and Healey argue that planning practice is 'grappling with new treatments of place, based on dynamic, deterministic, and one-dimensional treatments inherited from the "scientific" approaches of the 1960s and early 1970s'. The author argues that the idea of the 'planning community' have to be located in an unequal world.
